AR Projects
Below is a conference paper I presented in January titled, "The Power of Words and the Appearance of Lived Space in Navajo Culture".
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Phenomenology as a way to embed meaning back into our relationship with the world pairs nicely with Navajo ritual language use. The Navajo culture places emphasis on one’s relationship with the world, which makes it of particular value to phenomenology, as it strives to relate experiencers with the world before they become separated. My paper addresses Heidegger’s notions of language in his later works and applies language to Husserl’s possibilities for perspectival appearances of objects (the experience of something as something). I will then detail how the Navajo language impacts the perspectival appearances of objects of its speakers and discuss language use as a response to the world and a response to being in the world.
Navajo ritual language seems to be the most significant factor influencing perspectival givenness within their culture. The Navajo have many rituals but all rites are to bless, purify, protect, and care for their community, land, animals, or themselves. I will explain that for Navajo speakers, objects appear as either contributing to or disrupting the original harmony. Objects appear as malleable and changeable. Objects appear as things which Navajo speakers are responsible for nurturing. Objects appear as vulnerable to your language use—if language is used correctly, then objects will flourish, if language is used incorrectly, then objects will suffer. Objects additionally appear to Navajo speakers as intertwined with themselves—everything belongs to the one same thing, and everything was constructed with similar substances. Objects do not appear as things understood separately from one’s own experience of them. This is one possibility among many of how objects appear and is one response to being in the world. I will argue that the Navajo language’s impact on the perspectival appearance of objects allows nature to appear in a more valuable way than other languages or cultures might. The Navajo landscape reveals itself as sacred to the Navajo. Heidegger addresses standing-reserve as one possibility of what things appear as, is one response to the world. An alternative is the perspective of the Navajo culture, in which the world appears as sacred and always already intertwined with human beings. This response to the world is more fruitful than the response of separation or standing-reserve because it allows for more meaningful relationships with the world and allows for a more valuable breadth of human existence than that of standing-reserve. In such a culture, natural landscapes are viewed as integral to human existence. For the Navajo, one is always already in a relationship with Earth; one is intertwined with nature. The relationship with the land and the human is one of reciprocal care and tending. The human being belongs to the Earth; human thought and speech is also Earth’s thought and speech.
In conclusion, this paper, by closely examining Navajo ritual use, sheds a new light on one possibility of how the world might appear to us as embedded with meaning. Navajo language and culture are valuable contributions to phenomenological studies.
