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This chapter further elaborates upon the concept of ecstasy in practices of popular mysticism introduced in the Prologue and differentiates between practices of “baseline ecstasy” and “individuated mediumship,” as well as highlighting the significance of the contrast between positive ecstasy and negative affliction in ecstatic religious behavior. It examines commonly shared vernacular conceptualizations in both African and Hindu trance-performance practices in Trinidad such as “power,” “manifestation,” “possession,” and “play.” The chapter theorizes the ritual arts of trance as a form of “alter-cultural praxis” and reviews the literature on Afro-Caribbean ludic performance culture in order to better situate the comparative study. It provides an overview of the entire book, including the methodology of controlled comparison utilized.

This chapter seeks to challenge Henri Lefebvre’s conception of nature while extending his understanding of cultural praxis. The project initiated in the previous chapters—to make a case for metropolitan nature as a differentiated unity woven through sensuous praxis—has clear affinities with Lefebvre’s revolutionary project “to extend the boundaries of praxis into aesthetic experience and aesthetic experience into praxis.” If, however, Lefebvre seeks to extend praxis to the environmental qualities of the city, he does so with an impoverished understanding of what constitutes that environment. This is the signal move that Neil Smith performed and that was taken forward in recent writings on urban technonatures and the cyborg city. It is also perhaps the key distinction between Smith’s understanding of the production of space and Lefebvre’s own. The city is not simply a social construction ripped from its natural hinterland and transformed into a terrain over which worldviews compete and are consolidated. Instead, it is a fundamentally socio-natural entity. Recognizing this fact not only counters some of the antinomian aspects of Lefebvre’s conception of nature, but it opens the possibility for a radical environmental praxis embodied within urban interventions. This provides a richer conception of the moment of revolutionary change.

One of the central contributions of Henri Lefebvre is to emphasize the importance of cultural praxis to Marx’s overall vision of a future society. This chapter begins to excavate aspects of this aesthetic critique by demonstrating the importance of the sensuous to Marx’s overall critique of capitalism, his vision of communism, and, crucially, his concept of nature. Deeply influenced by both Epicurus and Feuerbach, Marx posits sensuous human labor at the center of both his epistemological and ontological framework. This position is crucial to the practical materialism he goes on to develop. Thus, reality is understood as “sensuous human activity, practice.” The chapter begins by demonstrating the ways in which sensuous human activity is crucial to the environment of one particular postapartheid informal settlement in South Africa. The laboring acts of women serve to create an ecosystem on which the life of this settlement depends. Riven with injustices, this environment is exposed to the whims of commercial relationships. One particular moment of crisis invokes a fiercely politicized response on the part of local women. The chapter questions how this can be understood to emerge from the women’s situated understandings of the political ecology of the settlement. These understandings, in turn, are related to their sensuous laboring acts.