Introduction: The Religion and Politics of Avatar
bron taylor
Readers who have not seen Avatar should do so before reading
further, noting their own reactions and observations. For those unable to see
the film and for those whose memory of the story and its pivotal moments would
benefit from refreshing, the first section, below, provides a synopsis of the
film. The second section surveys the approaches taken in the subsequent essays
to guide those who may wish to pursue particular lines of inquiry. The
introduction concludes by explaining both the “family resemblance” approach to
social phenomena variously understood to be “religious” or “spiritual” and how
this approach has shaped the terminology and framing of this volume.
Synopsis
Avatar
is set on Pandora, a stunningly
beautiful, often bioluminescent, and lushly vegetated moon circling a gaseous planet
in the Alpha Centauri star system. There, in the year 2154, humans from the
Resource Development Administration (RDA), a corporation with great political,
economic, and military might that operates with the authority of Earth’s
Interplanetary Commerce Administration, has established a mining colony. The
RDA seeks a rare mineral called “unobtanium,” which is the most efficient
superconductor known and is thus critically important to advanced energy
systems and galactic economic enterprises. In a metaphorical allusion to the
ways in which colonizers have often pursued the lands and resources
13
of colonized peoples, Avatar quickly establishes that human beings have been waging a
campaign to subjugate the Na’vi—tall, blue, humanoid (but tail-wagging) hunter-gatherer
creatures who are the moon’s indigenous inhabitants. The Na’vi stand in the way
of the RDA’s exploitive plans and ultimately mount a violent resistance against
the invaders.
The RDA employs two entwined strategies in its campaign: one
social, one military. The social strategy is scientific and is led by Dr. Grace
Augustine, whose discipline is never clearly specified but resembles that of an
anthropologist with a specialty in ethnobiology; when the film begins, she has
already been studying Pandoran biology and Na’vi culture for some time.
Although her primary passion is to learn about the moon’s environment and the
Na’vi’s environmental and social systems, she is also there to provide
information that may be useful to the RDA so that the corporation can gain the
co-operation and pacification of the Na’vi, and thus access to the coveted
energy conductor. If this strategy fails, the military strategy will take
precedence: the RDA will then subjugate the Na’vi by force and take the
unobtanium without their consent.
One of the soldiers brought to Pandora to help secure the
unobtanium is a former Marine named Jake Sully. A paraplegic who lost the use
of his legs in an earlier battlefield injury, he has been brought in to replace
his deceased brother, who was participating in a genetic engineering program on
Pandora that produces human-Na’vi hybrids (named “avatars”)— beings with human
consciousness in a Na’vi body. Augustine and her anthropologist assistant, Norm
Spellman, also have Na’vi avatars, enabling them to breathe the Pandoran air,
which is toxic to humans, and to interact with the indigenous inhabitants.
Because Sully and his brother were identical twins with the same genetic
structure, Sully can assume his brother’s avatar body; combined with his
military background, this accounts for his selection for the project. Working
with Augustine’s team, Sully is mandated to learn enough about the Na’vi to
convince them to leave the regions that are targeted for commercial extraction.
Failing that, he is to identify Na’vi vulnerabilities and thus ensure an easy
military victory.
What the imperial forces do not anticipate is that Augustine, Spellman,
Sully, and, later, a tough, no-nonsense
Latina helicopter pilot and former Marine named Trudy Chacon will view what is
happening to the Na’vi as fundamentally unjust and will join their resistance.
Chacon, however, has no avatar body as she is a part of the military forces but
not the avatar project. Augustine and Spellman, like many contemporary
anthropologists, come to respect not only the environmental knowledge but also
the nature spirituality of the Na’vi; so, too, does Sully, although he does not
come to such respect scientifically.
There are two key aspects to Na’vi spirituality. On the one
hand, they perceive the planet itself as a Gaia-like, organic, bio-neurological
network, which they personify as the goddess Eywa. The Na’vi believe that Eywa
does not take sides between different species on Pandora but rather promotes
the balance and flourishing of the entire natural world. Augustine is obviously
interested in but skeptical of the religious understandings that the Na’vi have
about Eywa; early in the film, she seems to understand Eywa as akin to the laws
of Pandoran nature.1
Na’vi spirituality also involves what could be called
relational animism. With such animism, respect toward all other organisms, even
dangerous prey animals, is obligatory. The Na’vi’s animism is rooted in their
belief that Eywa is “the author and origin of the vital interconnectedness of
all its living things” (Wilhelm and Mathison 2009, xiv). But
a special intimacy and bonding is also possible via a braid-resembling neural
“whip” or “queue” that the Na’vi can entwine with other individuals and animals
to deepen communion and communication with them. This sort of bonding enables
Na’vi warriors to mind-meld with these animals and then hunt or engage in
battle as though they were one being (8). They can establish this bond with
creatures such as the direhorse and two flying creatures, the banshee and the
Great Leonopteryx (in biological terms, an apex aerial predator), which the
Na’vi call the toruk or flying king
lion.
