379
Brazil,
3
and the Korowai of Indonesia.
4
Impressively, the Digambara Jain monks
throughout parts of India also remain naked their entire ordained lives, as has been
referenced in earlier chapters, wandering from village to village, never asking for
food, but accepting it in the manner of gowkari, the grazing of a cow, if it is pure
vegetarian cuisine, and depending on the ascetic’s own particular schedule. Taking
one meal per day, though some ascetics fast every other day; while others have
imposed myriad additional scruples. Ultimately, Jain monks may slip into the endof- life discipline of Sallekhana, not so much a suicide as a letting go, for a new
country of the soul. Such select choices test the boundaries of what science calls
natural selection. And the choices are copious ones, from species, to population;
from culture to community; from individual to individual. And if that can be seen to
interfere with conventional natural selection, it alters even more troubling twists for
the idea of human evolution, as scientifically described.
42.2 Shelters and Co-adjacencies
Humanity’s colossal ecological crisis is an explicit function of our architectural and
socially enforced spaces of occupancy, plots of arrogation, the places in which we
choose to live, altering our surroundings, inventing and constructing “our” possessions. This is an entirely ephemeral habitation, obviously, which has only our ancestors, or futurist scenarios and pictorial cosmologies, to cling to, or benefit. Short of
Digambara, or uncontacted, or quasi-uncontacted tribal affiliation, human wildness
of the kind portrayed in the tragic case of Ishi (c.1861–1916), the last member of the
California Yahi people,
5
remains paradoxically embedded in an environmental nostalgia with a rich history. The concept, the individual, was first sentimentally attributed in John Dryden’s play “The Conquest of Granada” (1672)—“I am as free as
nature first made man,/Ere the base laws of servitude began...”—a literary precursor
to Alexander Pope’s reference to a “simple nature,” “a humbler heav’n; Some safer
world in depth of woods embrac’d.”
6
Until one has been homeless in Mumbai, or a coyote in Chicago, or a rubythroated hummingbird frantically storing up calories before migrating across the
Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan, we have no approximate idea what it means to be
wild. The macroevolutionary speciation, mutations, differing phenotypes, traits discernibly heritable, and all the modernist syntheses of developmental biology remain
3 See http://planetdoc.tv/documentary-sanema-tribe-customs-and-traditions.
4 See “Born To Be Wild,” by Amanda Devlin, March 28, 2017, The Sun, https://www.thesun.co.uk/
news/3195004/indonesia-lost-pygmy-tribe-picture/. Accessed April 19, 2020.
5 Fleras, Augie (2006). “Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North
America”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 27 (3): 265–268. doi:https://
doi.org/10.1080/01434630608668780.
6 An Essay on Man; In Epistles to a Friend (Epistle II) (London: Printed for J. Wilford, 1732. See
https://archive.org/details/b3054466x/page/n2/mode/2up.
42.2 Shelters and Co-adjacencies
Brazil,
3
and the Korowai of Indonesia.
4
Impressively, the Digambara Jain monks
throughout parts of India also remain naked their entire ordained lives, as has been
referenced in earlier chapters, wandering from village to village, never asking for
food, but accepting it in the manner of gowkari, the grazing of a cow, if it is pure
vegetarian cuisine, and depending on the ascetic’s own particular schedule. Taking
one meal per day, though some ascetics fast every other day; while others have
imposed myriad additional scruples. Ultimately, Jain monks may slip into the endof- life discipline of Sallekhana, not so much a suicide as a letting go, for a new
country of the soul. Such select choices test the boundaries of what science calls
natural selection. And the choices are copious ones, from species, to population;
from culture to community; from individual to individual. And if that can be seen to
interfere with conventional natural selection, it alters even more troubling twists for
the idea of human evolution, as scientifically described.
42.2 Shelters and Co-adjacencies
Humanity’s colossal ecological crisis is an explicit function of our architectural and
socially enforced spaces of occupancy, plots of arrogation, the places in which we
choose to live, altering our surroundings, inventing and constructing “our” possessions. This is an entirely ephemeral habitation, obviously, which has only our ancestors, or futurist scenarios and pictorial cosmologies, to cling to, or benefit. Short of
Digambara, or uncontacted, or quasi-uncontacted tribal affiliation, human wildness
of the kind portrayed in the tragic case of Ishi (c.1861–1916), the last member of the
California Yahi people,
5
remains paradoxically embedded in an environmental nostalgia with a rich history. The concept, the individual, was first sentimentally attributed in John Dryden’s play “The Conquest of Granada” (1672)—“I am as free as
nature first made man,/Ere the base laws of servitude began...”—a literary precursor
to Alexander Pope’s reference to a “simple nature,” “a humbler heav’n; Some safer
world in depth of woods embrac’d.”
6
Until one has been homeless in Mumbai, or a coyote in Chicago, or a rubythroated hummingbird frantically storing up calories before migrating across the
Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan, we have no approximate idea what it means to be
wild. The macroevolutionary speciation, mutations, differing phenotypes, traits discernibly heritable, and all the modernist syntheses of developmental biology remain
3 See http://planetdoc.tv/documentary-sanema-tribe-customs-and-traditions.
4 See “Born To Be Wild,” by Amanda Devlin, March 28, 2017, The Sun, https://www.thesun.co.uk/
news/3195004/indonesia-lost-pygmy-tribe-picture/. Accessed April 19, 2020.
5 Fleras, Augie (2006). “Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North
America”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 27 (3): 265–268. doi:https://
doi.org/10.1080/01434630608668780.
6 An Essay on Man; In Epistles to a Friend (Epistle II) (London: Printed for J. Wilford, 1732. See
https://archive.org/details/b3054466x/page/n2/mode/2up.
42.2 Shelters and Co-adjacencies