**5. Multispecies Sacralization**

Nonhuman creatures are also on the move in an era of climate change and mass extinctions, seeking sanctuary. Our lab wonders: how can we acknowledge and include the ways that nonhuman flows and other species participate in processes of sacralization? Describing the lab's conception of sanctuaries (in Section 2 above) I followed a constructivist line, broadly in line with the legacy of Emile Durkheim, in which sacralization expresses social form. That approach permits us to investigate how sacred places are produced from human imaginations. Yet it also seems incomplete, failing to account for the way certain lands seem to lure human imaginations toward ascribing specialness. They may, in a sense, recruit the sanctuary designation.

High mountains, for example, have long seemed to set their own thresholds, to mark a division of worlds. Cultures have responded to them in various ways: in fear, wonder, veneration, and divinization; through rituals of access, prohibitions of entrance, and making prayer retreats on them; by experiencing the mountain as person, or divinity, or as lair of the demonic, or as arena of the sublime. None of those responses are necessary consequences of the tectonic friction that wrinkled a fold of Earth's crust skyward. Yet neither do they seem arbitrary social projections onto inert space; they are *responses*.

Imagining a landscape, argues anthropologist Ingold (2011), entails participating in the landscape in some way. It is not an event that happens entirely inside the human brain; it is a relational activity, shaped by the contours and creatures of a place as well as by embodied perception and cultural ideas. Yellowstone has both high mountains and rare geothermal features. Its geological character has for millennia spurred a question in humans: what is the etiquette of relation here? While sanctuaries are not natural kinds, landscapes may enlist human propensities to sacralize. In that sense, the mountains and geysers, American Bison and Grey Wolf, collaborate in the cultural construal of a place as special. They entice sacralizing minds and participate in the social processes by which a place is set apart as sacred.

Our lab therefore asks which nonhumans seem to be stimulating sacralization or taking advantage of a ffordances created by ascriptions of sacredness. In line with interventions from the field of Multispecies Studies, which asks scholars in humanities and social sciences to work beyond humanist premises to understand how worlds are constituted with diverse forms of life, Sanctuary Lab attends to the ways sacred places are made from the interaction of multiple species participating together to realize particular possibilities of a certain land (van Dooren et al. 2016). In supplement to Durkheim's account of society, it is not only humans who do religious work.

The Hula Valley in Northern Israel has become a key stop-over for birds migrating between Africa and Eurasia. A marshy wetland drained by the Jewish National Fund in the midcentury Zionist program of landscape modernization, part of it accidentally reflooded in the late 20th century, and exhausted birds quickly found and claimed it. The National Fund protected part of the flooded areas as a sanctuary, which is now globally famous among birders, many of whom make their own kind of pilgrimage there. You could say that Zionism enlists the birds, but maybe the birds have also enlisted Zionism. They are, for now, collaborators in sacralizing.

The birds follow a flyway that traces the rift valley, from the highland headwaters down the Jordan River over the Dead Sea to the Red Sea, taking advantage of the habitats variously protected by religious designations, by militarized security zones, and by ecological reserves. Our lab's itinerary will follow that flyway, traversing this densely sacralized, bitterly contested landscape along a path made by tectonics, marked by water, reproduced by birds seeking refuge. That line holds religious histories and human politics with geological histories and nonhuman projects, affording the lab a way into the entanglement of particular religious futures with particular fates of nonhuman life, coupled together along uncertain, imperiled flightways.

Refugia are areas where special environmental circumstances have enabled a species to survive after extinction in surrounding areas. (For example, the Yellowstone hot springs are refugia for forms of life that were widespread before the cataclysmic change to an oxygen-rich atmosphere.) Tsing (2017) employs the term more broadly, to refer to conditions that provide haven for biocultural processes and multispecies relations from the plantation simplification and destruction that she takes as hallmark of the Anthropocene. Refugia are critical for livable futures, she writes, for from them may resurge the diversity of multispecies arrangements on which valued human ways of life depend.

Consider sanctuaries as biocultural refugia in that sense. Sacred places often protect some unconventional set of multispecies relations, even when they are not explicit ecological reserves. At least, they are usually set aside from plantation principles of simplification, extraction, and indifferent biological substitution. For that reason, places marked and protected as sacred may have a role to play in resilience and resurgence. Because they offer haven to a multiplicity of biocultural arrangements, they protect multispecies possibilities from extinction. That is one reason for the Sacred Natural Sites initiative of the IUCN: "the sacred" marks havens of biocultural diversity.

In Anthropocene conditions sanctuaries thus may take on new functions of refuge. Think of the Anthropocene not as an enduring planetary condition, writes Donna Haraway, but rather as a boundary, a discontinuity marking the transition between epochs (Haraway 2016, p. 100). Sanctuaries can offer haven both to multispecies relations being extinguished in the Anthropocene and to imaginations being excluded from it. For making ways through the Anthropocene discontinuity perhaps we need sanctuaries to harbor as many possibilities for biocultural resurgence and replenishment as there are sacred stories.