Based on what they learn from the Na’vi, Augustine and the
others initially try to protect them by convincing RDA officials that Pandora’s
true wealth is in its natural systems and the living things that constitute
them, not in the moon’s minerals. Put simply, even though their motives for
being there in the first place are clearly not altruistic, the scientists come
to love the Na’vi, their knowledge and way of life, and even the habitats to
which they belong. As Augustine puts it, “There are many dangers on Pandora,
and one of the subtlest is that you may come to love it too much” (Wilhelm and
Mathison 2009, epigraph). Although without a scientific
background, Sully also falls in love with the people and the place, albeit in a
different way than Augustine and Spellman. In his case, his love for Pandoran
nature is due in no small measure to his expert guide into its beauties and
mysteries, the lithe and beautiful Na’vi princess, Neytiri. The beginning of
their relationship is rocky because of Sully’s ignorance and disrespect of the
forest and its creatures. But after the small luminescent wood sprites (the atokirina’), jellyfish-like “pure
spirits” who are the seeds of the Tree of Souls (the Vitraya Ramunong) descend and alight on Sully, thus indicating
their favour, Neytiri decides to take Sully to her parents.2
Her father, Eytukan, is the chief of her Na’vi clan, the Omaticaya, and her
mother, Mo’at, is their shaman-like spiritual leader. Mo’at, perceiving the
will of Eywa, orders her daughter to teach Sully the Na’vi ways. Sully proves
to be a courageous and astute student, and he is eventually initiated into the
tribe, enters a romantic relationship with Neytiri, and mates with her.
In their own ways, especially as made possible viscerally
through their avatar bodies, Augustine, Sully, and Spellman each come to love
the Na’vi and to respect, if not embrace, their holistic ecological
spirituality. This leads to a difficult situation, however, since they know of
the RDA’s plans and are complicit in pursuing its social strategy to pacify the
Na’vi. Knowing that the RDA is on the brink of a military operation and having
been initiated into the tribe, Sully desperately tries to convince the
Omaticaya to leave their Hometree. (Each Na’vi clan has a Hometree, where they
live and share their lives; the massive plant actually comprises a number of
individuals of the same tree species that have grown together over time into a
strong, interrelated organism.) While pleading with the Omaticaya, Sully
reveals how he knows the RDA’s military intention. In this way, he confesses
the role that he and Augustine have played in the RDA’s objectives. Having
mated with Sully, Neytiri feels anguish and betrayal, and her entire clan
rejects the human avatars. Shortly thereafter, the RDA forces— led by another
former Marine, Colonel Miles Quaritch—attacks. Despite the efforts of Sully and
his avatar comrades, and even though the helicopter pilot Trudy Chacon refuses
orders to attack the Hometree, Quaritch’s forces launch missiles that
obliterate the Omaticaya’s Hometree and kill many Na’vi, including Eytukan,
scattering the survivors in agony and terror.
Soon after, back in their human bodies, Augustine, Sully,
and Spellman are imprisoned after the RDA learn of their rebellion, but Chacon
frees them, enabling Sully to return to his avatar body and prove his courage
and good heart by bonding with the Leonopteryx, a rare feat in Na’vi history.
Thus, Sully regains the trust of the Na’vi, who acknowledge him as the sixth
Toruk Makto, conferring upon him the status of a warrior-leader, which he
apparently shares with the Na’vi warrior and leader Tsu’tey. Clearly, however,
as the Toruk Makto, Sully emerges as the greater of the two leaders.
Sully then asks Mo’at and the Omaticaya for help saving
Augustine, who was shot by Quaritch during the battle over Hometree. Despite a
ritual orchestrated by Mo’at at the Tree of Souls, Augustine dies. Before
dying, however, as her own energies and memories pass into the Pandoran
neuroenergetic field, she exclaims, “Eywa is real!” Sully then rallies the
Omaticaya and other Na’vi clans to prepare for the next attack, which he knows
is imminent. Indeed, Colonel Quaritch’s next target is the Tree of Souls
itself, since he thinks that destroying the spiritual heart of Na’vi culture
will bring a quick end to the resistance. In another important spiritual
moment, Sully—acting awkwardly, apparently because he is not used to praying,
at least to Eywa—beseeches Eywa at the Tree of Souls for help defeating the
RDA, even though Neytiri has told him that Eywa will not take sides in a
battle.
