The Weyekin Principle: Toward an Embodied Critical Rhetoric

Environmental Communication Vol. 5, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 243
260 The Weyekin Principle: Toward an Embodied Critical Rhetoric Michael Salvador & Tracylee Clarke This essay offers the weyekin principle to address the symbol
material, human
nature dualisms found in much of our theory and critiqued by a growing number of environmental communication scholars. The authors see two core requirements for transforming our engagement with the nonhuman: first, a way of attending to or interpreting natural phenomena that opens our awareness to other-than-symbolic modes of experience; and second, an embodied critique that expresses the inherent tensions of the symbolic
material interface. Keywords: Critical Rhetoric; Ecosemiotic Mimicry; Embodied Listening; Nez Perce; Phenomenology; Resonance; Weyekin Two persistent aspirations govern scholarship within the developing domain of environmental communication. The first brings the lens of communication theory and criticism to bear on the enormous environmental devastation wrought by human action. As noted by Cantrill and Oravec (1996) in their early collection of environmental communication essays: ‘‘The environment that we experience and affect is largely a product of how we have come to talk about the world’’ (p. 2). The idea that our symbolic constructions of the environment animate human (mis)conduct toward the natural world is axiomatic to the project of environmental communication research. Cox (2007) articulated this foundational premise in his call for environmental communication to engage the world as a crisis discipline similar to conservation biology. ‘‘Like perturbations in biological systems,’’ he argued, ‘‘distortions, ineptitudes, and system pathologies occur in our communication about the environment’’ (p. 10). If humanity is to recognize and address the multitude of system failures threatening environmental and therefore human well-being on a Michael Salvador is an Associate Professor in the College of Communication, Washington State University. Tracylee Clarke is an Assistant Professor of Communication at California State University, Channel Islands. Correspondence to: Michael Salvador, College of Communication, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164 2520, USA. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1752-4032 (print)/ISSN 1752-4040 (online) # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2011.586713 244 M. Salvador and T. Clarke global scale, we must recognize and alter the patterns of communication that have maintained those very systems. The aspiration to ‘‘enhance the ability of society to respond appropriately to environmental signals’’ (p. 15) underlies much contemporary environmental communication scholarship. The move to apply communication theory and criticism to the environmental arena demands a second point of inquiry for environmental communication scholars, for if previous symbolic constructions of the environment have contributed to our current state of crisis, then the very theory we seek to apply may itself be suspect. Rogers (1998) offered an environmentalist critique of constitutive theories of communication that operate from the principle that humans socially construct the world around them through discourse. Noting that constitutive theories ‘‘emphasize the social and political nature of knowledge’’ (p. 245), and undergird critiques of oppressive ideologies that claim objective, universal, and essentializing knowledge as justification for oppression, Rogers acknowledged that they play an important role in challenging discourses of domination. He argued, however, that while constitutive theories of discourse hold an undeniable value for communication scholars, they also reinforce the longstanding, Western, binary separation between humans and nature. In short, where traditional Western philosophy (Platonic
Cartesian) holds that nature in and of itself has no value beyond that assigned by humans, constitutive theories of discourse hold that nature has no meaning, no reality, beyond that assigned through symbols. Rogers maintained that such a position perpetuates the subjugation of the ‘‘nonhuman’’ world and called for communication theory that incorporates a ‘‘transhuman dialogue’’ with nature. While Rogers did not develop a detailed description of what such a transhuman dialogue might look like, he held that the natural world can function as a discourse, in that the material structures of nature may be seen as discursive forces that shape our subjectivities by enabling and constraining possibilities for human experience and sense making. In the decade since Rogers’ call for a transhuman dialogue with nature, many in the emerging field of environmental communication have focused attention on the symbolic
material dichotomy. For Cox (2007), the first tenet of environmental communication as a crisis discipline was that any conception of environment ‘‘imbricates material and social/symbolic processes’’ (p. 12). He argued that ‘‘although at times we may mistake tropes for real terrains or, in dismantling social constructions of ‘pristine,’ forget that the loss of habitat has real consequences, our field is founded on this tension’’ (p. 12). Peterson, Peterson, and Peterson (2007) argued further that the ‘‘human-nature dualism poses a serious obstacle to conservation generally and to EC [environmental communication] specifically by excluding extrahumans from the community of decision-makers’’ (p. 75). Building on Leopold’s land ethic, they called for a larger and an integrated community where interdependent humans and extrahuman citizens (animals, land, and nature) participate in decision making, explaining that ‘‘With the land community nestled inside the environment, EC shifts from a discipline responsible for reinterpreting The Weyekin Principle 245 material reality for those trapped by faulty symbolic mediation to a discipline responsible for expanding what can be experienced’’ (italics added, p. 78). Beyond a specific focus on environmental communication, Condit (2006) argued that addressing the symbolic
material tension is imperative for contemporary rhetorical criticism in general. A convergence of current events ‘‘now challenges rhetorical critics to transcend our historical, ‘trained incapacities,’ to take account of codes outside of human language,’’ she wrote, ‘‘codes of the body and the broader ecologies in which we swim’’ (p. 370). Rhetorical critics must shed the ‘‘ethnocentric assumption that only human-made symbolic codes matter to human action’’ (p. 371). Similarly, McKerrow (1989) argued that ‘‘only through a corporeal perspective*a sense of rhetoric as embodied*will we ever break the constraints imposed by the narrower vision of an administrative rhetoric’’*rhetoric arising from a traditional Western perspective that reinforces static dualisms such as male
female, mind
body, and nature
culture (p. 325). The ‘‘corporeal style’’ advanced by McKerrow ‘‘expresses itself as an ‘embodied rhetoricity’ ’’ (p. 319). Whereas Rogers argued that contemporary communication theory does not account for the fact that nature ‘‘speaks,’’ McKerrow argued that it does not account for the fact that ‘‘bodies speak, without necessarily talking, because they come coded with and as signs’’ (p. 319). Multiple arguments for a fundamental shift in contemporary theorizing about and criticism of communication thus converge at the common point of nature and the body. Prominent rhetorical scholars advocate realigning critical theory and praxis to engage the materiality and meaning of our embodied existence with-in nature: for Rogers (1998), a transhuman dialogue; for Cox (2007), the imbrications of material and symbolic processes; for Condit (2006), the codes of the body and ecology; for McKerrow (1989), a corporeal rhetoricity. As summarized by Peterson et al. (2007), at core these ideas point to a shift from interpretation and critique to an expansion of human experience. But what would such an expansion of human experience look like in the actual application of rhetorical critique? While the preceding calls for a new kind of symbolic
material engagement with our environment are eloquent and persuasive, they provide little illustration of what such an environmental communication theorist or critic would do in practice. This essay offers the weyekin principle to address the symbol
material and human
nature dualisms critiqued above. We see two core requirements for transforming our engagement with the nonhuman: first, a way of attending to or interpreting natural phenomena that opens our awareness to other-than-symbolic modes of experience; and second, a critique that expresses the inherent tension of the symbolic
material interface. Fundamentally, the weyekin principle emphasizes both a different way of listening to and a different way of speaking about the environment. Our project here is to discuss each of these moves: first, a manner of ‘‘embodied listening’’ focused on resonance and mimicry, and second, a mode of critical rhetoric that expresses the ‘‘resonant tensions’’ among human symbolic meaning and being in nature. To explain these ideas fully, we must first convey how they are rooted in the Nez Perce concept of weyekin. 246 M. Salvador and T. Clarke Understanding the Weyekin We first heard the term weyekin1 about a decade ago in our study of the Nez Perce management of the gray wolf reintroduction in North Idaho. The Nez Perce were the first Native American tribe in history to be given official responsibility by the US federal government for the reintroduction of an endangered species. We were interested in the cultural symbolism of the wolf for the Nez Perce and interviewed around 40 tribal members about their perceptions of the wolf reintroduction program. In discussing the program, several Nez Perce mentioned the concept of the weyekin to explain a special connection many tribal members felt with the wolf. A Nez Perce woman introduced us to the term: A weyekin is a type of spiritual strength . . . I was taught about the wolf and about some of the names like Red Wolf, Yellow Wolf, all those names like that. That’s why the meaning of the wolf was there, because of the strength of the wolf. That was kind of like their weyekin, that’s how they got their Indian name. Later in our study, we talked to a Nez Perce man in his early 20s who was directly involved with tracking the reintroduced wolves. He shared his personal view of the reintroduction effort. ‘‘I’m happy with it. Yeah, well I mean, historically they’ve been in the area,’’ he explained. ‘‘I mean from a native perspective, I like seeing the wolf come back, I mean you read about Yellow Wolf, research on some of this stuff . . ..’’ He turned to his desk and picked up the book Yellow Wolf (McWhorter, 1991). The book is a translation of the stories of a Nez Perce warrior who fought with Chief Joseph and other Nez Perce during their historic journey to escape forced relocation to the reservation in 1877. ‘‘There’s some stuff in there where he’s trying to get his weyekin, his spiritual leader, and uh, he ends up getting Yellow Wolf, and that’s where he gets his strength to kill grizzly bears, and so it’s just kind of a, I mean there’s a, something inside you, you know, I mean it’s just a different perspective, from a native point of view.’’ In trying to understand the concept of weyekin, we also turned to a nonnative description offered in Voice of the Old Wolf (Evans, 1996): Not only did the Wallowa country hold the remains of Nez Perce ancestors and nurture all forms of existing life, from it also came the source of an individual’s weyakin, a personal tutelary (guardian) spirit power possessed by many Nez Perce men and women. (p. 36) An appendix in Yellow Wolf (McWhorter, 1991) offered a similar description, wherein an individual would endure a period of some days without food and sleep. ‘‘In time the candidate would fall into a comatose state of mind. It was then that the Wyakin would reveal itself, sometimes merely as a voice, or at other times as a recognizable apparition’’ (p. 298). Both books recurrently refer to this practice as ‘‘mystical’’ and ‘‘supernatural,’’ denoting a reality beyond the senses, beyond our material, physical surroundings*a metaphysical (above the physical) transcendent reality outside of bodily perception. Thus, following the typical Western perspective articulated in these accounts, we initially understood the term weyekin to denote a mystical, incorporeal, or The Weyekin Principle 247 metaphysical relationship with an animal: in euro-American terms, a ‘‘guardian angel’’ or a ‘‘saint.’’2 Accordingly, we assumed that through various religious rights and mystical experiences, an individual discovered or was assigned an animal (later we learned that it could be any living creature, including an insect) to be a protector of sorts*a spiritual guide from which one could gain inspiration and guidance. The wolf served as a positive symbol of strength, cunningness, and survival for the Nez Perce, much as it represented a negative symbol of evil and savagery in Western mythology. We thus located the weyekin in the realm of the symbolic*it referred to the metaphorical significance of the wolf in the Nez Perce cultural meaning system. In understanding the weyekin in this fashion, we remained comfortably within the longstanding tradition of environmental communication studies that separated the material from the symbolic. Human understanding of the environment and our interactions with nature (as well as all human thought and action) were a product of symbolic/rhetorical construction. Then, near the end of our study, we spoke with a tribal elder and leader in the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction