In the course of tending to our goats in recent years, we have been consistently warned and forced to see beyond the human paradigm of visual sight to watch out for foxes concealed behind bushes or in ground-level holes. These words of caution have come from fellow cow and goat herders during the grazing season in a landscape that predominantly consists of privately owned rice paddy fields, transforming into commons after rice harvest. The grazing season roughly takes place from January until the onset of the monsoons in June. During this period, grazing ceases as the fields slowly become submerged under the monsoon rains. The insistence on seeing what the human eye cannot, such as a gaze from a fox hidden behind the bush on livestock grazing in the landscape, stirs something in the human psyche which fundamentally shakes the very individuated image of the human self. Selfhood is not just the domain of the human but rather a cascade of embodiments of every non-human thinking in any given landscape and in this, humans too are part of that perception. The connection between the gaze and perception and its direct or indirect links to other socio-economic structures that bind the herder and the goat holds significance. It matters because the fox is a predator for both the human and the goat. For the human, the fox attacking the goat is linked to the herder’s wider economic sustenance derived from goat rearing and protecting the herd is protecting the herder’s economic structure. On the same note, the goat is ultimately regarded as prey to humans, while the fox plays a dual role as both predator and prey to humans. At some point in history, goats, foxes and humans built an alliance of interdependency. Although the structures of interdependency transformed in different ways globally, some form of  alliance continues. The human, indeed, is neither accepted nor rejected by the more-than-human. “…typically humans see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however, animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators). By the same token, animals and spirits see themselves as humans; they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages, and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture” (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro notes in his brilliant studies of Amerindian cultures). The gaze of the non-human on the human and vice versa quintessentially establishes the foundation of the complex dynamic called entanglement, embodiment and embeddedness of a landscape. At the same time embodiment of multiple perceptions transpires not just within inter-species entanglements but also towards the wider horizon of plants, seasons, rain, heat, wind and so on. 

During the grazing season, the negotiation of the gaze sometimes occurs through the calls of our fellow herders, resembling animistic sounds, or  through the entire herd collectively staring into the distance, followed by  calls from the cows. The fox indeed contemplates the theatre of signals and calls. This is an emergence of what one might roughly call the politics and phonetics of language. When a language moves beyond the confines of grammatical syntaxes and lexicons, sounds, gestures and calls attain anthropomorphic forms. This gives agency to multiple locus (both human and non-human) at any given time in a landscape, setting the dynamic nature of entanglements. 

The grazing season is also a peculiar period for dreaming. Many nights we wake up with false alarms triggered by dreams of foxes howling behind the goat shed,  the anxious bleats of the young goats whose feet might have got stuck between the floor planks of the goat shed or quite often the visuals of dead goats in the morning possibly bitten by a snake at night. These lucid dreams are Freudian and animistic or totemic at the same time. They are lucid not because they emerged from any events of the previous days but rather as “dream distortions”, which ultimately become “wish fulfilment”. Drawing from an analogy of the self, the centralities of our psychic processes are also closely interlinked with the wider contemporary capital consumerist world we are part of. In a way one could almost say an existence of dualism between two worldviews and practice. These dreams hold significance as they symbolise an economy or sustenance reliant on maintaining the goat population, preventing it from dwindling due to attacks from foxes, snakes or accidents occurring within structures (goat sheds) we designed. These unpleasant “dream distortions” are a process towards “wish fulfilment” quality in the lucidity of dreams, which ensures we take steps to reduce the economic setbacks when the herd numbers are minimised. Simultaneously, these dreams resist being merely visual; phonetics is of particular importance and the sound of each animal needs to be paid attention to. The sound of the fox, goat or cow transpires in meanings to the herder in different times and seasons and hence a cacophony of toads and frogs in monsoons, as well as dreams of howling foxes behind goat sheds are directly related to the contemporary consumerist psyche of the human. Predation and prey, gaze and perception is not a stagnant entity but is a dynamic whole whose value and traction changes with relation to time. In navigating this, how does a contemporary human navigate the challenge of embracing multiple interconnected worldviews, most often dangerously unified? 

