A World with Many Centers

We celebrate the following three things: One, the animist revival currently sweeping the land. Two, a completed book with a tangible publication trajectory. Three, the form of ceremony, with all its diverse manifestations in various cultures, usually simply called shaking, as explicated in Bradford Keeney's book Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. We contrast this type of ceremony with a set of tendencies described by Louis Sass in his brilliant work Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. Sass argues that schizophrenia is a limit case—the most extreme manifestation of—perceptual changes experienced by all industrialized peoples. While its manifestations are extremely diverse, he claims the shared foundations of these perceptual changes are social disconnection, lack of agency, and loss of direct immersion in experience, in favor of analyzing experience—a turning of attention to attention itself. We examine how industrialization caused a steep decline in the ritual traditions of rural Europe, and a simultaneous building boom in psychiatric hospitals. If we know the world in three phases—intuition, analysis, and integration of the two—perhaps we can think of pre-modern politics, with qualifications, as the intuitive, and the modern, “scientific” conception of politics as the analytical. All that's left is the synthesis: a return to our bodies and shared reality, with all the wisdom we have gained in the first two phases.