We see ourselves and the distant others as occupying the same risky, immune-compromised spaces
Inhabited lands, as the geographers term them, are ecumene. The awkward sounding term comes from the Greek “oecumene”, which meant the known world, and later the ‘civilised’ world, effectively banishing the rest of the globe to the category of the ‘barbaric’.
There are industrial, agricultural and other types of ecumene. It was later adapted to Christian beliefs and to signify the united Church. The ecumene is a geographical idiom, but its cultural effects and constructions move well beyond the discipline.
There is a strong imaginative aspect to the ecumene, one that escapes our attention. Fairs, exhibitions, festivities around national events are modes of signalling to the inhabitants of a place that are all together, bonded in a common, shared identity, in a particular geographical and cultural space.
When in Victorian England, for example, the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” (also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition) was held in London in 1877, objects and manufactures from different parts of Britain’s empire were brought, catalogued, showcased in booths for visitors to see. Among its visitors were Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin and the Brontës. As a mode of bringing the Empire home, the Exhibition was an unparalleled achievement, for the visitor (English men and women) could stand and admire an Indian or Burmese artefact even though they had never been to those regions. This exhibition, as the critic Carol Breckenridge argued, produced the Victorian ecumene that emphasised Britain as an imperial power, controlling the lives and fortunes of distant inhabited spaces such as India. The colony was also a part of the “home”.
These staged events – our national festival and parades are cases in point – are necessary tools in the making of an imagined ecumene, which then enables the cultural and political functioning of the nation-state. We imagine different and distant parts of the country as integrated with ourselves, we imagine people who are culturally different from us, still tethered to us in some form of a felt community.
The imagined ecumene, reiterated through tableaus from various States, and the ‘festival of India’ kind of national-level events that are devoted, at first sight, to artistic variety and splendour, are in effect ways of telling us: these too, are you.
With technological advances, we perhaps inhabit an ecumene whose contours and features may only be imagined as pixels, graphs and numbers on some screen. A nation-state whose people are linked together through the vast network of data that crisscross from Amazon buyers with your shared tastes to FB’s face-mapping and face-matching constitute the modern ecumene. While at once a more diffused ecumene, because the spaces of habitation could literally be any-place, the sense of connectivity and connectedness – hotly contested by many, of course – is an irreducible component of how we live now. Information, even unwanted, links us.
That said, let us retrace steps briefly, to the photograph of the earth taken from outside: the famous one of Earth rising above the moon taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968 and the ‘Blue Marble’ photograph of 7 December 1972 by the Apollo 17 crew travelling to the moon, showing the entire globe for the first time, as seen from outer space. For the first time, humanity was able to imagine the earth in its entirety.
Environmentalists were quick to see the value of these photographs as a means of producing an imagined ecumene of the earth itself. The UN document, Our Common Future (the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), put it bluntly:
‘From space, we see a small and fragile ball dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils. Humanity’s inability to fit its doings into that pattern is changing planetary systems, fundamentally.’
As the critic Ursula Heise puts it in her book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global: “the enormous appeal of the image lay precisely in its suggestion of a unified and balanced world” – an imagined, global ecumene.
Admittedly, both the informational ecumene of the current age and the ‘Blue Marble’ ecumene of the late 20th century are technologically dependent, and therefore fraught with ideological and political issues. Notwithstanding these issues, the undeniable sense we get of being linked, for better or for worse, in a common (if uneven) future is a significant one.
Through the pandemic, we have been treated to stats on mortality and morbidity rates, the rate of vaccination, the erosion of economic stability, in different parts of the world, and our own nation-state. We have been introduced to diverse modes of dealing with the pandemic, the social distress it has produced and the role of the state in different parts of the world. The arithmetical discourse around the pandemic contested for space with the economic one of alarmism and financial contagion, and apocalypticism.
The revival of texts such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Stephen King’s The Stand, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and other end-of-humanity works from different literary cultures and languages also suggested, to the astute reader, the potentially or actually pathologised ecumene we all occupy, with differing degrees of vulnerability and support.
The pandemic’s geographical and cultural spread has demolished the myth of cultural-geographical isolates, borders and safe spaces. Thus, we all now recognise, even if we ignore the apocalyptic tone of public discourse, that it is possible to see ourselves and the distant others as occupying the same risky, immune-compromised spaces: a pathologised global ecumene.
If we align this current sense with the sentimental ‘connections’ produced by the ‘Blue Marble’ photograph, we are able to discern how the world has changed. The fragility of the planet in ‘Blue Marble’ is now tied in to the tangible precarity of infected persons and deaths across the planet. That is, if the ‘Blue Marble’ image communicated a sense of planetary fragility, with the stats coming to us thick and fast in the pandemic, this fragility has been demonstrated any number of times. One is a photograph, the other a set of numbers: both communicate the same planetary vulnerability.
The pathologised ecumene is our living space. As of now, it is the only home we have. The question, to paraphrase Hemingway, is it or is it not, still worth fighting for?
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
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