Ethics That Matters: African, Caribbean, and African American Sources

Chapter 12: An Ecowomanist Vision

189 Chapter 12 An Ecowomanist Vision .Melanie L. Harris. in THE SPIRITUALITY OF African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse,1 Peter J. Paris presents an overarching argument that an African and African American social ethic rests on the primary value of community . In this essay, I use Paris’s reflection on the interconnectedness between self and community as well as African cosmology as a point of departure for discussing ecowomanism. Ecowomanism is reflective of the second part of Alice Walker’s definition that asserts a womanist quest for “the survival and wholeness of entire people.”2 Moreover, the primacy of community is in keeping with a womanist commitment to establish multiple forms of justice that will promote survival and wholeness in the lives of women and men of African descent in the communities that they call home. Indeed, an ethical imperative to do justice guides the womanist quest for “the survival and wholeness of entire people.” Following an explication of Paris’s discussion of the interdependence of community and African cosmology, I will present an ecowomanist perspective that celebrates the interconnectedness that humans share with and among creation. This ecowomanist perspective simply enlarges what womanist religious thought already affirms and values: the living presence of ancestors and the earth as part of a cosmic community. 190 Melanie L. Harris The Interdependence of Community Community,“the preservation and promotion of community,” is the primary goal that Paris purports to be central to an African and African American social ethic. Paris describes community as an interdependent group consisting of persons who share cultural and ethnic bonds; this group is linked by the shared values they hold as the basis for common moral discourse. Beyond this broad definition, Paris clearly places the meaning of community within the frame of African cosmology as he states that community reaches beyond these rather obvious connections and bridges connections between living persons, the “living dead” (ancestors), the supreme deity, subdeities, and the realms of nature and history. Explaining the continuous flow of life in the African worldview and the deep understanding that “all is sacred,” Paris notes that each of the realms within African cosmology (spirit, nature, history) is interconnected . He points to the ways in which spirit and history are connected by writing about the cyclical process of life that does not end at death; instead, death as a “departure from physical life marks a transition of the human spirit from the state of mortality to that of ancestral immortality .”3 For Paris, the interdependence between the realms of spirit, nature, and history is situated within African and African American cosmological thought. This cosmological thought is thus the basis of African spirituality that undergirds African and African American ethics. African Cosmology Of particular note in Paris’s writings is the ethical import that he attributes to the natural realm because of its sacredness in African cosmology and the stewardship of the earth that such requires. Paris opens chapter 3, “Community: The Goal of Moral Life,” of The Spirituality of African Peoples with reference to the important role that ancestral life plays in the cosmological order and how this in turn affects the shaping of African and African American social ethics. Citing African scholar John Mbiti, Paris’s point of departure is the African religious worldview that insists that to be human is to be in community; this is the case because community is “a sacred phenomenon created by the supreme An Ecowomanist Vision 191 God, protected by the divinities, and governed by ancestral spirits.”4 Indeed, ancestors can be represented in elements of nature that can be used by divinities to create harmony and ethical balance within the cosmological whole. Likewise, in his classic text, Introduction to African Religion , Mbiti sheds additional light on the significance of the natural realm within African cosmology and religious beliefs. The locus of the natural realm is the earth, and the earth is viewed as a “living being”5 in African cosmological thought. This is the case because many natural elements embody the spirit of a divine entity. According to Mbiti, the African cosmology maintains that it is the relationship between the natural and moral order that undergirds harmony in the universe. It is a moral obligation for black peoples to take care of the earth, for ultimate respect for the earth is critical to establishing moral order in the universe. As both Mbiti and...