Sweetgrass Stories: Listening for Animate Land

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-352
Author(s):  
Warren Cariou
Keyword(s):  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Material World ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Cultural Sovereignty ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Living Material

This article examines Indigenous stories that reveal how the land communicates to humans through medicinal plants. The intention is to address a blind spot in new materialist theory, which Zoe Todd has criticized for its lack of attention to Indigenous forms and practices of relational materialism. The main focus of this essay is Indigenous narratives about the sacred plant sweetgrass (known as (wihkaskwa in Cree; wiingaashk in Anishinaabemowin). Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s meditation Braiding Sweetgrass and Drew Hayden Taylor’s novel Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, and watching Jessie Short’s 2016 film Sweet Night, I argue that these artists portray sweetgrass as an intermediary between humans and the land, strengthening Indigenous cultural sovereignty and deepening human relationships by reminding people of their shared embodiment and their shared spiritual-territorial connection. The plant is revealed in these works as a teacher, operating through its scent, texture, and literal rootedness to teach humans about their own connectedness to particular living places.By working at the level of sensation rather than linguistic signification, the sweetgrass is also shown to have an immediate and embodied effect upon the characters in these works. In particular, it offers itself as a gift, and as a conduit of love. I argue that the repeated image of the sweetgrass braid in these works is not exactly a metaphor, but is instead a profound conjoining of the earth and the human body, both submitted to the care of human hands. To braid the earth’s fragrant hair is to treat it in the most intimate way, as a family member or a beloved. It is this human activity of braiding that clarifies the kinship aspect of sweetgrass, showing us that it is not a thing, but a relation. The reciprocity of this relationship shows an Indigenous ethic of engagement with the living material world.

scholarly journals Psychology in an Indeterminate World

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162095800
Author(s):  
Ludger van Dijk
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Material World ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The World ◽  
Indeterminate World ◽  
Over Time

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.

How the Critique of Heaven Confines the Critique of the Earth

Qui Parle ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Mohamad Amer Meziane
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Anthropology Of Religion ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Western Marxism ◽  
Critique Of Religion

Abstract This essay examines the effects of the critique of religion on the critique of capital and how the former confines the latter. It asks: What remains of the concepts of alienation or fetishism if they all stem from an anthropology of religion that seems to be criticized? If religion ceases to refer to an anthropological essence and is criticized as a European colonial concept, then what happens to the critique of capital? It argues that what Marx considers the condition for critique seems to be the blind spot of Western Marxism. Without a critical analysis of how the concept of religion is constructed and how religion is thus described as a human invention, Marxism cannot know itself. If Marx is a “critic of the critique of religion,” this gesture must apply to Marx as well as to Marxism itself. The critique of capitalism might need an alternative foundation if the anthropological concept of religion that supported it collapses. It is therefore impossible to maintain the critique of capital as it is while refusing the critique of religion that lies at its foundation.

Introduction

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vance T. Holliday
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Site Formation ◽  
Site Formation Processes ◽  
Active Components ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
Archaeological Materials

Soils are a potential source of much information in archaeological studies on site and feature-specific scales as well as on a regional scale. Soils are a part of the stage on which humans have evolved. As an integral component of most natural landscapes, soils also are an integral component of cultural landscapes. “Soils are active components of functioning ecosystems that reflect the spatial variability of ecological processes and at the same time have varying degrees of suitability for different kinds of human behavior” (Warren, 1982b, p. 47). Beyond physically supporting humans and their endeavors, however, soils are indicators of the nature and history of the physical and human landscape; they record the impact of human activity, they are a source of food and fuel, and they reflect the environment and record the passage of time. Soils also affect the nature of the cultural record left to archaeologists. They are a reservoir for artifacts and other traces of human activity, encasing archaeological materials and archaeological sites. Soil-forming processes also are an important component of site formation processes. Pedogenesis influences which artifacts, features, and environmental indicators (floral, faunal, and geological) are destroyed, which are preserved, and the degree of preservation. Those involved in field archaeology (as archaeologists, geoscientists, or bioscientists) routinely deal with soils—probably more so than most soil scientists or geologists (Birkeland, 1994, p. 143). However, what the soils or a soil scientist can tell archaeologists about the site and about the archaeological record is not always clear. In part, the integration of soil science in archaeology has been hampered by ambiguities in use of the term “soil” and confusion over what a soil is or is not. The bigger issue is that pedological research, particularly in the United States, has not traditionally been a component of geoarchaeology (the application of the earth science in archaeology) until recent years, in comparison with applications of other aspects of geoscience such as stratigraphy, sedimentology, or geomorphology. This situation evolved in large part because the academic study of soils typically is located in the agricultural sciences rather than the earth sciences.