Sully and Tsu’tey, a royal Na’vi warrior and Sully’s former
rival, lead the fight against the invaders. Despite the bravery of the
resisting forces, the Na’vi are being overwhelmed by the superior technology of
the RDA. Sully himself is saved by the valour of Chacon, who is killed by an
RDA missile soon after. Spellman is shot and has to leave his avatar body, but
he tries to rejoin the battle in his human body by using a breathing apparatus.
Tsu’tey bravely attacks the Valkyrie,
the airship laden with the bomb that is to destroy the Tree of Souls, but he
suffers mortal wounds in the effort. Clearly, the RDA forces are superior, the
Na’vi are losing, and it appears that soon Neytiri and Sully will join their
fallen comrades. Then, just when all seems lost, hordes of the most dangerous
Pandoran animals suddenly arrive—hammerheads, sturmbeests, viperwolves, and
others—routing the imperial humans. As this occurrs, an astonished Neytiri
exclaims to Sully that Eywa has heard him.
Although Quaritch can see that the battle has turned against
him, he fights on, now in a desperate and direct battle with Sully and Neytiri.
Quaritch injures Neytiri and is about to kill her when Sully saves her,
although in doing so, he is himself injured and his consciousness leaves his
avatar and returns to his human body. Neytiri then saves Sully twice: first, by
killing Quaritch with arrows just before he can deal a final blow to Sully and
second, by providing him with a breathing apparatus after she finds Sully’s
human body and recognizes that he is suffocating in the Pandoran air, to which
he has been exposed by Quaritch’s attack. As Sully regains consciousness, he
says to Neytiri, “I see you”—a Na’vi greeting that reflects a deep feeling of
connection. Neytiri, relieved and crying, reciprocates, fully recognizing her
mate even though he is then in his weak and fully human form. In another
important event of the battle’s denouement, Tsu’tey passes on his own
leadership to Sully before dying from his wounds.
At the end of the film, the Na’vi allow Spellman and a few
other humans who wish to remain on Pandora to do so. Sully, Neytiri, and the
other Na’vi warriors, as well as Spellman, escort the RDA’s survivors to their
spacecraft, forcing them to leave the scarred but still beautiful moon. The
implication is that Pandora will recover, but an obvious question remains
unanswered: Will the invaders return? Sully’s spirit and mind, through a ritual
at the Tree of Souls, is permanently moved to his avatar body, eliminating the
need for either the breathing apparatus or the avatar technology. Sully thus
becomes a naturalized member of Na’vi society.3
Overview of Essays
The next chapter in this volume
provides additional valuable background from film scholar Stephen Rust, who
analyzes Avatar’s representations of
social and ecological issues as they unfold within a form of cinema—the
blockbuster melodrama—that is often criticized as
socially and ecologically regressive. This is followed by historian of religion
Thore Bjørnvig, whose careful analysis of Cameron’s obsession with science and
space exploration enhances our understanding of the passions that produced Avatar.
In part 2, the chapters focus on popular responses to the
film. In its first two chapters, we travel to (cyber)space for two studies
based on analyses of website forums, called “fandoms,” that have been devoted
to Avatar. Religion scholar Britt
Istoft teases out various ways in which the spirituality of the film has been
understood among its fans, most often as involving pantheistic and animistic perceptions,
but also in ways more compatible with monotheistic traditions as well as with
naturalistic metaphysics of interconnection. She shows that the fandom
discourse generally includes calls for ecological lifestyles and environmental
action, and argues that given these responses, and those of fan cultures
inspired by the television and motion picture series Star Trek, it is reasonable to surmise that Avatar may kindle new communities with a complex mix of Pandoran
and Earthly nature religion at their centre. In the next essay, cinema scholar
Matthew Holtmeier, working with the views of the French critics Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari regarding the possibility of cinema and other art forms
inspiring positive action in the world, focuses on two affective responses he
sees in Avatar fandoms, which he
labels “post-Pandoran depression” and “Na’vi sympathy.” Only one of these, he
contends, is likely to promote positive action in Earthly domains.
The next two chapters leave cyberspace for Earthly places.