Black-Necked Crane migrates each winter to Bhutan's Phobjika Valley from habitats in Tibet and other places in China. Tradition holds that when they first arrive for the year, they circle (clockwise of course) the temple complex overlooking the valley, before settling in the wide plains. Farmers expect their arrival just after harvest, the cranes and humans seeming to time their provisioning to one another. When it appeared that numbers of Black-Necked Crane were decreasing, the king declared that Phobjika should be managed as habitat for Black-Necked Crane, due to its special relationship with Bhutan. Now the valley plains, rare in this land of narrow gorges and therefore under development pressure for farming and tourism, must maintain winter feeding grounds for Black-Necked Crane.

That action seems to have set in motion cultural processes that elevate Black-Necked Crane's status. While cranes have generally been regarded as admirable creatures in Himalayan Buddhism, regularly appearing in story and art, until recently the bird did not enjoy special political protection. Now the strong conservation policies in Phobjika seem to stimulate religious veneration and incorporation into the story of Bhutan as *beyul.* Every mention of the bird is sure to note that by migrating between Tibet and Bhutan, Black-Necked Crane keeps alive the connection between these sacred lands. In fact, a painting hanging in the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature in Thimpu depicts flying Black-necked Cranes connecting the most important sites of Tibet and Bhutan. As development in China invades habitat of the birds, they find sanctuary in Phobjika—repeating a centuries-old pattern. In the sacralization of Black-Necked Crane, the old/new narrative of Bhutan as *beyul* is told. At the monastery above Phobjika Valley, Black-Necked Crane has recently been inserted into the murals depicting the masters and incarnations around which the narrative of this land is shaped. Meanwhile, the long-legged creatures, regal in posture, walk the Phobjika fields and pastures in confidence that this is their refuge.

Early one morning I awoke in the dark to go to the valley floor with the music professor. He wanted to record the dawn clamor of the cranes. We set up the microphones atop a layer of fresh snow and then waited in the moon-lit fog that lay thick over the warm-watered valley bottom. Dogs skirted around us, mutually wary, loping with territorial purpose and tracking barks from the farmhouse settlements, their own sociality evident. We waited. Snow-mu ffled steps of herds beginning to think about moving. The silhouette of cows, shaggy horses, and yak, lugubrious in the cold. We waited. Then, still before a hint of dawn, Oriental Skylark began to call, the dispersal of their high-pitched song testifying to grea<sup>t</sup> numbers spread throughout the grasses. We waited. Finally, as mountains to the East began to be outlined by the first flush of light, a crane called. It was from a group far up the valley, near the base of the temple complex. Individuals in a group down-valley, nearer to us, answered. A few family groups of three seemed to switch places, wing-beating in opposite directions. As the day brightened the two groups set to full clamor, their high bugling sound ringing o ff the mountainsides, dispelling the fog. Little Grebe awoke and began patrolling up and down the river. Ruddy Shelduck set aloft due south, away from the hilltop temple complex, now emerging from the crane-dispelled fog.

By waiting upon Black-Necked Crane we encountered a complex assemblage of biosocial relations finding refuge in crane clamor. In order to protect their habitat, no construction, tillage farming, or water channelization is permitted in the valley center. Within that protection, other bird species also find refuge. So do the mixed herds of free-ranging cattle and the broader ecosocial system of pastoral livelihood from a commons. So do the absorbent soils beneath the marsh grasses that (our environmental scientist taught us to see) take in the monsoon rains like a sponge and release them slowly. So do the quasi-feral dogs, moving across those worlds and policing them for their own ends.

In the land of the sacred Black-Necked Crane, domestic, feral, wild, economic, and religious forms of life negotiate a shared common. Phobjika as refugia o ffers not only Black-Necked Crane a chance to survive, but a set of landscape relations the possibility to make their way together through the harrowing and replenish the possibilities beyond it.

## **6. Arts of Attentiveness**

Why spend such time, money, and carbon to assemble the lab in each place? Following Ingold's point that perception of landscapes arises from some form of participating in them, Lane argues for a phenomenological method, in which the researcher's experience has an important role in understanding sacred places. To an extent, Sanctuary Lab follows the supposition that inquiry is enhanced by the collective experience of participating in the landscape under study. This essay's peculiar style highlights the contributive role of experience. But Lane also shows the liabilities of thinking from experience when he writes: "one's actual embodied experience in encountering a place perceived as sacred is crucial, then, to the sense of magic or awe one finally attributes to it" (Lane 2001, p. 53). That could mislead, as if the researcher needs to feel the magic historically ascribed to the place. Worse, it could invite researchers to treat their own experiences as reliable, even superior, knowledge about the specialness of a place. Especially when the majority of the team shares cultural background and material privilege, and when their engagements with a place are short, reflecting from experience, as I have done throughout this essay, runs high risks of perspectival distortion and ethnocentric imposition.

