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Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing critically engages with the major East Asian cultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices that influence environmental consciousness in the twenty-first century. This volume examines key thinkers and aspects of Daoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, indigenous, animistic, and neo-Confucianist thought. With a particular focus on animistic perspectives on environmental healing and environmental consciousness, the contributors also engage with media studies (eco-cinema), food studies, critical animal studies, biotechnology, and the material sciences.
Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities is a pioneering text that examines the ideas about social ecology and communalism behind the evolving political structures in the Kurdish region. The collection evaluates practical green projects, including the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, Jinwar women’s eco-village, food sovereignty in a solidarity economy, environmental defenders in Iranian Kurdistan, and Make Rojava Green Again. Contributors also critically reflect on such contested themes as Alevi nature beliefs, anti-dam demonstrations, human-rights law and climate change, the Gezi Park protests, and forest fires. Throughout this volume, the contributors consider the formidable challenges to the Kurdish initiatives, such as state repression, damaged infrastructure, and oil dependency. Nevertheless, contributors assert that the West has much to learn from the Kurdish ecological paradigm, which offers insight into social movement debates about development and decolonization.
Humanity is struggling with the environmental destruction and social change caused by modern technologies like nuclear reactors. Politicians, scientists, and business leaders all too often revert to a tried and tested set of solutions that fails to grasp the wicked nature of the problem. Eschewing the problem-solving approach that dominates the nuclear energy debate, Anna Volkmar suggests that the only intelligent way to account for the inherent complexity of nuclear technology is not by trying to resolve it but to muddle through it. Through in-depth analyses of contemporary visual art, Volkmar demonstrates how art can suggest ways to muddle through these issues intelligently and ethically. This book is recommended for students and scholars of art history, anthropology, social science, ecocriticism, and philosophy.
Departing from a persisting current in Western thought, which conceives of time in the abstract, and often reflects upon death as occupying a space at life's margins, this book begins from position that it is in fact through the material and perishable world that we experience time. As such, it is with death and our encounters with it, that form the basis of human conceptions of time. Presenting rich, interdisciplinary empirical studies of death rituals and practices across the globe, from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Taming Time, Timing Death explores the manner in which social technologies and rituals have been and are implemented to avoid, delay or embrace death, or communicate with the dead, thus informing and manifesting humans' understanding of time. It will therefore be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, philosophy, sociology and social theory, human geography and religion.
The Low-Carbon Good Life is about how to reverse and repair four interlocking crises arising from modern material consumption: the climate crisis, growing inequality, biodiversity loss and food-related ill-health. Across the world today and throughout history, good lives are characterised by healthy food, connections to nature, being active, togetherness, personal growth, a spiritual framework and sustainable consumption. A low-carbon good life offers opportunities to live in ways that will bring greater happiness and contentment. Slower ways of living await. A global target of no more than one tonne of carbon per person would allow the poorest to consume more and everyone to find our models...
The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the new geological epoch, the ‘Age of Humans’. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed ...
Contesting Environmental Imaginaries foregrounds a question central to humanistic environmental studies: How is nature to be perceived and understood in a time of global environmental crisis? A challenge was issued to imagine counter natures, past or present, casting nature as a normative concept into productive relief. One ambition was to highlight shifting perspectives on nature and the environment that may help account for the rise of the environmental humanities; another was to invite challenges to orthodoxies, including those that animate this burgeoning field. Contributions emerged from the study areas of Environmental History, Ecocriticism, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Scandinavian Studies, Media Studies, and the History of Ideas. This volume draws together the fruits of this thought experiment.
American nature writing characteristically embodies an appreciative, lyrical evocation of the natural world. But often, too, green-disposed authors have been moved to dramatize diverse, anthropogenic perils to environmental health. John Gatta freshly reveals how this dark yet graced and hopeful strain of environmental literature enlarges upon a jeremiad tradition of prophecy inherited from Puritan New England. Across successive historical periods, such expression has assumed a rich variety of American form--as creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, or film documentary. In the spirit of ancient Hebrew prophecy, jeremiads—unlike diatribes--reach beyond effusions of doom and gloom toward the prospect of change through a conversion of heart. Accordingly, the new climate fiction and much other writing steeped in what Gatta terms this “Green Jeremiad” tradition not only warn of material threats to life’s flourishing, but may also look to stir spiritual understanding and renewal.
Exploratory, investigative, and energetically analytical, 1650–1850 covers the full expanse of long eighteenth-century thought, writing, and art while delivering abundant revelatory detail. Essays on well-known cultural figures combine with studies of emerging topics to unveil a vivid rendering of a dynamic period, simultaneously committed to singular genius and universal improvement. Welcoming research on all nations and language traditions, 1650–1850 invites readers into a truly global Enlightenment. Topics in volume 29 include Samuel Johnson’s notions about the education of women and a refreshing account of Sir Joseph Banks’s globetrotting. A guest-edited, illustration-rich, interdisciplinary special feature explores the cultural implications of water. As always, 1650–1850 culminates in a bevy of full-length book reviews critiquing the latest scholarship on long-established specialties, unusual subjects, and broad reevaluations of the period. Published by Bucknell University Press, distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
This edited book provides a broad collection of current critical reflections on heritage-making processes involving landscapes, positioning itself at the intersection of landscape and heritage studies. Featuring an international range of contributions from researchers, academics, activists, and professionals, the book aims to bridge the gap between research and practice and to nourish an interdisciplinary debate spanning the fields of geography, anthropology, landscape and heritage studies, planning, conservation, and ecology. It provokes critical enquiry about the challenges between heritage-making processes and global issues, such as sustainability, economic inequalities, social cohesion, and conflict, involving voices and perspectives from different regions of the world. Case studies in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Turkey, the UK, Columbia, Brazil, New Zealand, and Afghanistan highlight different approaches, values, and models of governance. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to researchers, academics, practitioners, and every landscape citizen interested in heritage studies, cultural landscapes, conservation, geography, and planning.