**2. Two ways of being in the world2**

Two of the most fundamental ways in which human beings mentally construct the world around them and place themselves within it have been called, following Max Weber, the enchanted and the disenchanted. It is this particular binary that has fascinated and absorbed me for the past two decades and that I have reflected on and written about extensively. I am well aware that the advent of postmodernity has led to the rejection of such binary and essentialist interpretations of reality. At best, people say, such thinking serves as a heuristic device. My argument, however, is precisely that worldviews are heuristic devices that we all have and cannot do without. These two particular characterizations, while originating with Max Weber, have resonated throughout ethnographic history ever since the encounter between the "west" and the

<sup>1</sup> The word "habitus" was coined originally by Aristotle and subsequently adopted by Bourdieu whose name is associated with the empiricist school of philosophy. The habitus is a repository of values and dispositions within the individual that he or she has learned from society, which predisposes him or her to act and react in certain ways to external phenomena. The subconscious nature of the habitus means that social rules, laws, systems, structures, and categories of meaning can only function effectively when they submerge into the habitus, which becomes a template by which everything is filtered and interpreted. The expression "in whom we live and move and have our being" is taken from the book of Acts 17:28 where Paul is describing the relationship with the "unknown God." I use this expression because it emphasizes an epistemology of intersubjective involvement rather than the detachment that is typical of the Cartesian paradigm.

<sup>2</sup> I am using the expression "being in the world" instead of the word "worldview" here because it better expresses what I am trying to convey. "Worldview" implies an objective observer, standing outside the world and looking at it from a distance. This, in turn, is suggestive of Cartesian separateness, which is precisely the paradigm that I am wanting to contrast with its opposite, which is an immersion in and participation with the world. The expression I am using is almost a direct translation of the word Heidegger uses—*dasein*, in his articulation of a phenomenological approach to philosophy. I say almost because in fact the English translation of *dasein* is usually hyphenated as in "being-in-the-world" so that the idea of immersion is further emphasized. These two approaches, being out of the world in order to understand it (Descartes) and being in the world in order to understand it (Heidegger), broadly resonate with a Western as opposed to an indigenous epistemology. For the purposes of this essay, I will be using the terms worldview, lifeway, habitus, being in the world, cosmology, belief, and epistemology interchangeably.

#### *Indigenous Religions as Antidote to the Environmental Crisis: Surveying a Decade of Reflection DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105209*

"south" or the "modern" and the "pre-modern." That there is no one single worldview in the West and that worldviews change and evolve is undeniable. That there are numerous shades of gray in terms of levels of enchantment/disenchantment in between the two poles, especially in pre-modern or so-called "developing" societies, and that the post-modern condition has made space in modern societies for forms of enchantment, is also accepted. It is how the processes of disenchantment work, what happens to our understanding of the world as they evolve, and what we do or do not do to the world around us because of them, that matters. So what are the enchanted and disenchanted worlds.