effort. He referred to a ‘‘vision quest’’ and to going into the mountains where ancestors had gone to seek their weyekin: As you have fasted and you have sweated over these things and you have prepared yourself, of course you have placed yourself there with the Mother Earth and over that period of time it is believed that the weyekin comes to a person. It is not always what they might predict it would be or want it to be and it comes based on those needs and prayers. This account was consistent with the Western descriptions we were reading at the time. The elder, however, went on to explain that receiving one’s weyekin was only the beginning of a long and demanding process of close observation, experience, and learning. When one received a weyekin*for example, the otter*one set about to experience the life of the weyekin as much as physically possible: staying where the otter lived, eating what the otter ate, swimming in the water, and closely attending to the habits and patterns of otter’s existence. While the person would not become the material otter, through this process the ‘‘power’’ of the animal could be ‘‘bestowed’’ on the individual. What struck us was how radically different this relationship with the weyekin was from our original, Western conceptions. What the elder described was not a mystical or metaphysical association at all but rather a very material connection experienced at the corporeal level of sensation and consciousness. The power bestowed upon an individual from a weyekin came not through an ‘‘outside-the-body’’ encounter but rather through a rigorous process of physical experience and scrupulous observation. Thus, the weyekin did not reside solely in the realm of the metaphorical and symbolic experiences, but was connected to direct, corporeal, and material experiences with the nonhuman. Here we want to emphatically state that we are not claiming to fully comprehend the Nez Perce experience nor do we claim to be describing the total meaning of the weyekin for all Nez Perce. Elsewhere we have discussed the cultural significance of the 248 M. Salvador and T. Clarke wolf reintroduction program for the Nez Perce members we interviewed (Clarke & Salvador, 2000). Our objective here is only to illustrate how our contact with Nez Perce ideas led us to reconceptualize how we approach environmental communication research. As non-Nez Perce individuals, we use the term ‘‘weyekin principle’’ to recognize and honor how Nez Perce ideas influenced our conceptualization of environmental communication. Through the years that have passed since our wolf reintroduction study, we have come to recognize that our struggle to understand the Nez Perce concept of the weyekin was, in microcosm, the struggle of many scholars to address the symbolic
material tension underlying almost all contemporary environmental communication research. The tendency to interpret the weyekin as a metaphysical construct, as resulting from an other-than-material and outside-the-body realm of experience, is to perpetuate the constructivist orientation critiqued by Rogers (1998). What the elder described to us, on the other hand, was an embodied interaction with one’s weyekin*a practice that seems very similar to Rogers’ conception of a transhuman dialogue. To employ Rogers’ view, the power of the weyekin comes not from transcending (symbolizing) nature and the material world but rather from a fully embodied dialogue with the nonhuman. Thus, the weyekin may serve as a principle for conducting a fundamentally different type of environmental communication inquiry. We offer the weyekin principle as a starting point for an embodied critical rhetoric that contends with the symbolic
material opposition constraining much current environmental research. The weyekin principle holds that in advancing an embodied critical rhetoric the researcher attends to the corporeal experience of the nonhuman world so as to articulate the symbolic
material tensions obscured by predominant systems of meaning. In the remainder of this essay we (1) advance a mode of ‘‘listening’’ to the material realm using the concepts of resonance and mimicry; (2) illustrate the construction of a critical rhetoric that applies the weyekin principle by using the wolf reintroduction as exemplar; and (3) discuss how a critical rhetoric built on the weyekin principle expands the foundations of contemporary environmental communication scholarship. From Symbolic Meaning to Resonance and Mimicry Environmental communication scholars have recognized the value of phenomenology in understanding the relationship between the symbolic and the material and in encouraging radical reflection on the question of human relationship with nonhuman nature (e.g., Killingsworth, 2007; Kinsella, 2007). In advancing phenomenology as an approach to help scholars better understand the rhetoric of place*our bodily connection with the land*Killingsworth (2007) reiterated, ‘‘At the heart of the problem lies the human capacity to forget where we actually are, to live virtually or vicariously, to lose one’s connections to other people and the natural habitat’’ (p. 59). Writers such as Rogers and McKerrow suggest that this environmental amnesia is reinforced by the dominant symbol systems of Western culture and indeed by predominant Western communication theories. The question, then, is how do we escape modes of thinking that privilege symbolic codes over our embodied The Weyekin Principle 249 connections to the world? Following Carbaugh (2007), we call for new ways of listening to the natural world. Our challenge ‘‘is to open our understanding to the world beyond words, beyond our representation of it, to learn anew from it,’’ Carbaugh argued, ‘‘and to be in a better position to speak about what we come to know and act accordingly’’ (p. 68). To understand how listening beyond representation is accomplished, we turn to Jean-Luc Nancy (2007). Nancy (2007), a French theorist, explored the phenomenological experience of being in the world through a treatise on listening*in his case, listening to music. He began his exploration with a question that connects with our current concern of apprehending environmental phenomena apart from human symbols. Nancy asked, ‘‘Is listening something of which philosophy is capable?’’ (p. 1) and followed that question with an intriguing observation, ‘‘Isn’t the philosopher someone who always hears,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but who cannot listen, or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize?’’ (p. 1). We hear in Nancy’s query echoes of Rogers (1998), Carbaugh (1999, 2007), and Killingsworth (2007). Have communication critics and theorists neutralized significant ways of listening to and experiencing nature in order to critique and theorize human