Precisely in order to stimulate critical reflection on the frames and practices through which researchers experience a place, Sanctuary Lab includes arts-based practices of attentiveness as part of its method. It is an important reason why each team includes a faculty member from the arts. In places dense with cultural signification, so trodden by paths of pilgrims and tourists that it is hard

to experience anything but their overdetermination, exercises of embodied attentiveness o ffer a way of participating in the landscape, creating an experience from which to ask anew why the place has enticed sacralizing minds from many worlds for thousands of years. They o ffer a way to walk at once along and askance from the heaviest paths of sacralizing traditions, allowing researchers to reflect on those cultural pathways while also opening themselves to experience the living landscape that has been enlisted into those pathways. The intentionality of an arts exercise compels critical reflection on the mediation of experience.

Mammoth Hot Springs, a short walk from parks headquarters along a road with stores and cafes, is the background to a million selfies. For just that reason, I did not want to go there. Most people come to Yellowstone not as pilgrims to sacred wilderness, of course, but just to gaze at the wonders. The Park was in fact long marketed as "wonderland," a place for the a ffluent to come see fabulous curiosities. Yet it was here, on the elaborate wooden walkways built to manage the human tra ffic, that the music professor chose to set up a listening station: a hydrophone dropped into water bubbling from a thermal vent, channeled with an omnidirectional mic to hear variegated surface flows. Skeptical of the venue, the elaborate equipment, and the entire exercise, I slipped on the headphones out of politeness. And then, in spite of my attitude, I found myself confronted with the live presence of an unfinished volcanic event. The steaming, bubbling sounds moving through my mind were made by temporalities and powers greater than the anthropogenic forcings stressing the forest cover above, certainly greater than the colonial forces that drew the boundaries and erected the walkways. In the midst of over-tourist wonderland, I was caught up in wonder at the presences that have attracted sacralizing minds for millennia.

Leaders in Multispecies Studies have called for researchers to create "arts of attentiveness" as a first step toward scholarship that can carry inquiry beyond observational noticing "into the cultivation of skills for both paying attention to others and meaningfully responding" (van Dooren et al. 2016, p. 17). Their hypothesis is that better, integrated forms of knowing rapidly changing worlds are more likely to arise from immersion within their liveliness. Explaining his own phenomenological approach to sacred sites, Ivakhiv suggests bracketing the conventional notion of landscape as inertly objective and adopting a functionally animist perspective, as a way into inquiry from reciprocal relation with a place (Ivakhiv 2001, p. 14). Animist or not, the mode of inquiry involves a normative decision of how to acknowledge and interact with the relations of a place. Deborah Bird Rose and Thomas van Dooren call for multispecies attentiveness as a matter of research ethics: "we understand ethics as an openness to others in the material reality of their own lives ... with their multitude of interdependencies and precarities, their grea<sup>t</sup> range of calls, their care and their abundance along with their su ffering and their grief" (Rose and van Dooren 2017, p. 124). By listening to the life of Phobjika, we opened our investigation to the many projects of other species who find refuge in the calls of Black-Necked Crane. More happens in that moment than unusual acquisition of data about a contemporary sacralization process; including arts of attentiveness within research protocols invites lab members to acknowledge our research as a multispecies practice, a form of interaction with nonhuman relations.

Before we left Mammoth, the music professor handed out wind instruments made from stones and some simple percussion items, and invited us to play something back for the thermal springs, as a gesture of acknowledgement and gratitude. Uncomfortably participating in this gesture of reciprocity compelled us to reflect on how academics ordinarily come into a place and the unstated ontological terms by which we propose to interact with it. As a practice of art, it was not quite religious, ye<sup>t</sup> as an offering of respect and relation, it was not entirely secular either. The exercise compelled attention to contingent premises of embodied experience in the place—our own, our local experts', those of predecessors and of future generations.

Even while pursuing historical perspective and critical knowledge about these places, we thus also seek a ffect-oriented pathways for attending to the stresses that are making futures. Arts of attentiveness allow researchers to connect disciplinary forms of inquiry with an often-avoided question of basic relations: whose relations convene here and what kind of claims can they make? Acknowledging the question and the conflicts it represents can create an ontological opening, a consideration of arrangements alternative to those currently or even historically dominant. Sometimes in such practices, the art of inquiry can become itself an o ffering of sanctuary: in the posture of listening, a way of letting imagination attend to the biocultural pasts and possibilities of the place.