Rachelle Gould leads an interdisciplinary team of environmental studies
scholars striving to understand “cultural ecosystem services” through a
sophisticated qualitative and quantitative mixed-methods study. She and her
colleagues integrate into this wider research reactions to the film Avatar among inhabitants of Hawaii—both Native Hawaiians and those of other
ethnicities. This fascinating study, set in a region with a relatively recent
colonial history, shows how thoughtful and nuanced non-academicians can be
about the sensitive historical, social, and ecological issues that Avatar raises. Many of these
non-academics, Native and non-Native Hawaiians alike, appear to find resonance
with and/or incorporate many of the film’s ethical and spiritual themes; the apparent
differences between different groups, however, are every bit as interesting as
the similarities. Gould’s essay is followed by a study led by sociologist
Randolph Haluza-Delay, which explores the way in which both Canadian
environmentalists and the Canadian director of Avatar have appropriated the film to challenge tar sands mining in
Alberta, Canada, as well as the ways
(that some will find surprising) in which Christians from two different
traditions in that region have responded to the film’s spiritual and
environmental themes.
Part 3 advances a number of critical perspectives on the
film and its reception. Chris Klassen offers a feminist and post-colonial
analysis, first noting that Avatar has
affinity with ecofeminist spiritualities that emphasize the interconnectedness
of all living things and acknowledging the environmentalist intention.
But—contrary to enthusiastic readings of the film, including those that could
come from an ecofeminist direction— Klassen renders a strong, negative judgment:
Avatar presents “a thinly veiled
misogynistic plot tied to a romanticization of indigeneity.” Her analysis may
give pause to Avatar enthusiasts.
Science and technology professor Pat Munday, in an
interesting, contrasting way, takes up some of the issues examined by Klassen.
Deploying what he calls “postmodern semiotics,” Munday focuses on the
affinities between the hunting practices of the indigenous Na’vi and those of
nonindigenous American hunters. Like Klassen, he pays special attention to
gender, noting that Na’vi hunters are both male and female, as are contemporary
American hunters, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Munday finds in the
practice of hunting a spiritual alternative to the dualisms of mainstream
Western culture. He suggests, moreover, that such a spiritual hunting practice
has affinities with the animistic spirituality expressed in Avatar and that this frame makes sense
in the light of biophilia hypotheses. In contrast to Klassen, Munday sees in Avatar’s embrace of “woman the hunter” a
progressive respect for both women and non-human organisms.
While all of the preceding articles engage the spiritual
dimensions of the film, the next contributions make these their central focus.
Engineering and computer science professor Bruce MacLennan, showing remarkable
interdisciplinary range, advances an innovative perspective of the film with
lenses rooted in Jungian archetypal psychology, evolutionary biology, and (like
Munday) theories suggesting that Homo
sapiens has an innate, albeit weak, tendency toward biophilia. For
MacLennan, understanding biologically rooted archetypes and affective states
can bring an appreciation of both culture and nature as important, entwined
variables that are essential to understanding phenomena such as Avatar and its evocative power over its
audiences.
Literature, religion, and environmental studies scholar
David Barnhill demonstrates the continuities and discontinuities between Avatar and the work of American novelist
Ursula Le Guin, who, in 1972, published The
Word for World Is Forest. He examines the dystopian and utopian themes and
the Gaian and animistic spiritualities in both works, building to an argument
that, despite the problematics that inhere to both dystopian and utopian
genres, both of these works provide a salutary focus on the ecological and
social virtues needed to move Homo
sapiens toward utopian visions while avoiding dystopian realities. Lisa
Sideris concludes this section with a lucid exposition of the role of empathy
in interspecies ethical concern and the way in which Avatar puts such affective states into play.
In wildly different ways, the next two chapters engage
indigenous understandings related to the film. Musicologist Michael MacDonald
examines indigenous music as a way of knowing through sound (acoustemology). He
argues that had the composers been more directly engaged in relationship and
solidarity with indigenous peoples, they could have made a more imaginative,
evocative, and moving soundscape for the film while avoiding the ethical
problem that often accompanies the colonial attitudes toward indigenous
traditions—including sounds—as resources. Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sörlin
take up epistemological questions in another way as they pursue the potential
for cross-cultural understanding and for enhancing the resilience of
environmental and social systems by integrating the traditional ecological
knowledge of indigenous and local peoples with mainstream Western science. They
do this by juxtaposing contemporary, supposedly post-colonial resilience
science with Avatar’s depiction of
the work and person of Dr. Grace Augustine. In Augustine, Von Heland and Sörlin
see a powerful metaphor for both the peril and promise of engagement between
indigenous peoples (and other local actors) and natural scientists and environmental
conservationists as they struggle to understand, protect, and heal
social-ecological systems.