symbolic constructions of/over/through nature? Certainly, the communication scholars cited above suggest that this is the case. Our task, then, is to ascertain what modes of experience have been neutralized in our Western cultural symbol systems and administrative communication theories. ‘‘What does it mean,’’ as Nancy puts it, ‘‘to exist according to listening, for it and through it, what part of experience and truth is put into play?’’ (p. 5). Through a different kind of listening, can we recapture that part of experience and truth linked to the nonhuman? Nancy’s answer to this question pivots on the concept of ‘‘resonance,’’ the bodily interaction with sound in the world: both the vibrations of the sonorous and the experience of presence and self that reverberates in listening with embodied awareness. ‘‘I will say that the living present resounds,’’ he wrote, ‘‘or that it is itself resonance and is only that: resonance of instances or stances of the instant, in each other’’ (p. 19). This embodied listening is a matter ‘‘of going back to, or opening oneself up to, the resonance of being, or to being as resonance’’ (p. 21), that is, ‘‘to be listening is to be inclined to the opening of meaning’’ (p. 27). The meaning to which Nancy refers is meaning before and beyond symbols and signification. He treats resonance ‘‘not only as the condition but as the very beginning and opening up of sense, as beyond-sense or sense that goes beyond signification’’ (p. 31). Furthermore, this meaning is a bodily (corporeal) meaning before and beyond symbolic thought/ mind. The body is thus posited as being ‘‘a resonance chamber or column of beyondmeaning (its ‘soul,’ as we say . . . of the part of the violin that transmits vibrations between the sounding board and the back . . .)’’ (p. 31). Finally, then, the subject itself is reconstituted as ‘‘that part, in the body, that is listening or vibrates with listening to*or the echo of*the beyond meaning’’ (p. 31). To attune to resonance, then, is to open one’s self up to bodily meaning beyond the symbolic, to sense the vibrations of ‘‘the living present.’’ Carbaugh’s (1999) discussion of listening as central to the cultural practice of the Blackfeet echoes this conception 250 M. Salvador and T. Clarke of listening as embodied practice. The Blackfeet mode of listening, Carbaugh affirms, ‘‘can involve the listener in an intense, efficacious and complex set of communicative acts, in which one is not speaking, discussing or disclosing, but sitting quietly, watching, and feeling the place, through all the senses’’ (italics added, p. 259). As Nancy calls upon resonance to connect the embodied listener with the living present, Carbaugh notes that through embodied listening ‘‘one becomes a part of the scene, hearing and feeling with it’’ (p. 259). This type of listening connects one to a specific location in the present moment and is the basis for ‘‘a rich and deep way of dwellingin-place’’ (Carbaugh, 1999, p. 250). Nancy’s (2007) experience of embodied listening to a symphony is the experience of opening up to unforeseen experience and meaning*meaning beyond the cultural forms and symbols of the mind’s ear. To gain such experience, such resonance with the living present, ‘‘we should go resolutely to the end of what is implied, without letting ourselves be restrained by the primacy of language and signification that remains dependent on a whole onto-theological prevalence and even on what we can call a philosophical anesthesia or apathy’’ (p. 30). In our case, the ‘‘philosophical anesthesia’’ to which Nancy refers is our selfimposed numbness to the resonance of the natural environment. To avoid such senselessness, one must open one’s senses to the embodied experience of place where ‘‘people, animals, rocks and trees are actually co-present and co-participate’’ in the lived moment (Carbaugh, 1999, p. 261). We see parallels between this notion of embodied listening apart from signification and Milstein’s (2008) focus on ‘‘collective human silence’’ as response to direct engagement with the nonhuman in the author’s ethnographic research on whale watching. Many participants, she observed, ‘‘appear to associate particular meaningfulness with not talking and, at times, express the notion that ‘no words’ exist to express understandings, emotions, or meanings’’ (p. 179). For some in Milstein’s study, silence ‘‘appears to connote a collective human sense of shared experience with the whales’’ (p. 179), and one participant credited the whales ‘‘with bringing him in touch in an embodied sense’’ and connecting him to ‘‘forgotten knowledge’’ about whales and their habitat (p. 183). For Nancy, Carbaugh, and Milstein, then, listening without words is a central element for connecting to resonance and the direct phenomenal engagement of the world around us. How is such an attunement with resonance to be accomplished in the tumultuous contexts where most environmental communication scholars perform their research? The weyekin principle suggests an answer. Recall the Nez Perce custom of close observation and material connection with one’s weyekin. We see in this practice a close link with the ecosemiotic concept of mimicry. Ecosemiotics, ‘‘the semiotics of the relationship between nature and culture’’ (Kull, 1998, p. 350), represents a theoretical approach to human ecology that can be applied across several disciplines including environmental communication (Noth, 1990). Addressing the tradition in Euro-American thought of maintaining a conceptual boundary between the material and the symbolic, ecosemiotics attempts to transcend Cartesian conceptual dichotomies such as culture
nature, mental
material, or material
symbolic. It argues that ecosystems are ‘‘constituted no less by flows of The Weyekin Principle 251 signs than by flows of matter and energy. It rejects the conventional notion of nature as a primarily material phenomenon, opposed to a notion of society as primarily communicative. Rather, it views nature and society as interconnected systems, both of which are simultaneously material and communicative’’ (Hornborg, 2001, p. 122). Ecosemiotics, then, addresses the material aspect that Rogers seeks to acknowledge, at the same time that it recognizes the broad range of meaning the natural world possesses. Within the field of ecosemiotics, Maran (2001) advances an argument for the semiotic dynamics of mimicry. He argues that mimicry*visual behavioral resemblance or mimicking by one species of/by another*is by its very nature a sign process and a communicative function. Further, he argues that mimicry systems as phenomena can occur in any organism, including humans: ‘‘It is possible to find mimicry systems which connect humans with the rest of nature and which have shaped our cultural consciousness and understanding of nature in general’’ (Maran, 2001, p. 334). We see similarities between the Nez Perce traditions described to us and ecosemiotic mimicry. As the tribal elder explained, receiving a weyekin is