Photo by: T. K. Rex “Air Spirit”

The Breath of the Dancing Earth: Biophilia, Eco-Feminist Ritual, and the Body as Ecological Knowledge in South Asian Performance Traditions

Dr. Arathi Anil

Guest Faculty of English, Pondicherry University

Abstract

This paper argues that South Asian ritual and performance traditions offer a living archive of what Erich Fromm (1973) termed biophilia, the passionate love of life and of all that is alive, and that this archive holds urgent relevance for contemporary ecological thought and practice. Drawing on eco-feminist theory, performance studies, and postcolonial ecology, the paper examines three interconnected sites where the biophilic impulse is enacted through embodied ritual performance in South Asian cultural contexts: the Theyyam traditions of Northern Kerala, in which performers become living vessels of ecological deities who embody the interdependence of human and non-human life; the Chipko-inspired eco-feminist performance practices that emerged from women’s environmental movements in the Indian Himalayas; and contemporary South Asian eco-art interventions that deploy the moving body as a medium for ecological grief, resistance, and reimagination. Against the grain of dominant ecological discourse, which tends to frame environmental crisis as a problem of knowledge (we know what we should do but fail to act), the paper proposes that these performance traditions enact a different epistemology altogether, one in which ecological knowing is not cognitive but kinaesthetic, not propositional but embodied, not individual but relational. The paper introduces the concept of ‘somatic ecology’ to describe this mode of knowing, arguing that the dancing, ritualising body in South Asian performance traditions constitutes a form of ecological intelligence that Western environmental thought has largely failed to recognise or theorise. In dialogue with Fromm’s biophilia and contemporary eco-psychology, the paper contends that the psycho-emotional paralysis at the heart of the ecological crisis cannot be overcome by more information, better arguments, or stronger policy alone, but requires the cultivation of embodied, affective, and relational capacities that ritual performance traditions have sustained for centuries.

Keywords: biophilia, eco-feminism, ritual performance, somatic ecology, Theyyam, South Asia, body politics, ecological grief, embodied knowledge

Introduction: The Paradox of Knowing and Not Acting

We know. That is the terrible, paralysing truth at the centre of our ecological predicament. We know that the ice is melting, that the forests are burning, that the species are vanishing, that the waters are rising. We know, with a specificity and certainty unprecedented in human history, exactly what is happening to the living systems on which all life depends. And yet we do not act, or we act inadequately, or we act in ways that contradict what we know. Erich Fromm (1973), writing half a century before “climate psychology” became a recognisable field, understood this paradox with remarkable clarity. For Fromm, the failure to act in defense of life was not a failure of knowledge but a failure of orientation, a failure rooted in what he called necrophilia, the love of the dead, the mechanical, the controllable, which he saw as the dominant psychic orientation of industrial civilisation. Against necrophilia, Fromm proposed biophilia: “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group” (Fromm, 1973, p. 366).

This paper takes Fromm’s biophilia as a point of departure for an inquiry that moves in an unexpected direction: toward the ritual performance traditions of South Asia. My central argument is that these traditions, far from being archaic survivals or exotic curiosities, constitute a living archive of biophilic practice, a repertoire of embodied techniques for cultivating what Fromm described as the love of life. They do so not through doctrine, argument, or information but through the body itself: through movement, rhythm, breath, trance, and the ritualised enactment of the interdependence between human and non-human life. In a moment when the dominant responses to ecological crisis remain trapped within the cognitive and the propositional, within the production of more knowledge, more data, more alarming reports, these traditions offer something different and, I will argue, something necessary: an epistemology of the body that knows the earth not as an object to be studied or managed but as a living presence to be danced with, breathed with, and mourned.

I introduce the concept of ‘somatic ecology’ to name this mode of knowing. Somatic ecology, as I develop it here, describes a form of ecological intelligence that is generated through and held within the moving, breathing, sensing body, rather than in the reasoning mind alone. It is the knowledge that arises when a Theyyam performer in Kerala enters trance and becomes, for the duration of the ritual, the living body of a forest deity; when Himalayan women embrace trees with their own bodies to prevent their felling; when a contemporary eco-artist dances grief for a dying river. These are not metaphors for ecological awareness. They are practices of ecological knowing that operate through registers, the kinaesthetic, the affective, the relational, that Western environmental thought has largely ignored.