Here we will take a slight detour from the self analogy towards an entanglement with the wider collective of the human selves. There is a product (let’s say a bar of soap), and then there are the related pertinent questions of provenance and process. In relation to that there is a self in the collective and the collective in the self, and there shall be the related questions of provenance and the process of individuation of the self. In this, the self and the collective is almost interchangeable. Between the product and the self lies a veritable bed of psychoanalytic processes, intricately involving time, space, memory, dreams, desires and perhaps guilt – skillfully incorporated and shockingly universalised in what could be called the contemporary consumerist world. The product, the self and the collective today is strangely entangled in this capitalist landscape. And in this landscape, animals, plants, horizons, seasons, rivers, mountains, deserts and so on have disappeared from the embodied dreams and myths of the contemporary human. At the same time, ironically and subconsciously, this product (the bar of soap/any object of mercantile exchange) is deeply embedded, individualised and collectivised within the contemporary human psyche of desire rather than with an embodiment and embeddedness of a non-human cosmology. At this intersection of time and space, it is of pertinent need to ask what does it mean to be a human in a post-industrial capitalist environment in the face of concretised dualism between the human and non-human, between human and ‘nature’ and between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Is it possible to repopulate and rethink our relational identity with the wider horizon of animals, plants, mountains, deserts, oceans, rivers, seasons? Can ‘nature’ as we understand it today move beyond its position as a backdrop for utility or aesthetic or recreation towards an embodiment within human psychic processes?  

Before the rupture of the industrial world, animals, plants, seasons, mountains, rivers, oceans, lakes, deserts, and forests constituted the first circle of the human world. This centrality of the non-human world implied the absence of a dualistic separation between humans and animals or plants, consequently leading to the non-dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Relations and identities transpired in a continuum that we today define as ‘social’ or ‘cultural’, and this continuity encompassed the entire non-human cosmology in any given environment.  “Humans, I argue, are brought into existence as organisms-persons within a world inhabited by beings of manifold kinds, both human and non-human. Therefore, relations among humans, which we are accustomed to calling ‘social’, are but a sub-set of ecological relations.
….Ways of movement, and subsistence in the landscape give us a peek into the complexities and dynamics of the entanglement with the non-human and the wider environment while also reflecting a worldview comprising of myths and beliefs of a particular locale, in this locale comprising of innumerable engagements with the landscape; human and the nonhuman. Ways of acting are also ways of perceiving the environment.” (Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment)

It is on these intersectional and conflicting grounds that Desert is a Forest continues to evoke and grapple with the broader questions that influence the psychic processes of the contemporary post-industrial human. While Desert is a Forest focussed on the indigenous plants sourced from the deserts, mountains and wadis of the UAE, the approach is quintessentially animistic rather than naturalistic. Its animistic nature lies in its emphasis not on the singular aspects of plant taxonomy, morphology or uses alone,  but rather on the need to contemplate a relational identity and meaning with the entire non-human/human cosmology as a whole in entanglement with the plants of the UAE environment. This highlights the historical significance of a landscape traversed over centuries by pastoral nomads with herds of sheep, goats or camels while also embodying the vast horizon of the non-human. It brings into consciousness the fact that pastoral nomads and seasonal farmers perceived and negotiated the same non-human cosmology of this landscape. Eating and seasonal migration was closely intertwined with seasons, water, mountains, wind, plants, foraging and so on. In such a mindscape/landscape, there is no distinction between human and nature. Hence, Desert is a Forest is not naturalistic because naturalism, as a school of philosophy, emerges from the Western modern perception that dichotomises human and nature or nature and culture without acknowledging the existence of innumerable worldviews where such distinctions do not exist. This naturalism has succinctly homogenised the (human) collective as opposed to ‘nature’ and is meticulously achieved by the capitalist structures whose existence depends on this very ‘nature’, elements of it today have become objects for the sustenance of human subjects. The ‘climatic’ consequences of which are burgeoning every day at devastating scales. How does one grapple and rethink towards a paradigm of a non-dualist world? While there is an urgency for future urban spaces to “rewild” with food forests or common rooftop edible gardens, will the post-industrial human ever comprehend what it means to have non-hierarchical relations with plants, animals, or the landscape as a whole?

Desert is a Forest is an attempt to push for a philosophy beyond the human, encouraging thinking along the lines of embeddedness, entanglement and embodiment of a landscape. It aims to understand agency in the selfhood of the non-human, working towards repopulating our mindscape with animals, seasons, time, history, grazing and blurring the lines between “nature” and “culture”. Reference

Asad, Talad. 1970. The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. London: C.Hurst & Co Publishers
Berger, John. 2009.  Why Look at Animals? London: Penguin Books
Descola, Philippe. 2013.  Beyond Nature and Culture; Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Freud, Sigmund. 2006.  Interpreting Dreams; Translated by J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin Classics
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think : Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press
Ingold, Tim. 2022. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Oxon: Routledge
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

*Special gratitude to a dear friend and anthropologist Dr. Lakshmi Pradeep for her insights and feedback on the text