an experiential process built on learning and imitation. To obtain one’s weyekin is to gain special knowledge or ways of living in nature through relationships established by repeated observations over time. As we construe the practice, acts of imitation allow tribal members to come to know their weyekin, for it is through this imitative process that they are connected to it materially and symbolically. This mimetic process may also be viewed as the practice of an epistemology in which the mind embodies itself in a particular relationship with material aspects of the natural world, a journey defined as coming to know or knowing (Cajete, 2000; Peat, 1994) or ways of being/living (Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007; Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005). Thus, as we now understand it, the journey of receiving a ‘‘weyekin’’ is a process of learning ways of being or coming to know the natural material world and oneself. We find in the notions of resonance and mimicry guideposts to an expansion of ‘‘what can be experienced’’ (in Peterson et al.’s words) and an opening up of ‘‘parts of experience and truth’’ (in Nancy’s words). Ecosemiotic mimicry points to a purposeful direction of our attention and awareness to particular aspects of being with-in nature. The concepts of mimicry and resonance alert us to the idea that listening beyond symbols requires more than a senseless walk in nature. It demands close attention, rigorous observation, and embodied presence. As Maxcy (1994) noted, selective attention to resonance ‘‘can show us how we are ‘entangled’ in the world through embodied perception as well as linguistic action’’ (p. 345). He concluded that ‘‘rigorous description and reflection on a simple walk in the forest reveals complex dimensions, linguistic and nonlinguistic, of significance in nature’’ (p. 345). Importantly, this approach directs us to engage the world as we find it* allowing the nonhuman elements of that world to confront and interrogate our assumptions and symbolic inventions. We need to be careful here to emphasize that we are not privileging phenomenal experience and embodied listening as superior to rhetorical analysis and critique. On the contrary, we argue that embodied listening simply opens up a set of data to the 252 M. Salvador and T. Clarke researcher that is excluded in constructivist theoretical models and that such data may inform the very theory and critique environmental communication scholars seek to advance. Our argument is similar to Studlar’s (1990) reconciliation of phenomenology and feminist criticism. While maintaining a core commitment to feminist critical theory, she contended that ‘‘a phenomenology of feminist film theory might also interrogate and invigorate our most cherished theoretical paradigms and methodologies’’ (p. 77). Studlar employed phenomenology to reposition the place of women’s experience in the domain of film theory. We are employing phenomenological principles to reposition the place of the nonhuman world in the domain of communication theory*to ‘‘interrogate and invigorate’’ the core theoretical assumptions of environmental communication. While we are not calling for all communication scholars to become phenomenologists, we are suggesting that addressing the symbol
material tension inherent in all environmental communication demands that attention be paid to the embodied experience of the relevant phenomena being studied. Applying the Weyekin Principle: Telling a Story That ‘‘Makes Sense’’ Let us summarize our discussion to this point. For the past decade, scholars in environmental communication and rhetorical criticism have increasingly argued that the predominant focus of our field on the symbolic/rhetorical construction of reality, while central to important insights and critiques of ideology and power, has perpetuated negligent inattention to the nonhuman, nonsymbolic dimensions of our world. Thus far in this essay, we have offered ‘‘embodied listening’’ as a partial corrective to this lapse in environmental communication theory and practice. Starting with the Nez Perce notion of weyekin and utilizing concepts of resonance and mimicry, we have argued that a purposeful focus on the corporeal experience of being with-in nature yields insights into experiential data that might inform our analysis of symbols and signification. However, the value of finding new ways of listening to nature is minimized if the insights gained are not shared. We now turn to the second part of the weyekin principle*articulating a critical rhetoric that speaks to both the symbolic significance and the material reality of nature. Along with Plec (2007), we find McKerrow’s (1989) notion of critical rhetoric useful for our approach to environmental communication, particularly because it emphasizes that all ‘‘criticism is a performance’’ (p. 108). That is, criticism is as much about textual construction and advocacy as it is interpretation and analysis. McKerrow painstakingly called for a reversal of the term ‘‘public address’’ to ‘‘focus attention on that symbolism which addresses publics’’ (p. 101). The critic’s job was to ‘‘construct addresses out of the fabric of mediated experience . . . not by means of a simple speaker
audience interaction, but also by a means of ‘pulling together’ of disparate scraps of discourse which, when constructed as an argument, serve to illuminate hidden or otherwise taken for granted social practices’’ (p. 101). The weyekin principle extends the practice of critical rhetoric to include the ‘‘pulling together’’ of scraps of embodied experience which, when articulated as an argument, The Weyekin Principle 253 illuminate the material, nonhuman realities hidden or obscured by dominant social
symbolic practices. Even in selecting what symbolic elements count as the ‘‘text’’ under examination, the ‘‘critic as inventor’’ constructs both the object of study and the arguments advanced about it (McKerrow, 1989, p. 108). As Rogers (1998) argued, our theories and analyses of environmental communication are ‘‘part of the ongoing construction of how the world, human beings, and social activity can and should operate’’ (p. 269). We recognize that the symbol
material disconnect is perpetuated not only by our (non)listening to nature, but also by how we tell our stories. We use the term embodied critical rhetoric to denote a purposeful effort to construct theory and critique that expresses, as much as possible, the resonant, corporeal dimensions of the human
