Performance, religious imagination and the play of the land in the study of deep ecology and its practices

In this dissertation I demonstrate that a Performance Hermeneutic methodology can uncover the role(s) of embodied imagination in the processes of emerging religious phenomena. In order to prove this contention, I study the processes in the Deep Ecology movement which imaginatively structure the Deep Ecology worldview and performatively place the bodies of its adherents within that world through ritual, role playing, performance and social action.; I begin by making the case for a Performance Hermeneutic, which is a process of interpretation and understanding based within the various ways and means in which the human body interacts with its environment. I argue that the body itself thinks—that cognition is an activity of the whole body.; Through on-site research as a participant-observer, and occasionally as a facilitator-participant-observe in workshops, rituals and training events, I apply a Performance Hermeneutic to the performative practices of certain persons within the Deep Ecology movement. I argue that Deep Ecology is an emerging religious phenomenon that has arisen as an attempt to articulate and embody the core experience of Deep Ecology practitioners of their relationship with the natural world.; From those experiences I draw the following conclusion: A Performance Hermeneutic operates at the level of the engaged and interconnected imagination. Its value lies in its ability to experience simultaneously both the imaginative creation and externalization of internal worlds and the internalization of how and what the external world impresses upon the human recipient. This suggests that new religions emerge as a descriptive attempt to make sense of what a group of people experience of the external world and how it is that they experience that world. Religion emerges as an imaginatively constructed world whose formal elaboration occurs as an expression of a world-view. The reciprocal nature of this religious imagination reveals itself in the rituals and performances constructed in order to celebrate this world, as well as to reinforce the authenticity of the world-view which purports to describe it.