scholarly journals Transgressing National ‘Green Culture’ and the Moral Authority of Nature in ‘Age of the Market’ Mongolia

Inner Asia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-329
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Turk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Moral Guidance

Abstract This article explores the concept of nature (baigal) and the natural world (baigal delkhii, baigal khangai) as cosmological ‘beyond’ (tsaana) that derives particular moral authority in contemporary Mongolia. Interlocutors detailed an agentive nature, able to punish and save, cause illness and restore health that has become increasingly fierce (dogshin) and distant from humans in recent years. This trend was narratively linked to increased disorderly and ‘uncultured’ actions that disrupt the balance between humans and the natural environment which Mongolians’ ‘nature culture’ (baigaliin soyol) notionally upholds. Although notions of natural and nomadic culture were transformed during the twentieth century from concepts associated with ‘backwardness’ to celebration of unique forms of heritage, culture’s fundamental tie to nature endured. As ideas of nature uphold social order and ‘stand in’ for order itself, baigal normatively governs, reacting to lack of moral guidance and state-led regulation today.

Putting Down the Steady Pen for the Natural World

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ka’mal McClarin ◽  
Mike Antonioni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Understanding

Much of the scholarship on Frederick Douglass in the past twenty years has focused on his public contributions to society at large: numerous comprehensive biographical treatments detail his interactions with political, religious, civil, and social movements. However, there has been little discussion of his interactions with the natural world. This article explores Douglass as a man of many seasons who demonstrated over the course of his life many passions, nature being among the most prominent. Along with Douglass’s staunch commitment as a universal reformer, we argue, Douglass carried a lifelong love for the environment, engaging with it physically, intellectually, and as a source of leisure. By the time of his death, he had become a Victorian gentleman farmer and a naturalist who possessed a global understanding of his natural environment. In fact, he often merged his appreciation for nature with his broad range of activism. These actions worked in harmony with one another. This aspect of his life was an equally important aspect of his character as a man who came of age during the nineteenth century and whose soul departed from the earth on the eve of the twentieth century.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

An Ancient Dream Manual

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Road Map ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Life Career

Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) is the only dream-book which has been preserved from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Composed around AD 200, it is a treatise and manual on dreams, their classification, and the various analytical tools which should be applied to their interpretation. Artemidorus travelled widely through Greece, Asia, and Italy to collect people’s dreams and record their outcomes, in the process casting a vivid light on social mores and religious beliefs in the Severan age. This book aims to provide the non-specialist reader with a readable and engaging road-map to this vast and complex text. It offers a detailed analysis of Artemidorus’ theory of dreams and the social function of ancient dream-interpretation; it also aims to help the reader to understand the ways in which Artemidorus might be of interest to the cultural or social historian of the Graeco-Roman world. The book includes chapters on Artemidorus’ life, career, and worldview; his conceptions of the human body, sexuality, the natural world, and the gods; his attitudes towards Rome, the contemporary Greek polis, and the social order; and his knowledge of Greek literature, myth and history. The book is intended to serve as a companion to the new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams by Martin Hammond, published simultaneously with this volume in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

The sociocultural realm in relation to environment, biology, and history: Notes on Van Gennep and the emerging social sciences of his day

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-337
Author(s):  
Harvey E Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
American School ◽  
Broad Approach

Van Gennep’s research interests were located in the region where the fields of folklore, anthropology, sociology, and religion overlapped. His Rites de passage reflected a broad approach to ritual and social life that took into account the natural environment, biology, and history. This article scans his interests and emphases in relation to the American school of cultural anthropology that developed in the twentieth century. It assesses parallels and differences, and points to areas deserving further clarification such as Van Gennep’s understanding of language.

“A Better Crop of Boys and Girls”: The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
School Buildings ◽  
School Gardens ◽  
Laboratory School ◽  
Normal Schools ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
School Gardening ◽  
The University

In the 1890s progressive educators like John Dewey proposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society. Working to make the boundaries between classroom learning and pupils' natural environment more permeable, for example, Dewey urged teachers to connect intellectual and practical elements within their curricula. Highly visible and widespread examples of this integrative goal were the school gardens that flourished from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. Evidence of their presence is recorded in newspapers, national magazines, and annual school reports whose illustrations typically portrayed well-dressed children cultivating large gardens next to impressive urban school buildings. Whether in large cities or country settings, school gardens were expressions of modern and progressive education of the sort encouraged by Dewey. Gardens were encouraged in theory and in practice not only at the laboratory school affiliated with the University of Chicago but also in normal schools across the country (Figure 1).