environment interchange. In the words of Abram (1996), an embodied critical rhetoric seeks to tell stories that ‘‘make sense’’: And ‘‘making sense’’ must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses . . . To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. (p. 265) Abram’s notion of rejuvenating our felt awareness parallels Killingsworth’s (2007) call for environmental communication scholars to commit ‘‘to the work of re-minding people of the lifeworld, calling them out of the trance of technological well-being and asking them, like doctors, to listen to their bodies, their most vital connection to the lifeworld’’ (p. 62). Yet, how are we to assess the degree to which our research ‘‘enlivens the senses’’ and reaffirms our bodily connection to the lifeworld? Our answer again follows the weyekin principle: We listen to our research with our bodies, sensing the resonance created within. To illustrate this notion, we offer an example from our study of the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction. The following section is a first-person account of one of the authors’ fieldwork experience during that study. A Day at the Big Hole Monument During the final year of our study I was living in Montana, just a few miles from the Continental Divide and the area where several wolves in the reintroduction program were establishing territories. That spring there was to be a Nez Perce Memorial Day ceremony at the Big Hole Battlefield National Monument, only a few miles from my cabin. The wolf reintroduction zone managed by the tribe was contained within the territory traditionally used by the Nez Perce for hundreds of years prior to the nineteenth century. At one point in the reintroduction, several wolves tried to move outside the authorized zone. Many feared that they would be killed by local ranchers, but they were recaptured in the Big Hole Valley of Montana. This was the very same area where, in 1877, the Nez Perce battled with US army troops as the Chief Joseph band tried to escape forced settlement*today’s National Monument site. I was struck by the symbolism of the wolves’ escape and recapture in the very place where Chief Joseph and hundreds of Nez Perce had fought to escape confinement by the US government. During our interviews, we noted that many tribal members 254 M. Salvador and T. Clarke expressed pride in and strong identification with the wolf program, often seeing the wolves’ resurgence as connected to tribal well-being. One tribal leader expressed this recurrent sentiment eloquently: I look at the wolf project and the tribe; I feel they are a mirror . . . The Indian people were displaced off the land. The gray wolf, the predator, was taken, killed off the land. So you have two sections of the community that were displaced. Now we see the Indian community coming back to retrieve rights and sovereignty and to regain the spiritual integrity of the land. At the same time, we see the gray wolf trying to come back and regain its rightful place in the natural world. So I thought that they were a mirror of history. The idea that the histories of the Nez Perce and the gray wolf mirrored one another influenced my entire perspective on the wolf reintroduction program and was encapsulated by the compelling parallels I saw between the Nez Perce and gray wolf ‘‘battles’’ in the Big Hole Valley. With this historical orientation firmly established in my mind, I traveled to the Memorial Day observance with great anticipation. The ceremony took place in an undeveloped field next to the monument parking lot that was full of weeds and wild grass, with perhaps 100 people attending. The loosely structured program included Nez Perce and non-Nez Perce speakers in both Western and native dresses, Christian and traditional Nez Perce prayers, and references to the Big Hole Battle, as well as the telling of contemporary veteran experiences from World War II and the Viet Nam war. During the ceremony tourists would occasionally drive into the parking lot, get out of their cars, and examine the proceedings curiously, apparently unaware of the planned event. Some would point and snap a few pictures before entering the monument. I observed all of these actions and took notes with little of the excitement that had motivated me to attend, as it seemed to me a somewhat haphazard and inconsequential event. Then, at the conclusion of the ceremony, all of the males in attendance were invited to come forward and sit in a circle, and about 40 men, including myself, participated. The leader told us that we were going to share in smoking a pipe that reportedly had belonged to Chief Joseph himself. For the first time during the ceremony I felt great excitement. I had come to the ceremony hoping for a kind of ‘‘pinnacle experience,’’ something that would symbolically tie together the many elements of history, wolves and the environment we had been studying, and the Nez Perce people we had been interviewing. Up to this point the ceremony had largely been a disappointment to me*it just hadn’t seemed very momentous. A prayer was spoken in Nez Perce as the leaders lit the pipe and started it around the circle. As each man took the pipe, he would say a few words in honor of the Memorial Day; most talked about relatives or their personal experience as a veteran. As the pipe moved closer to me, my excitement and nervousness grew as I thought about what I should say. I decided to talk briefly about my father. Then the pipe was handed to me. I was surprised at how plain it was. It was little more than a bare, white, hollowed-out stick, about two and a half feet long. I grasped the pipe, spoke a few words, and then placed it to my mouth. When I puffed on the pipe, I was stunned to find that it was out, or at least it seemed that way. I drew hard on the pipe, trying to ignite any remaining embers. The taste was unpleasant. The Weyekin Principle 255 I was one of the last in the circle. Perhaps the tobacco was gone or maybe the pipe had just gone out when it reached me. I was uncertain about what to do. Should I ask to relight it or announce that it had gone out? I said nothing and handed it to the person sitting next to me. None of the remaining men mentioned anything about the pipe. Something about placing the pipe to my mouth, the unpleasant taste and sensations of puffing on dried-out tobacco, affected my entire orientation toward what was happening. I was pulled out of my interpretations and expectations and stories about the ceremony and into my direct, corporeal experience. My bodily sensations were confronting the symbolic framework I had been constructing, not only of the ceremony but also of the entire wolf reintroduction program. In Killingsworth’s (2007) terms, I was being called out of a trance to listen to a more vital connection to my lifeworld in that specific time and place. The question I had been asking all day shifted from ‘‘what does this event symbolize for me?’’ to ‘‘what am I experiencing in this place in this moment?’’ While I had not conceptualized it at the time, I had shifted into applying the weyekin principle. For most of the ceremony, I had not really been present at all; I had not been open to resonance or embodied listening. I was functioning like some of the whale watchers described by Milstein (2008) who stayed below decks until a whale appeared and who returned below decks after it left. They were not engaging with their surroundings or the experience of being with-in nature*the myriad animals and sensations that were part of the natural setting*at all. They were simply visiting an amusement park, as a symbolic construction of which the whales were only the main attraction. Similarly, I had not been present to the ceremony taking place all around me. Rather, I had been focused on my own interpretations and expectations and was selectively attentive only to those things that seemed (from my symbolically centered perspective) relevant. For how much of our wolf reintroduction study had I been removed from the very places I was trying to engage? How inattentive had I been to the voices of the nonhuman? What I felt in my body, as I participated in the pipe smoking, was a powerful sense of constriction and struggle. I became aware of my own struggle as I realized how my personal constructions of what the ceremony was ‘‘supposed to’’ mean (or what I expected it to mean) were disconnected from the very event itself. Instead of enabling me to appreciate the significance of that day, my all-encompassing fixation on symbolism was actually constraining me from listening to the unfolding events. This was not some romantic experience of mythic tribesmen, untouched by Western society, expressing only the ancient truth of Native existence. These were contemporary people expressing a connection to this place and the history of this place in the here and now. The ceremony expressed all of the tensions and contradictions of that moment, and this dynamic echoed my encounters with the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction program as well. The reintroduction, like the ceremony, was a struggle to reassert both an endangered species and a cultural worldview within the constraints of the contemporary world. And it was toward those very struggles and constraints that my corporeal experience was redirecting my attention. The ceremony was taking place in a ‘‘spare field,’’ a location allotted to the tribe by the Federal government, and the tribe was utilizing this permitted zone to reassert its 256 M. Salvador and T. Clarke contemporary cultural worldview*not only its historical connection to that site but also its current ‘‘place’’ in the world. The tribe had been given permission from the federal government to manage the wolf reintroduction program, and it was using that program to reestablish the wolves and the tribe’s status as a legitimate authority in matters of land use and policy beyond reservation borders. There were internal tensions among tribal members who were more Western in their outlook and those that emphasized a more traditionally ‘‘Native American’’ orientation*we had interviewed tribal members whose families had practiced Christianity for generations as well as members who were trying to restore traditional Nez Perce religious practices and who were sensitive to past treatment of the Nez Perce by Christian missionaries. The wolves themselves faced the constant struggle of establishing territories while remaining within the confines of approved locations and were subject to constant monitoring, tracking, and occasional capture and relocation. Telling an Embodied Story In participating in tribal events and wolf management/tracking activities, in walking the land and observing the wolf, and in talking and eating with tribal members, we began to focus more on our phenomenal experiences to attend to the resonance of the places we encountered. What we recurrently sensed, hiking in the River of No Return Wilderness, smoking the ceremonial pipe at the Big Hole Battlefield Monument, and meeting with young tribal members while they were mapping the numbered wolf packs, was struggle*struggle of the wolf to survive and struggle of the Nez Perce to define their identity both as a Native American tribe with a proud history and also as a legitimate contemporary cultural authority. In sum, we increasingly focused on the struggle for both the tribe and the wolves to assert selfdetermination while under constant ‘‘management’’ and the constraints of legally allocated territory. The weyekin principle holds that an embodied critical rhetoric attempts to express the tensions found through embodied listening*that is, the telling of a story or the use of symbols that reveal the disconnect between the dominant human
symbolic constructions of a particular environmental issue and the corporeal awareness gained by the researcher though embodied listening. We find it significant that there are numerous books celebrating the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction (Halfpenny, 2003; Minor, 2008; Patent, 2008; Smith & Ferguson, 2005) but not a single one on the North Idaho program managed by the tribe (which took place during the same time period). The predominant portrayal of the wolf reintroduction in these books is illustrated by the subtitle of one: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone (Smith & Ferguson, 2005). These texts celebrate the reintroduction of the wolf as an almost mythic restoration of ‘‘the wild’’ and the proper order of pristine nature. ‘‘The grasses grew tall; the riverbank stopped eroding. Willow and aspen tress flourished. Beavers built ponds,’’ rejoiced one book, ‘‘the wilderness is in balance again. The wolves are back’’ (Minor, 2008, p. 31). In these accounts, the wolf reintroduction symbolizes a return to the sublime essence of nature that was lost through human intervention. The Weyekin Principle 257 We do not disagree with the notion that reestablishing the wolf as a foremost predator in Yellowstone National Park marks an important ecological milestone worthy of acclaim. However, the dominant image of the reintroduced wolf running free in a place of pristine and sublime nature unfettered by human intrusion simply does not reflect the struggles and tensions we found in our research. It occurred to us that an alternative image expressed the tensions we found in our study of the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction program. To illustrate the weyekin principle, we ask you to imagine a wolf in the wild. What does it look like? Now, put a radio collar on the wolf, with a color and number you can readily see. We are confident that the radio collar disrupts your original image and it is possible that you experienced a corporeal reaction to that disruption. It is our position that the image of a wolf in a radio collar expresses the material reality of the wolf reintroduction program, both for the wolves and for the Nez Perce. Moreover, the image disrupts the symbolic disconnect that obscures the material and nonhuman reality of wolf reintroduction. Out of the more than two dozen photographs of wolves in When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature’s