The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946 to 2018), who learnt from Aboriginal teachers on the Victoria River in northern Australia, used “double death” for destruction that breaks the bond between death and life; where an ordinary death feeds new life, double death kills the power of a living world to renew itself. “Shimmer”, her rendering of an Aboriginal artists’ word for brilliance, is the living power that arises when beings meet and respond to one another, and that extinction drags out of the world. Therapeutic Shamanism draws the same line between the natural deaths and extinctions of the living world and the human-made extinction now under way.
Who was Deborah Bird Rose? #
An anthropologist and ecological thinker, born in 1946 and based in Australia, who was one of the pioneers of multispecies ethnography, the study of people together with the other beings they live among.1 Much of her fieldwork was at Yarralin, on the Victoria River in the Northern Territory, where her teacher was Old Tim Yilngayarri, born in 1905, whose name is given here as it appears in her published work. Many of the people she worked with there had lived the whole of their lives on cattle stations owned by Anglo-Australians, and remembered decades of station work as a time of great hardship;2 the cosmology they kept, as she describes it, belongs to “a world of hunting and gathering”, in which people are hunters.3 Her books include Dingo Makes Us Human (1992), Reports from a Wild Country (2004), Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (2011) and Dreaming Ecology, published after her death.34 She died after a long illness in December 2018.1
What is an ordinary death, in her view? #
Part of life. Old Tim’s dingo stories told of a first dog-human being from whom both dogs and people came, so that “to look at the face of a dog is to see your own ancestor and your contemporary kin”. In the cosmology he lived by, as Rose describes it, “the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human”.5 In such a world, people who hunt know death closely: “every hunted animal is someone’s family”, and “killing is part of life because death is part of life. To be alive is to know that one’s life is dependent on the deaths of others.”5 Death, on this account, binds the living and the dead into one community and returns life to life.
What is double death? #
Death that does not return to life. Rose’s book opens with a tree near Canberra hung with the bodies of killed dingoes, and much of her late writing asks what such killing does.6 In a short essay of 2014 she gave double death four senses: so many losses that damaged ecosystems cannot recover their diversity; “The death of evolution itself, at least for a while”; the death of the relationships that carry life through generations and across species; and the destruction of the future of one’s own death, which collapses along with the future of others. “Double death is a despoiler. It smashes the relationship between life and death.”7
The first death is the ordinary one that feeds others. The second is the death of that feeding, so that nothing returns. Living through it, she wrote, brings “a new era of solitudeSolitude. Chosen aloneness from other humans: a healthy, essential Adult capacity, the opposite of loneliness (which is about the quality of relationship, not the quantity). Relational solitude is time away from the humans in the company of everything else. More about this“, as other beings depart, never to return.6
What is shimmer? #
The brilliance of life in relationship. In her essay “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed”, published in 2017 in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, a collection co-edited by Anna Tsing, Rose took up the anthropologist Howard Morphy’s work with Yolngu artists of eastern Arnhem Land, a people who lived by hunting and gathering before missions came in the 1920s and 1930s. Their word for the brilliant, shimmering quality of a painting is, the artists say, “a kind of motion”, and, people say, a person’s capacity to see and experience ancestral power.89 For Rose, “shimmer, the ancestral power of life, arises in relationship and encounter.”8
Her example is the flying foxes of Australia and the eucalypts. The trees call to the flying foxes in colour and scent; the flying foxes come to feed, and pollinate as they go: “They carry Eucalypt futures on their furry little faces.”8 When one partner in such a relationship disappears, the other suffers too, and those “extinction cascades drag shimmer from the world.”8 Shimmer, then, is what double death destroys. See What did Anna Tsing mean by modular simplification and feral proliferation?
Isn’t nature resilient enough to recover? #
This is a contrast, not a reply: Rose’s essay came before his book. Some scientists think nature is more resilient than the language of extinction suggests. The ecologist Chris D. Thomas, in Inheritors of the Earth (2017), argues that animals and plants are “coping surprisingly well in the human epoch”, and that humans are “increasing the rate at which new species are formed”, perhaps to the highest level in Earth’s history.10 Rose’s side is that the losses come so fast and so deep that damaged ecosystems cannot recover their diversity, and that what dies is evolution itself, “at least for a while”.11
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the line between two kinds of death. Mass extinctions are a natural part of the history of life; there have been five, caused by volcanoes, asteroids and changes of climate. The sixth, the one now under way, is not natural. It is caused by humans, with extinction rates a thousand to ten thousand times the natural rate.12 The view that it does not matter because life will always survive, recover and evolve again is the antithesis of shamanism, and a symptom of our wounded relationship with Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.13 That is close to Rose’s point, that the deaths of a living world feed it, and the deaths now being made by humans break it.
The kinship with dingoes she learnt from her Yarralin teachers, people who had spent decades working on the cattle stations while keeping the cosmology of a hunting and gathering world, also has its counterpart. Hunter-gatherers treated other species with respect and gratitude, often called them brothers and sisters or ‘the peoples’, all kin to the human people, and never set out to wipe out a competing species; a war on another species would have been an abomination.14 A society killing species at around a thousand times the normal rate, and destroying the environment its own survival depends on, is in that sense a death cult.15 Calling that double death made into a culture is this answer’s own parallel; the books themselves say that the sixth extinction is made by humans. See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In where the brilliance comes from. For Rose, shimmer arises in relationship and encounter, between the tree and the flying fox, the person and the painting. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, whether or not anyone is there to meet it; things very different from us are conscious in their own way.16 Relationship is how that consciousness is met, and the loss of relationship is a real loss, but the aliveness does not begin with the encounter. And where Rose writes as an anthropologist about particular beings and places and what is being lost, the teaching adds that we are still surrounded by wise beings who want to help us, if we begin listening to them again.17 See Who is Francis Weller, and what does he teach about grief? and What is Joanna Macy’s work, and how does it connect with shamanism?