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

The Moral Dimension of Constitutional Faith

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanford Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the relationship between the Constitution—and the sovereign people ostensibly represented in its terms—and morality. Constitution faith requires the linkage of law and morality even as most twentieth-century jurisprudence has emphasized their analytic separation. All calls for renewed faith in the rule of law and renewal of the constitutional covenant imply that submission to the Constitution will create not only order but also the conditions of a social order worthy of respect. In order to see the logic and desirability of submission to the rule of the Constitution, the assumed linkage between it and morality must be closely examined.

Technology and the Theory of Apocalypse

2021 ◽  
pp. 1638-1647
Author(s):  
Maximiliano Emanuel Korstanje
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Interesting Discussion

This chapter ignites an interesting discussion around the idea of apocalypse or at the best to the role of technology by slicing humanity from nature. In terms of the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, one of the conceptual limitations of “dwelling perspective” as a project is the clear-cut division of humans from the natural environment. Unlike hunters and gatherers who have developed “relational” ties with the sensual world, we are educated to imagine ourselves as administrators of natural world. In view of this, the eco-friendly projects (as conservation parks) often exclude the presence of humans. The employment of technology denotes certain rationality which while sorting the environment according to our needs it creates a sentiment of culprit, which is expressed in the bottom-days´ narratives. Mankind, as outstanding specie, is the only one gifted by Gods to administer nature, but failed. Moved by greed and speculations, men governed with energy in backs to God and for that, they should be heavily punished.

Ecología y Bioética. La insuficiencia de los límites

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Miguel Serrano Ruiz-Calderón
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Problem ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Humanae Vitae ◽  
Individual Aspect ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Made In

La ecología y la bioética como disciplinas nuevas aparecen durante el siglo XX como consecuencia del horror producido por los abusos técnico-industriales. Tienen pues un origen común y positivo, como está generalmente admitido. Sin embargo, autores críticos han observado que principalmente la bioética ha derivado en una actitud complaciente que, en definitiva, ha servido como coartada moral a buena parte de los abusos realizados en nombre de la Ciencia. Todo lo que es técnicamente posible hacer se acaba haciendo y además encuentra una justificación bioética construida por los expertos de forma analítica. Se puede sospechar que lo mismo sucede con la ecología. Esto constituye en definitiva una traición a las pretensiones de los fundadores de las nuevas ciencias. No se trata de algo nuevo en la Historia humana donde los hallazgos más valiosos o los valores más altos han sido habitualmente manipulados. Parte del problema actual radica en la divinización del hombre, ya sea en su aspecto individual o bajo el concepto de Humanidad. Paradójicamente esta divinización causa la perdida de la noción de dignidad y favorece la conversión del hombre concreto en mero instrumento de la acción técnica. Nuestra época alberga, sin embargo, motivos para el optimismo. La respuesta fundamental se encuentra en la noción de “límite” o si se prefiere de marco que sitúa al hombre en su lugar en el universo, distinto del puro mundo natural y relacionado con la divinidad. La Humanae Vitae es un ejemplo claro de esta concepción globalizadora. ---------- Ecology and bioethics as new disciplines appear during the twentieth century as a result of horror produced by industrial technical abuses. Therefore they have a common and positive origin, as is generally admitted. However, critics mainly authors have observed that bioethics has led to a complacent attitude that ultimately served as a moral alibi for much of the abuses made in the name of science possible. All that is technically possible is just doing and also finds a justification built by bioethics experts analytically. You may suspect that the same is true in the field of ecology. This is definitely a betrayal of the claims of the founders of the new sciences. This is not something new in human history where the most valuable findings or higher values have been routinely manipulated. Part of the current problem is the deification of man, either in its individual aspect or under the concept of humanity. Paradoxically, this deification causes the loss of the notion of dignity and promotes the conversion of concrete man into a mere instrument of technical action. Our era houses, however, grounds for optimism. The fundamental answer lies in the notion of “limit” or “frame” which puts man in his place in the universe, other than pure natural world and related to divinity. Humanae Vitae is a clear example of this globalizing conception.

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