Balance in Yellowstone (Patent, 2008), not one shows a radio collar, even though most of the original wolves that were released had collars. The collar simply does not fit with our sublime image of wilderness and is excluded. Moreover, the image of the collared wolf resonates with our corporeal experience of studying the wolf reintroduction effort. The wolves are hardly free to exist as they did before the advent of humans. They are indeed collared and constantly tracked and trapped and now hunted. (They were removed from the endangered species list in 2009.) Even the wolves without radio collars are constrained by the political structures that determine their material fate. Similarly, the Nez Perce are ‘‘collared’’ by the bureaucratic, cultural, and political structures shaping their fate. As we have noted elsewhere (Salvador & Clarke, 1999), images of Native Americans are frequently used in environmental advocacy, but those images are often romanticized, mythologized, and disconnected from the material reality of contemporary tribal existence. We posit, then, that the radio-collared gray wolf serves as a meaningful ‘‘weyekin’’ for the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction. It resonates the symbolic and material reality for both the tribe and the animal. It also expresses the tensions we discovered between our material, corporeal experience of the reintroduction, and the symbolic constructions we observed that displaced or neglected that experience. We feel struggle within our bodies when confronted by the tension of a ‘‘wild wolf ’’ pictured in a radio collar*that struggle resonates our corporeal experience of the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction. Furthermore, the collared-wolf image exemplifies a critical rhetoric that challenges the dominant, Western, binary separation of nature and culture. The wolf has long served as an iconic image for Western culture: on one side as a symbol of savagery and chaos and on the other side as a symbol of freedom and the sublime. This dichotomized ideology has been part of the wolf ’s long history in the United States (Hampton, 1997; Lopez, 1978; McIntyre, 1995). ‘‘The image of wilderness as a figurative chaos out of which man had to bring order was firmly embedded in the Western mind,’’ wrote Lopez, ‘‘but it was closely linked with a contradictory idea: that 258 M. Salvador and T. Clarke of wilderness as a holy retreat, wilderness as towering grandeur, soul-stirring and majestic’’ (p. 142). The insertion of the radio collar disrupts both the construction of wolf as a symbol of holy retreat and wolf as a symbol of savage chaos. The radio collar thus calls attention to contemporary, nonhuman realities of the wolf reintroduction that are hidden or obscured by dominant social
symbolic practices. The Weyekin Principle: Toward an Embodied Critical Rhetoric The weyekin principle holds that in order to inform environmental communication research by incorporating material, nonhuman dimensions of the world around us, we must first attend to meaning beyond signification through purposeful and embodied listening; and second, express the perspective gained from that embodied listening through stories and symbols that resonate with the material
symbolic tensions underlying a particular environmental concern. We offer this principle not to replace but rather to supplement ongoing environmental communication research. We agree with Maxcy (1994) in concluding that a combined project of symbolic and nonsymbolic awareness ‘‘can lead us toward the fundamentally ethical project of recognizing, understanding and criticizing the modalities of our inhabitation of the world’’ (p. 345). We are not arguing that our corporeal experiences were more important or meaningful than our attention to symbols and critical analysis but rather that embodied listening opened up an additional field of data*a material engagement with the nonhuman*that then informed our critical analysis. Embodied listening allowed our corporeal engagement with the world to confront and interrogate the symbolic frameworks we were, sometimes unknowingly, reproducing. Applying the weyekin principle expanded the range of ideas, experiences, and phenomena that we could weave together into the critical rhetoric represented by the image of the collared wolf. That image is our own expression of the experiences we worked through as environmental communication scholars studying the Nez Perce wolf reintroduction program. We are aware that our promotion of embodied listening and scholarship that enlivens the senses challenges fundamental assumptions about the very practice of intellectual inquiry itself. After all, scholars are said to ‘‘live the life of the mind,’’ and the entire exercise of research and publication is built upon symbolic exchange. Our very practices as academics situate us on the mind/symbol/culture side of the divide with body/resonance/nature. The weyekin principle represents a substantial reconsideration of the very meaning of scholarship. However, if we are to take seriously the many calls for environmental communication scholars to expand what can be experienced, to remind people of their lifeworld, and to promote a genuine human
nature engagement, then we must start by expanding what we ourselves experience in engaging our lifeworld with-in nature. This shift requires the courage to consider ways of apprehending our world that foreground the body and resonance over the mind and symbols. If new insights are gained through mimicry and such embodied listening, we are then challenged to speak our scholarship in ways that sustain that corporeal resonance*that rouse the senses as well as open the mind to the The Weyekin Principle 259 environmental dilemmas we face. Our toil to understand the Nez Perce notion of weyekin opened a window on one possible way of expanding what we can experience. We believe an embodied critical rhetoric built upon the weyekin principle can also guide us to a different kind of environmental communication scholarship that awakens contemporary human experience from its environmental amnesia. Notes [1] [2] Spelling and pronunciation of this word varies. We adopt the spelling used by Margo Aragon, a Nez Perce tribal member and language scholar, in the book A Little Bit of Wisdom, written with Horace Axtell (Axtell & Aragon, 1997). The pronunciation we heard most frequently was ‘‘WHY-a-Kin,’’ though it is indicated by Aragon as ‘‘WAY-a-kin.’’ McWhorter (1991) equates the Nez Perce practice of calling upon a weyekin with the Christian notion of praying to a saint for help or guidance (p. 296). References Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. New York, NY: Vintage. Aikenhead, G.S., & Ogawa, M. (2007). Indigenous knowledge and science revisited. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2, 539
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