Everything on this site is writing, living and tended and revised in place. This page holds something different: works fixed in print. These include books and book chapters as well as articles and academic papers. These are old school and can be found printed on paper in select locations. The garden moves faster; the publications go deeper.
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Ecologies of Participation
Agents, Shamans, Mystics, and Diviners. Lexington Books, 2018.
A daring debut that challenges the “wise homebodies” of academia by proposing a profoundly interdisciplinary methodology for comparative philosophy and religious studies. Grounded in process philosophy, the book advances a new ontology of agency and develops a multi-ontology approach that moves beyond both the reductionism of scientific materialism and the relativism of postmodern constructivism. Drawing on Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss, and the ontological turn in anthropology, it shows how diverse ecologies of participation (shamanic, mystic, divinatory, and agential) offer different ways of world-making that destabilize the givenness of “nature” and “culture.” The closing chapters extend these insights into an ethics of comparison and a participatory guest protocol, fertile ground for facing our shared planetary predicament. The seed of everything this site now articulates as tending is already growing here.
“Ecologies of Participation is impossible to capture in some neat, established academic sound-bite, mostly because its multiple claims are all quite impossible — impossible, that is, within our present Western and colonized ways of speaking, thinking, and being. If we can imagine ourselves outside or after that framework, we might say that the book, like its author, is a shaman, a diviner, and a traveler among worlds, including future worlds. The vision of the human (and nonhuman) that emerges through these words and worlds is unabashedly global, comparative, moral, and magical. Here is a weird and wonderful book in which everything is alive and even the stones tell stories. Really.” — Jeffrey Kripal, Rice University
“A joyful, verve-driven contribution to the conversation about the role of ontological difference in getting a handle on what used to be called cultural diversity. Impressive in its scope and ambition, this book takes the whole debate about ontology in the humanities and social sciences to places it has never been before.” — Martin Holbraad, University College London
Available from Lexington / Rowman & Littlefield and Amazon.
Chapters & articles
- “Toward an Integral Ontological Pluralism: A Process-Oriented Critique of Integral Theory’s Evolutionary Cosmology.” In Dancing with Sophia: Integral Philosophy on the Verge, edited by Michael Schwartz and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens. SUNY Press, 2019.
- “African Afterlife Beliefs.” In The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying, edited by Christopher M. Moreman. Routledge, 2018. DOI 10.4324/9781315723747-20
- “Atemporal Creativity: Evolution Beyond Lines & Spirals.” ReVision, Spring 2010. Published under the name Zayin Neumann. PDF
The ORCID record is the standing verified identity; see how to cite.
What is being written
There are other books and articles in process. They offer a different articulation than the garden found in these web pages, slower and more sustained, fixed when they arrive. Stay tuned for news, which will land here and in the letters, this garden’s email list, opening soon. When it does, a quiet way to join will live at the bottom of every page.