The Archaeology of Global Environment Change

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole L. Crumley
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Urgent Task ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Non Linear System

Recent, widely recognized changes in the Earth system are, in effect, changes in the coupled human–environment system. We have entered the Anthropocene, when human activity—along with solar forcing, volcanic activity, precession, and the like—must be considered a component (a ‘driver’) of global environmental change (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Levin 1998). The dynamic non-linear system in which we live is not in equilibrium and does not act in a predictable manner (see Fairhead, chapter 16 this volume for further discussion of non-equilibrium ecology). If humankind is to continue to thrive, it is of utmost importance that we identify the ideas and practices that nurture the planet as well as our species. Our best laboratory for this is the past, where long-, medium-, and short-term variables can be identified and their roles evaluated. Perhaps the past is our only laboratory: experimentation requires time we no longer have. Thus the integration of our understanding of human history with that of the Earth system is a timely and urgent task. Archaeologists bring two particularly useful sets of skills to this enterprise: how to collaborate, and how to learn from the past. Archaeology enjoys a long tradition of collaboration with colleagues in both the biophysical sciences and in the humanities to investigate human activity in all planetary environments. Archaeologists work alongside one another in the field, live together in difficult conditions, welcome collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines—and listen to them carefully—and tell compelling stories to an interested public. All are rare skills and precious opportunities. Until recently few practitioners of biophysical, social science, and humanities disciplines had experience in cross-disciplinary collaboration. Many scholars who should be deeply engaged in collaboration to avert disaster (for example, specialists in tropical medicine with their counterparts in land use change) still speak different professional ‘languages’ and have very different traditions of producing information. C. P. Snow, in The Two Cultures (1993 [1959]), was among the first to warn that the very structure of academia was leading to this serious, if unintended, outcome.

scholarly journals An Efficient Full-Wave Electromagnetic Analysis for Capacitive Body-Coupled Communication

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Irfan Kazim ◽  
Muhammad Imran Kazim ◽  
J. Jacob Wikner
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Ground Plane ◽  
Propagation Loss ◽  
Communication Link ◽  
Simulation Approach ◽  
Full Wave ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Measurement Results ◽  
Link Budget ◽  
Physiological Variations

Measured propagation loss for capacitive body-coupled communication (BCC) channel (1 MHz to 60 MHz) is limitedly available in the literature for distances longer than 50 cm. This is either because of experimental complexity to isolate the earth-ground or design complexity in realizing a reliable communication link to assess the performance limitations of capacitive BCC channel. Therefore, an alternate efficient full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation approach is presented to realistically analyze capacitive BCC, that is, the interaction of capacitive coupler, the human body, and the environment all together. The presented simulation approach is first evaluated for numerical/human body variation uncertainties and then validated with measurement results from literature, followed by the analysis of capacitive BCC channel for twenty different scenarios. The simulation results show that the vertical coupler configuration is less susceptible to physiological variations of underlying tissues compared to the horizontal coupler configuration. The propagation loss is less for arm positions when they are not touching the torso region irrespective of the communication distance. The propagation loss has also been explained for complex scenarios formed by the ground-plane and the material structures (metals or dielectrics) with the human body. The estimated propagation loss has been used to investigate the link-budget requirement for designing capacitive BCC system in CMOS sub-micron technologies.

Reducing the negative impact of changes in space weather on human condition

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-239
Author(s):  
E. V. Martysh
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Space Weather ◽  
Geomagnetic Field ◽  
High Efficiency ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
Plasma Medicine ◽  
The Earth

In the article, based on the analysis of the physical factors responsible for the parameters of space weather near the Earth, possible ways of influence of the geomagnetic field disturbances on the state of the human body and methods of untraditional medicine to prevent the negative impact of such disturbances, the conclusions about the possibility of using acupuncture in the prevention and elimination of such influence are made. and the ability to use plasma medicine to address these problems with high efficiency.

Illuminating Triangulations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy R. Pauketat
Keyword(s):  
Mississippi River ◽  
Relational Theory ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
River Valley ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Mississippi River Valley ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Indigenous History ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Human Perceptions

The moon and its moonlight mediated human and non-human relationships in ways that a relational theory of bundling helps us to understand. Similar to assemblage, bundling better captures the ways that human perceptions involve triangulations and transfers. Pre-Columbian human experience in the Mississippi River valley was intimately aligned to the nightly, monthly, and generational cycles of the moon as these converged with the earth and other moving entities, things, and phenomena as sensed by people. Cahokian and other early Mississippian-era mounded complexes—Trempealeau, Angel, and Emerald in particular—mimicked specific lunar phenomena on earth and, in that way, articulated the powers of the moon among people in ways that altered the broad sweep of pre-Columbian indigenous history.

The Anatomy of Eroticism: Reimagining Sex and Sexuality in the Late Ming Novel Xiuta Yeshi

NAN Nü ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-329
Author(s):  
Ka Wong
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sexual Content ◽  
Material World ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Relationships ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
New Interpretation

AbstractDue to its explicit and outrageous sexual content, Xiuta yeshi is often deemed an "obscene book" that lacks literary sophistication. Precisely because of its obscenity, however, the novel provides a unique perspective from which to study the discourse of sex and sexuality in the late Ming period. By examining Xiuta yeshi on its own terms as pornography, one can explore more fully the dynamics of gender, desire, and male-female relationships in this supposedly decadent era. In its construct of eroticism, the novel hinges as much on the detailed recounting of the material world and, in particular, a new interpretation of the human body, as on sex itself. Using foul language to exploit most of the modern pornographic tropes—from rape to orgy to both male and female homosexual acts—this late sixteenth-century work not only redefines a popular genre but also reveals the exhilarating, extravagant, and even grotesque aspects of a libertine culture captivated by and capitalizing on sex.

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