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“privileged” voices to be heard. This requires constructing (or empowering) voices from a “position that enables it to spot distortions, mystifications, and colonizing and totalizing tendencies within other discourses.”31
One way of accomplishing this, and the means through which postmodern feminists establish a relationship with the ecofeminist and deep ecology movements, is to structure a contextual discourse in a place where tribal myth and ritual might be actualized:
The effect of totalizing language is to assimilate the world to it. Totalizing language provides an abstract understanding that cuts through individual differences when these are irrelevant to its purposes. Nested, logically related concepts are employed to draw the idiosyncratic up into language and give it a place in its schema of the real. Contextual discourse is not fundamentally concerned with issues of overall coherence. Or, rather, the kind of overall coherence for which it strives is different: a mosaic of language which serves as a tool of many purposes at once. In the life of a tribal community, for example, it must articulate a sense of those processes which bind the community together and to the land; and it must do this in a language which functions effectively to call forth appropriate responses. It must provide a means whereby individuals can come into their own in nonrepressive ways; yet, individuals must be articulated in a language that makes these individuals intelligible to the community. Culturally understood conceptions of the self, that is to say, must come to articulate individual experience without being imposed on individuals in a way that sets up psychic splits. The language must also articulate a process of human interaction with the land which ensure that health both of the land and community. Contextualized language is turned to quite specific situations and forgoes the kind of totalizing coherence with which we have been so preoccupied in the modern world.32
Under such a scenario, Jim Cheney is correct to point out the narrative itself becomes the key. However, as he notes, “it is a narrative grounded in geography rather than in a linear, essentialized self.”33
Bioregionalism, understood through the idea of narrative, once again has much more in common with Native American than Christian or western thought:
The monotheistic overlay, the narrative of a totalizing history, a salvation history rooted in the beyond of a father god distinct from his creation, is a rejection of precisely those elements which make mythical image bearers of health, images which gather to themselves knowledge of place and its health, community and the dynamics of community health – all woven together in a narrative that instructs us by locating us in a moral space in which moral imperatives are present to the community with the force and presence of reality, of fact. The mythic images and narratives which gather to themselves knowledge of place and community and the health of each must be free of the influence of such world-denying and self-truncating projects so that they can be responsive to world and self. In addition, they must be rich and complex enough to articulate an understanding of both self and world and to weave them together into a unity which understanding of self and community is an understanding of the place in which life is lived out and in which an understanding of place is an understanding of self and community.34
The goal is to attack the patriarchal societies that realize totalizing and essentializing discourse by developing bio-regionally constructed selves and communities in a “storied residence.”
In a “storied residence,” the landscape would actually function as a metaphor for the self and the community by “speaking” to people in a narrative that provides not “one true story certified by a foundationalist epistemology,” but through the possibility of being freed from any single, totalizing language. Meditating on the role of land and understanding nature as