Fromm’s Biophilia and the Limits of Ecological Rationalism

Fromm’s concept of biophilia, developed most fully in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), offers a psychoanalytic and social-theoretical framework for understanding both the orientation toward life that ecological survival requires and the orientation away from life, the necrophilic tendency, that characterises much of modern industrial civilisation. For Fromm, biophilia was not merely a preference or a sentiment but a fundamental character orientation: a way of being in the world that is attracted to growth, complexity, movement, and the unpredictable vitality of living things. Necrophilia, its opposite, is drawn to control, order, certainty, and the reduction of life to mechanism. Fromm saw industrial capitalism as a system that systematically cultivated necrophilic orientations: through the abstraction of labour, the commodification of nature, the replacement of living relationships with mechanical processes, and the substitution of having for being.

What makes Fromm’s framework so valuable for contemporary ecological thought is its insistence that the crisis is not primarily one of knowledge but of character, not of what we think but of who we are and how we feel. This insight resonates powerfully with the emerging field of climate psychology, which has begun to document the affective and psycho-emotional dimensions of ecological inaction: the anxiety, grief, guilt, numbness, and denial that shape human responses to environmental catastrophe (Hickman et al., 2021; Pihkala, 2020). Yet Fromm goes further than most contemporary climate psychologists in locating these affective responses not merely in individual psychology but in the social and economic structures that shape character formation at a civilisational level.

The implication for ecological praxis is profound. If the ecological crisis is rooted not in ignorance but in the necrophilic character structures produced by industrial civilisation, then the response it demands is not more information but a transformation of orientation: a reawakening of biophilia, of the passionate love of life. The question then becomes: where do we find the resources, the practices, the techniques for cultivating biophilia in a civilisation organised around its suppression? It is here that I turn to South Asian ritual performance traditions, which, I argue, have sustained biophilic practices over centuries through embodied techniques of ecological relation that are largely invisible to Western ecological thought.

Somatic Ecology: Toward a Theory of Embodied Ecological Knowledge

The concept of somatic ecology that I propose draws on three bodies of scholarship. The first is the phenomenological tradition in performance and dance studies, particularly the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2011), who has argued that movement is the primordial form of human meaning-making, preceding and grounding all other modes of cognition. For Sheets-Johnstone, the body does not merely express ideas that originate elsewhere; it thinks through movement. This insight, applied to the domain of ecological knowledge, suggests that there are forms of ecological understanding that can only be generated and held in the moving body: knowledge of interdependence, of rhythm, of the relational dynamics between living systems, that is literally embodied rather than abstractly conceptualised.

The second is eco-feminist theory, particularly the tradition that links the domination of nature to the domination of women and other marginalised subjects. Vandana Shiva’s (1988) concept of “maldevelopment,” which describes how Western-model development systematically destroys both ecological and feminine principles of sustenance and care, provides a crucial framework for understanding why the biophilic traditions I examine here have been sustained primarily by women and by communities marginalised within dominant social hierarchies. The Chipko women who embraced trees, the Adivasi communities who perform ecological rituals, the Dalit women whose labour sustains the rice paddies and waterways of South Asia, these are not incidental participants in ecological knowledge. They are its primary custodians, and their marginalisation within dominant knowledge systems is inseparable from the marginalisation of the embodied, relational, and affective modes of knowing that their practices enact.

The third body of scholarship is postcolonial ecology, which has critiqued the Eurocentrism of mainstream environmentalism and has insisted on the recognition of non-Western ecological epistemologies. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier’s (1997) concept of “environmentalism of the poor,” which describes ecological movements rooted in the material struggles of marginalised communities rather than in middle-class preservationism, provides a framework for understanding how the performance traditions I examine are embedded in living struggles over land, water, forests, and the conditions of survival.

Somatic ecology, drawing on these three traditions, names the form of ecological knowledge that is generated through the ritualised, moving, sensing body in relation to the living world. It is not anti-intellectual; it does not reject scientific knowledge or rational analysis. Rather, it insists that these cognitive modes are insufficient on their own, that the transformation of orientation that ecological survival demands requires the cultivation of embodied capacities, the capacity to feel the interconnection of living systems in one’s own body, to grieve ecological loss somatically, and to enact, through ritual performance, the relational bonds between human and non-human life that industrial civilisation has severed.

Theyyam: The Deity Dances the Forest into Being

The Theyyam traditions of Northern Kerala provide a remarkable case study in somatic ecology. Theyyam is a ritual performance form practised primarily in the Malabar region of Kerala, in which performers, typically from Dalit and Adivasi communities, undergo elaborate costuming, face-painting, and ritual preparation before entering a state of trance in which they become, for the duration of the performance, the living embodiment of a deity. There are over 400 recognised Theyyam forms, many of which are associated with ecological deities: spirits of the forest, the river, the snake, the tree, the mountain. When a Theyyam performer embodies Muthappan, the deity of the forest and the river, or Nagakanni, the serpent goddess, the ritual enacts a relationship between human and non-human life that is not representational but ontological. The performer does not symbolise the forest; for the duration of the ritual, the performer is the forest, speaking, dancing, and breathing as the living earth.

Several features of Theyyam are significant for the concept of somatic ecology. First, the ecological knowledge enacted through Theyyam is irreducibly embodied. It cannot be extracted from the performing body and rendered as propositional knowledge without losing its essential character. The knowledge that the Theyyam performer holds, the felt sense of being inhabited by a non-human presence, of moving as the forest moves, of breathing as the earth breathes, is a form of knowing that exists only in the body and only in the moment of performance. This is not a deficiency; it is a different epistemological mode, one that privileges relation, affect, and embodiment over abstraction, distance, and control.

Second, Theyyam is performed by communities that have been historically marginalised within the Hindu caste system, primarily Dalit and Adivasi communities whose relationship to the land is one of direct dependence and intimate knowledge. The ecological wisdom encoded in Theyyam is thus inseparable from the social position of its custodians: it is knowledge held by those who live closest to the earth, whose bodies bear the marks of both ecological intimacy and social oppression. The Brahminical tradition that dominates much of Hindu religious and cultural authority has historically devalued Theyyam as a “lower” form of worship; its ecological dimensions have been correspondingly invisible to dominant scholarly frameworks.

Third, Theyyam enacts a cosmology of interdependence that is profoundly biophilic in Fromm’s sense. The ritual does not position the human as master or manager of the natural world but as one element within a web of living relationships that includes deities, ancestors, animals, trees, rivers, and the earth itself. The Theyyam performance space, the kavu or sacred grove, is typically a patch of undisturbed forest that has been preserved precisely because of its ritual significance. The ecological conservation function of these sacred groves, documented by scholars including Gadgil and Vartak (1976) and Chandran and Hughes (1997), is not incidental to the ritual but inseparable from it: the grove is preserved because the deity dwells there, and the deity is danced into being because the grove sustains the community. Ritual performance and ecological preservation are, in this framework, two aspects of a single practice of biophilic relation.

Embracing Trees: Chipko and the Eco-Feminist Body

If Theyyam enacts somatic ecology through trance and divine embodiment, the Chipko movement of the 1970s enacts it through a different but equally powerful modality: the direct, physical embrace of the living tree by the human body. The Chipko movement, which emerged in the Garhwal Himalayas in 1973 when village women wrapped their bodies around trees to prevent their felling by commercial loggers, has become one of the most iconic images of ecological resistance in the global imagination. Yet the significance of Chipko as a practice of somatic ecology has been undertheorised.

What is striking about Chipko, from the perspective of this paper, is that the women’s resistance took the form not of argument, petition, or political negotiation but of bodily embrace. The women placed their own bodies between the axe and the tree, creating a physical bond between human flesh and living wood that made violence against the forest simultaneously violence against the human body. This was not a merely strategic choice, though it was strategically effective. It was a somatic enactment of the ecological truth that the women’s lives and the lives of the trees were materially interdependent: the trees held the soil that sustained the fields that fed the families that held the community together. The women’s embrace of the trees was, in this sense, not a symbolic gesture but a truthful one: an embodied articulation of a relationship of mutual dependence that the logic of commercial extraction had rendered invisible.