In my concluding
reflections, I survey the range of reactions to the film and wrestle, both as a
scholar and personally, with what to make of the film and its contentious
reception. Last but not least, in the afterword, Daniel Heath Justice, a
Cherokee scholar of indigenous literatures, revisits Avatar, which he first discussed in a thoughtful review written
soon after the film’s release (Justice 2010), in the light of the reception to
the film since then. In his reflections, Justice engages some of the
perspectives expressed by the other contributors to this volume.
Of this I am confident: after reading Avatar and Nature Spirituality, open-minded readers will have a
much more complicated, if not also conflicted, view of the film, its director,
and its cultural, ecological, and ethical significance.
Family Resemblances, Religion, and Spirituality
Scholars have long debated the definition of
religion and, more recently, have wrestled with the term spirituality. No consensus has emerged. Along with a growing number
of scholars, I follow what we are calling the “family resemblance” approach to
the study of what people have in mind when they use terms such as religion and spirituality. Such an approach leaves aside the fraught quest to
demarcate where religion|spirituality ends, and where that which is not
religion|spirituality begins. Those who take the family resemblance approach
endeavour instead to explore, analyze, and compare the widest possible variety
of beliefs, behaviours, and functions that are typically associated with these
terms, without worrying about where the boundaries lie.
The family resemblance approach begins with recognition that
there are many dimensions and characteristics to what people call
religion|spirituality, and it rejects presumptions that any single trait or
characteristic is essential to such phenomena. Instead, the focus is on whether
an analysis of religionresembling beliefs
and practices has explanatory power.
In common parlance, of course, religion often refers to organized and institutional religious
belief and practice, while spirituality is
held to involve one’s deepest moral values and most profound religious
experiences. Certain other traits and characteristics are also often associated
more with spirituality than religion. Spirituality, for example, is often
thought to be more about personal growth and gaining a proper understanding of
one’s place in the cosmos than is religion, and it is often assumed to be
entwined with a reverence for nature and environmentalist concern and action
(Van Ness 1996; King 1996; Taylor 2001a, b). Careful observers will, therefore,
be alert to the different ways in which people deploy these terms.
Nevertheless, most of the traits and functions that scholars typically
associate with religion are also associated with spiritual phenomena. From a
family resemblance perspective, therefore, there is little analytical reason to assume that these are different kinds of
social phenomena. The value of a family resemblance approach is that it
provides analytic freedom to look widely at diverse social phenomena for their
religious|spiritual dimensions. With such an approach, whether James Cameron
believes in invisible divine beings (a trait some consider to be essential to
religion) is worth analyzing, but we need not refrain from examining the
religious dimensions of his films, or of their reception, based on whether
Cameron’s worldview includes that particular trait.4
Notes
1 In a mock Confidential Report on the Biological and
Social History of Pandora, which purportedly draws on Augustine’s research,
Eywa is said to be “a kind of biointernet. She’s a memory-keeper, a collective
consciousness. . . . She logs the thoughts and feelings of everything that
thinks and feels. Her function is to bring balance to
the systemic whole, one that
is perfectly interdependent, biodiverse, self-regulating, and unified. But more
than a network, she has a will. An ego. She guides, she shapes, she protects. .
. . [But] Eywa does not take sides; Eywa will not necessarily save you. Her
role is to protect all life, and the balance of life. She is, quite literally,
Mother Nature” (Wilhelm and Mathison 2009, xv).
2 The Na’vi
terminology was invented by Paul Frommer, a linguist from the University of
Southern California hired to create the new language for the film.
3 In addition
to the sources cited previously, in checking facts and details, I found this
online source helpful: Pandorapedia: The
Official Field Guide at http://www .pandorapedia.com/.
4 The family
resemblance school began with Wittgenstein ([1953] 2001). For the most lucid
exposition of the approach with regard to religion, see Saler (1993). For a
short version of the approach, but longer than here, see Taylor (2007). For an
even shorter version, see chapter 1 in Taylor (2010), also available online at
http://www .brontaylor.com/pdf/Taylor--DGR_ch1.pdf. For a clear statement
typical of those who object to the approach in religion studies, see Fitzgerald
(1996).
References
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 1996. “Religion, Philosophy, and Family
Resemblances.” Religion 26(3): 215–36.
Justice, Daniel Heath. 2010. “James Cameron’s Avatar: Missed Opportunities.” First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous
Studies, 20 January. http://www
.firstpeoplesnewdirections.org/blog/?p=169.
King, Anna S. 1996. “Spirituality: Transformation and
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Taylor, Bron. 2001a. “Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality
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