Narrating Nature

Download or read book Narrating Nature written by Mara Jill Goldman and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people. This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise. Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Download or read book Narrating the Mesh written by Marco Caracciolo and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hierarchical model of human societies’ relations with the natural world is at the root of today’s climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton’s concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena. How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes—from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution—can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters’ mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.

Download or read book Environmental Consciousness written by Stephen Hussey and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the globe, environmental questions feature more and more in today's social and political agendas. In Western countries environmental campaigns target issues at home and abroad. They have a special urgency, which draws in an astonishing range of field campaigners, from young militants to rebel aristocrats. This book examines the roots of contemporary environmental consciousness and action in terms of both popular experience and tradition. The global reach of this book reflects the character of contemporary environmentalism. It examines a geographically and thematically diverse range of case studies, including: British environmental campaigners in the Brazilian rainforest; ecocriticism and literature; the environmental movement in Kazakhstan; and medieval church iconography. The common theme linking each chapter is that environmental consciousness and activism are shaped through people's life stories, and that their memories are shaped not only through individual experience but also through myth, tradition, and collective memory. Containing a wealth of empirical source material, Environmental Consciousness will be invaluable for sociologists and historians alike. It offers a cutting-edge illustration of how narrative and oral history can illuminate our understanding of an uncertain present. Stephen Hussey is a research associate at the School of Education at the University of Cambridge. His previous publications include Childhood in Question and his next publication will be a book for the wider market entitled Headline History. Paul Thompson is research professor in sociology and director of Qualidata at the University of Essex. He is also founder of the National Life Story Collection at the British Library National Sound Archive and founder-editor of Oral History. His previous publications include The Voice of the Past, The Edwardians, and The Work of William Morris.

Download or read book Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics written by Whitney Bauman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, 2009 This book argues that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) sets up a support system for a "logic of domination" toward human and earth others. Conceptually inspired by the work of theologian Catherine Keller and feminist philosopher of the environment Val Plumwood, it follows a genealogical method in examining how the concept of creation out of nothing materializes in the world throughout different periods in the history of the Christian West.

Download or read book Introduction to Nordic Cultures written by Annika Lindskog and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction to Nordic Cultures is an innovative, interdisciplinary introduction to Nordic history, cultures and societies from medieval times to today. The textbook spans the whole Nordic region, covering historical periods from the Viking Age to modern society, and engages with a range of subjects: from runic inscriptions on iron rings and stone monuments, via eighteenth-century scientists, Ibsen’s dramas and turn-of-the-century travel, to twentieth-century health films and the welfare state, nature ideology, Greenlandic literature, Nordic Noir, migration, ‘new’ Scandinavians, and stereotypes of the Nordic. The chapters provide fundamental knowledge and insights into the history and structures of Nordic societies, while constructing critical analyses around specific case studies that help build an informed picture of how societies grow and of the interplay between history, politics, culture, geography and people. Introduction to Nordic Cultures is a tool for understanding issues related to the Nordic region as a whole, offering the reader engaging and stimulating ways of discovering a variety of cultural expressions, historical developments and local preoccupations. The textbook is a valuable resource for undergraduate students of Scandinavian and Nordic studies, as well as students of European history, culture, literature and linguistics.

Download or read book In Amazonia written by Hugh Raffles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

Download or read book Narrative, Social Myth and Reality in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing written by Tudor Balinisteanu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original interdisciplinary analysis of the relations between myth, identity and social reality, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory, harnessed to support an argument firmly located in the area of literary criticism. This analysis yields a fairly extensive reinterpretation of the concept of myth, which is applied to the examination of the relationship between narrative and social reality as represented in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. The main theoretical sources are Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia, Jacques Derrida’s theories of citationality and Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivity. The analysis framework developed in the book uses these theories to create a new way of understanding how literary texts change readers’ worldviews by enticing them to accept alternative possibilities of cultural expression of identity and social order. The texts analysed in this book reconfigure naturalised stories that have become normative and constraining in conveying identities and visions of legitimate social orders. The book’s focus on feminine identities places it alongside feminist analyses of reconstructions of fairy tales, myths or canonical stories that establish what counts as legitimate feminine identity. Studied here for the first time together, the writers whose texts form the interest of this book continue the revisionist work begun by other women writers who engage with the male generated literary, philosophical and humanist tradition. They share a view of narratives as tools for continually negotiating our identities, social worlds and socialisation scenarios. While the high-level theoretical discourse of the first part of the book requires specialised knowledge, the second part of the book, offering close readings of the texts, is both lively and accessible and should engage the interest of the general reader and academic alike. This book is written for all those who are interested in the power words have to hold sway over our inner and outer (social) worlds.