Vandana Shiva (1988) has argued that the Chipko women were enacting a “feminine principle” of sustenance and care that Western-model development had systematically devalued and destroyed. While Shiva’s framework has been critiqued for its tendency to essentialise both femininity and indigeneity (Agarwal, 1992; Jackson, 1993), its core insight remains valuable: that the ecological knowledge held by the Chipko women was not academic or theoretical but practical, embodied, and relational, generated through generations of intimate labour with the living world. The women knew the trees not as timber resources or carbon sinks but as living presences with which they shared a history of mutual sustenance. Their embrace was a performance of this knowledge, a ritual act that made visible a relationship that the economic logic of extraction had rendered invisible.

Dancing Grief, Breathing Resistance: Contemporary Eco-Art Interventions

The biophilic traditions of Theyyam and Chipko find contemporary expression in a growing body of South Asian eco-art practice that deploys the moving body as a medium for ecological grief, resistance, and reimagination. The work of the Chennai-based dancer and choreographer Anita Ratnam, who has created performance pieces addressing the ecological devastation of South India’s coastline following the 2004 tsunami and the ongoing destruction of wetland ecosystems, exemplifies an approach in which classical Indian dance vocabulary is mobilised to articulate ecological loss in registers that go beyond the informational or the argumentative. Ratnam’s performances do not tell audiences about ecological destruction; they enact it somatically, using the body’s capacity for grief, disorientation, and longing to create affective experiences that bypass the cognitive defences that typically insulate audiences from ecological reality.

Similarly, the Bengaluru-based collective Maraa has developed a practice of “ecological theatre” in which communities affected by water scarcity, deforestation, and industrial pollution create performance works that articulate their experiences through movement, song, and ritual. These performances function not as representations of ecological crisis directed at external audiences but as communal rituals of mourning, solidarity, and resistance enacted by and for the communities themselves. They are, in Fromm’s terms, practices of biophilia: occasions for the communal cultivation of the love of life in conditions that systematically undermine it.

What these contemporary practices share with the older traditions of Theyyam and Chipko is a commitment to embodied ecological knowing: to the idea that the crisis of the living world cannot be adequately addressed through the production of more information, more policy, more rational argument alone, but requires the cultivation of capacities, affective, kinaesthetic, relational, that are held in the body and activated through performance. They enact, in different registers and different historical moments, the somatic ecology that this paper theorises: a form of ecological intelligence that knows the earth not as an object of analysis but as a living body with which the human body is inextricably entangled.

Conclusion: Toward a Biophilic Future

Fromm (1973) insisted that biophilia and necrophilia are not fixed destinies but orientations that can be cultivated or suppressed by the social, economic, and cultural structures within which human beings live. The ecological crisis, understood through Fromm’s framework, is not simply a crisis of carbon emissions or biodiversity loss but a crisis of orientation: a civilisational drift toward the necrophilic love of the dead, the mechanical, and the controllable, at the expense of the biophilic love of the living, the complex, and the unpredictable. The question that confronts us is not merely how to reduce emissions or preserve habitats but how to reawaken biophilia, how to cultivate the passionate love of life in a civilisation that has systematically suppressed it.

This paper has argued that South Asian ritual performance traditions offer resources for this reawakening that are both ancient and urgently contemporary. The somatic ecology enacted through Theyyam, Chipko, and contemporary eco-art practices constitutes a form of biophilic knowledge that Western environmental thought has largely failed to recognise: knowledge that is held in the moving body rather than the reasoning mind, generated through ritual relation rather than scientific observation, and sustained by communities, particularly women and marginalised castes, whose intimate, embodied relationship with the living world has been devalued by the very structures that have produced the ecological crisis.

To recognise these traditions is not to romanticise them, nor to suggest that they can simply be transplanted into other contexts. It is to insist that the repertoire of human responses to ecological crisis is far wider than the dominant discourse of information, policy, and technology suggests, and that the shape of a survivable future may depend on our capacity to learn from practices of embodied ecological relation that have sustained life for centuries. The stories we tell each other about how to survive, the stories that this journal’s call for papers so movingly invites, will need to be not only told but danced, breathed, and ritually enacted. Biophilia, as Fromm understood and as these traditions embody, is not an idea. It is a practice. And it begins, as all life begins, in the body.

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