Previously TheoFantastique has engaged various facets of Avatar, including its incorporation of psychedelics and shamanism, its similarities to a new religious movement, utopianism, and its involvement with Dark Green Religion. In regards to the latter element I interacted with the work of Bron Taylor, and with this post I am pleased to mention a new volume, Avatar and Nature Spirituality (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013), edited by Dr. Taylor.

Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron’s film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandoran landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film’s message of ecological interdependence and animistic spirituality. Some were moved to support the efforts of indigenous peoples, who were metaphorically and sympathetically depicted in the film, to protect their cultures and environments. To others, the film was politically, ethically, or spiritually dangerous. Indeed, the global reception to the film was intense, contested, and often confusing.

To illuminate the film and its reception, this book draws on an interdisciplinary team of scholars, experts in indigenous traditions, religious studies, anthropology, literature and film, and post-colonial studies. Readers will learn about the cultural and religious trends that gave rise to the film and the reasons these trends are feared, resisted, and criticized, enabling them to wrestle with their own views about the film and the controversy. Like the film itself, Avatar and Nature Spirituality provides an opportunity for considering afresh the ongoing struggle to determine how we should live on our home planet, and what sorts of political, economic, and spiritual values and practices would best guide us.

Bron Taylor is a professor at the University of Florida and a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany. His books include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010), and he is the editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005) and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. His website is www.brontaylor.com.

Table of Contents for
Avatar and Nature Spirituality, edited by Bron Taylor

PART I BRINGING AVATAR INTO FOCUS

Prologue: Avatar as Rorschach | Bron Taylor

Introduction: The Religion and Politics of Avatar | Bron Taylor

Avatar: Ecorealism and the Blockbuster Melodrama | Stephen Rust

Outer Space Religion and the Ambiguous Nature of Avatar’s Pandora | Thore Bjørnvig

PART II POPULAR RESPONSES

Avatar Fandom, Environmentalism, and Nature Religion | Britt Istoft

Post-Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception | Matthew Holtmeier

Transposing the Conversation into Popular Idiom: The reaction to Avatar in Hawai’i | Rachelle K. Gould, Nicole M. Ardoin, and Jennifer Kamakanipakolonahe’okekai Hashimoto

Watching Avatar from “AvaTar Sands” Land | Randolph Haluza-Delay, Michael P. Ferber, and Tim Wiebe-Neufeld

PART III CRITICAL, EMOTIONAL & SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS

Becoming the “Noble Savage”: Nature Religion and the “Other” in Avatar | Chris Klassen

The Na’vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration | Pat Munday

Calling the Na’vi: Evolutionary Jungian Psychology and Nature Spirits | Bruce MacLennan

Avatar and Artemis: Indigenous Narratives as Neo-Romantic Environmental Ethics | Joy H. Greenberg

Spirituality and Resistance: Avatar Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest | David Landis Barnhill

I See You: Interspecies Empathy and Avatar | Lisa H. Sideris

Knowing Pandora in Sound: Acoustemology and Ecomusicological Imagination in Cameron’s Avatar | Michael B. MacDonald

Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience | Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sörlin

Epilogue: Truth and Fiction in Avatar’s Cosmogony and Nature Religion | Bron Taylor

Afterword: Considering the Legacies of Avatar | Daniel Heath Justice

Contributors

Index

Reviews

“Taylor’s new exciting volume gets at the heart of where most Westerners are engaging religious and spiritual life today: the realm of popular culture. The book’s contributors lead us on a compelling journey through a complex cultural ecology of religion, politics, fan forums, ethics, ecotopian promise, corporate violence, and troubling notions of the ‘native.’ At the end, we emerge with an altered eye, appreciating the power of narrative brought alive through the transformative semiotics of visual culture. Accessible for the uninitiated and yet interesting to the specialist, Avatar and Nature Spirituality is just one of a new generation of books that are shifting the very way we conceive of religion. As traditional congregational studies gather dust, vanguard scholarship that attends to the global ’congregation‘ of mass culture will bring the study of religion into a new era, and this volume contributes to that important turn.”

— Sarah McFarland Taylor, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture, Northwestern University

“If, as ecocinema scholar Adrian Ivakhiv suggests, a film is not only what happens between the dimming and brightening of theater lights, if it is also what happens in our discussions about it, then this collection brilliantly takes the measure of the conversations surrounding the highest grossing blockbuster of all time. Better still, the book draws you back into the dialogue, and asks you to reconsider what you think you know about a film so provocative that is has taken centre stage in the global imagination.”

— Joni Adamson, Arizona State University, co-editor of American Studies, Ecocriticism and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons