- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Into the Wildness
- 1 Wildfire News
- 2 Conundrum and Continuum
- 3 No Word
- 4 The Edge of Anomaly
- 5 Order versus Wildness
- 6 Biomimicry
- 7 Notes on “Up at the Basin”
- 8 Listening to the Forest
- 9 The Working Wilderness
- 10 The Hummingbird and the Red Cap
- 11 Losing Wildness for the Sake of Wilderness
- 12 Inhabiting the Alaskan Wild
- 13 Wilderness in Four Parts, or Why We Cannot Mention My Great-Grandfather’s Name
- 14 Wild Black Margins
- 15 Healing the Urban Wild
- 16 Building the Civilized Wild
- 17 Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side
- 18 Toward an Urban Practice of the Wild
- 19 The Whiskered God of Filth
- 20 The Akiing Ethic
- 21 On the Wild Edge in Iceland
- 22 The Story Isn’t Over
- 23 Cultivating the Wild
- 24 Earth Island
- Epilogue Wild Partnership
- Permissions
- About the Contributors
- Index
The Whiskered God of Filth
The Whiskered God of Filth
- Chapter:
- (p.189) 19 The Whiskered God of Filth
- Source:
- Wildness
- Author(s):
Rob Dunn
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
This chapter highlights cultural systems in Ghana in which beliefs about animal gods have led to the preservation of certain areas of forest habitat. These sacred groves, scattered across West Africa, are the domain of deified black-and-white colobus monkeys and are “spiritual connections to wildness” as well as a functional, traditional means of land conservation. The chapter discusses other types of “groves” in which vital ecosystem processes are preserved due to their sacred status. The chapter notes the vital recycling role that decomposers play, concluding with the assertion that if any creatures are worthy of god-like status, it is these decomposers—such as catfish, vultures, maggots, termites, dung beetles, bacteria, and fungi—through whom everything is reborn and becomes wild again.
Keywords: sacred groves, black-and-white colobus monkeys, Ghana, West Africa, decomposition, wild rebirth, animal gods
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Into the Wildness
- 1 Wildfire News
- 2 Conundrum and Continuum
- 3 No Word
- 4 The Edge of Anomaly
- 5 Order versus Wildness
- 6 Biomimicry
- 7 Notes on “Up at the Basin”
- 8 Listening to the Forest
- 9 The Working Wilderness
- 10 The Hummingbird and the Red Cap
- 11 Losing Wildness for the Sake of Wilderness
- 12 Inhabiting the Alaskan Wild
- 13 Wilderness in Four Parts, or Why We Cannot Mention My Great-Grandfather’s Name
- 14 Wild Black Margins
- 15 Healing the Urban Wild
- 16 Building the Civilized Wild
- 17 Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side
- 18 Toward an Urban Practice of the Wild
- 19 The Whiskered God of Filth
- 20 The Akiing Ethic
- 21 On the Wild Edge in Iceland
- 22 The Story Isn’t Over
- 23 Cultivating the Wild
- 24 Earth Island
- Epilogue Wild Partnership
- Permissions
- About the Contributors
- Index
