Landscapes Of Fear

Download or read book Landscapes of Fear written by Yi-Fu Tuan and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To be human is to experience fear, but what is it exactly that makes us fearful? Here is one geographer’s striking exploration of our landscapes of fear as they change throughout our lives and have changed throughout history. Yi-fu Tuan investigates landscapes of the natural environment which are threatening, and landscapes filled with the dark imageries of the mind; fears of drought, flood, famine, and disease, shared by all members of a community, and fears of the particular ghosts which haunt the individual imagination. In this lucidly-written, ground-breaking survey, Professor Tuan delves into many cultures and reaches back into our prehistory to discover what is universal and what is particular in our inheritance of fear. Starting with fear in animals, he raises and explores a variety of questions: What is specifically human about fear? Is there or has there ever been a “fearless” society? Professor Tuan examines the most specific forms fear takes in the mind of the child, among hunters and agriculturists, inside the walls of a medieval Chinese city, among Navaho Indians and American immigrants. He explores the ways in which authorities create landscapes of terror to instill fear in their own populations; and he probes that most basic of all contradictions between the need for human security and the fear of human nature. Professor Tuan particularly emphasizes how, in coping with fears of enemies, strangers, the insane, wolves, wind, witches, mountains, dragons, rain, or the terror that the universe itself might crumble, humans respond adventurously by creating “shelters,” ranging from fairy tales to cosmological myths. We watch as human beings continually draw and redraw their “circles of safety,” never feeling entirely at peace within them.

Download or read book The Nature of Fear written by Daniel T. Blumstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading expert in animal behavior takes us into the wild to better understand and manage our fears. Fear, honed by millions of years of natural selection, kept our ancestors alive. Whether by slithering away, curling up in a ball, or standing still in the presence of a predator, humans and other animals have evolved complex behaviors in order to survive the hazards the world presents. But, despite our evolutionary endurance, we still have much to learn about how to manage our response to danger. For more than thirty years, Daniel Blumstein has been studying animals’ fear responses. His observations lead to a firm conclusion: fear preserves security, but at great cost. A foraging flock of birds expends valuable energy by quickly taking flight when a raptor appears. And though the birds might successfully escape, they leave their food source behind. Giant clams protect their valuable tissue by retracting their mantles and closing their shells when a shadow passes overhead, but then they are unable to photosynthesize, losing the capacity to grow. Among humans, fear is often an understandable and justifiable response to sources of threat, but it can exact a high toll on health and productivity. Delving into the evolutionary origins and ecological contexts of fear across species, The Nature of Fear considers what we can learn from our fellow animals—from successes and failures. By observing how animals leverage alarm to their advantage, we can develop new strategies for facing risks without panic.

Download or read book Landscapes of Fear written by Patrick Hoenig and published by Zubaan Books. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the findings of a comparative research project, this volume tackles a set of intricate questions about the workings of impunity in India. Why does the world's largest democracy condone systematic violations of human rights in its periphery? How do victims of abuse and survivors of sexual violence end up being denied justice? What do those on the margins--those with the wrong sex, wrong identity markers, wrong political leanings--tell us about violence by state and non-state actors? Bringing together senior academics, civil society leaders and fresh voices from the regions, the volume offers analysis--contextual, structural and gendered--and breaks new conceptual ground on the underbelly of 'India Shining'. The volume contains testimonies that were collected during fieldwork in four Indian states.

Download or read book Fear, Space and Urban Planning written by Simone Tulumello and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the phenomenon of urban fear – the increasing anxiety over crime and violence in Western cities despite their high safety – with a view to developing a comprehensive, critical, exploratory theory of fear, space, and urban planning that unravels the paradoxes of their mutual relations. By focusing especially on the southern European cities of Palermo and Lisbon, the book also aims to expand upon recent studies on urban geopolitics, enriching them from the perspective of ordinary, as opposed to global, cities. Readers will find enlightening analysis of the ways in which urban fear is (re)produced, including by misinformative discourses on security and fear and the political construction of otherness as a means of exclusion. The spatialization of fear, e.g., through fortification, privatization, and fragmentation, is explored, and the ways in which urban planning is informed by and has in turn been shaping urban fear are investigated. A concluding chapter considers divergent potential futures and makes a call for action. The book will appeal to all with an interest in whether, and to what extent, the production of ‘fearscapes’, the contemporary landscapes of fear, constitutes an emergent urban political economy.

Download or read book Landscape and Power, Second Edition written by William John Thomas Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-04-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text considers landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identities. This edition adds a new preface and five new essays.

Download or read book Cosmos & Hearth written by Yi-fu Tuan and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality - world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict - from riots in U.S. cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the "cosmopolitan hearth," that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one's own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being "at home in the cosmos."

Download or read book Gothic Travel Through Haunted Landscaphb written by Lucie Armitt and published by Anthem Studies in Gothic Liter. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique and transformative perspective on the relationship between fear and recurring cultural preoccupations from the late eighteenth century to the present, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehension produced by various modes of modern transport and unknown/unknowable terrain. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms - tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the 'armchair tourist' or reader - as they encounter fascinating, strange and often disconcerting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people, places and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to 'home' ground. Climates of Fear reveals the persistent ways in which Gothic narratives of travel confront fears about the environment, surveillance, (im)migration and the foreign. These abiding concerns speak loudly to the present time, however, when the encroachments on our immediate surroundings - from climate change, digital communication and geopolitical dislocation - seem at once remote and intimate, invisible yet urgent. Thus the book also asks whether recent portrayals of Gothic journeys now pose different questions to the reader.