The bad environmentalism of ‘nature is healing’ memes

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110120
Author(s):  
Kai Bosworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Environmental Media ◽  
Critical Aesthetics ◽  
Emotional Norms ◽  
Diverse Audience ◽  
Insight Into

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

The Subaltern Speak- A Study On The Culture Of The Arunachalis With Special Reference To Mamang Dai’s The Legends Of Pensam

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Ms. Cheryl Antonette Dumenil ◽  
Dr. Cheryl Davis
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Small World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Arunachal Pradesh ◽  
North East India ◽  
North East ◽  
Shared History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Insight Into

North- East India is an under veiled region with an awe-inspiring landscape, different groups of ethnic people, their culture and heritage. Contemporary writers from this region aspire towards a vision outside the tapered ethnic channel, and they represent a shared history. In their writings, the cultural memory is showcased, and the intensity of feeling overflows the labour of technique and craft. Mamang Dai presents a rare glimpse into the ecology, culture, life of the tribal people and history of the land of the dawn-lit mountains, Arunachal Pradesh, through her novel The Legends of Pensam. The word ‘Pensam’ in the title means ‘in-between’,  but it may also be interpreted as ‘the hidden spaces of the heart’. This is a small world where anything can happen. Being adherents of the animistic faith, the tribes here believe in co-existence with the natural world along with the presence of spirits in their forests and rivers. This paper attempts to draw an insight into the culture and gender of the Arunachalis with special reference to The Legends of Pensam by Mamang Dai.

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.

scholarly journals ‘And I still see their faces…’: Wilhelm von Blandowski’s photographs from the collection of Museum in Gliwice

2009 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Leszek Jodliński
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Early Photography ◽  
Insight Into

Wilhelm von Blandowski (1822-1878) was born in Gleiwitz, Prussia (now Gliwice, Upper Silesia, Poland). From 1862 through 1868, Wilhelm von Blandowski may have taken up to 10, 000 photographs. Though only a portion of his photographic accomplishment has been preserved, the existing photographs provide an insight into their content and character, as well as providing us with the better understanding of the work of their author. The main emphasis in the paper will be on Blandowski’s photographs presently in the collections of Museum in Gliwice. It will focus on his portraits with reference to some of the formal experiments Blandowski carried out, such as photomontage and narrative photography. Attention will be also drawn to his creation of documentary-like and realistic photographs. Both the commercial nature of the photographic business run by Blandowski, as well as his personal interest in picturing the human condition, had a strong influence on his photography. He put the person at the center of his interest. This was reflected in Blandowski’s attempts to capture the natural world of the Prussian borderlands in the 1860s. Blandowski depicted a place inhabited by Germans, Jews and Poles ‘the promised land’ of early industrialization. Witnesses of these days, the known and anonymous characters look at us from the hundreds of prints taken by Blandowski. Among them one can see wealthy industrialists, priests and doctors, workers and peasants, children and women, the rich and the poor, persons of different professions, nationalities and confessions. The article concludes with a discussion of the influences that Blandowski has had on his contemporaries and also of his place in the history of early photography in Poland.

The “Two-Way Street” of Having an Impact: A Democratic School's Attempt to Build a Broad Counterhegemonic Alternative

2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Assaf Meshulam
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Critical Education ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Impact

Background/Context Critical education studies tries to make sense of the relationship between education and differential power in an unequal society and to what degree schools impact the social order. A premise in this field is that a fundamental aim of critical education is exposing unequal social, cultural, and economic power relations and engaging in social action that transcends the setting of the classroom and school. Counterhegemonic schools are thus generally characterized by an aspiration to be meaningful beyond the school community and a commitment to social transformation. Purpose/Focus of Study The study examines a unique bilingual, multicultural school in Israel/Palestine in its struggle to be broadly meaningful and sustainable by opening up enrollment beyond its binational (Jewish-Palestinian) community. In particular, the study analyzes the impact of incorporating external students on the school's counterhegemonic curricula, pedagogy, and dynamics, as well as the implications for the transformative potential of bottom-up democratic education initiatives in the absence of accompanying policy change more generally. Research Design The findings draw on data collected in a broader qualitative case study on multicultural, bilingual schools educating for democracy and social justice in different national, political, and cultural contexts. Data were collected and analyzed from semistructured open-ended individual interviews with school staff, parents, and founders; field observations; and document analysis. Findings The primary finding of this research is the paradox of being impacted while making an impact: The school's attempt to infiltrate the hegemony and expand and sustain its social impact led to the infiltration of external goals, interests, and power relations into its counterhegemonic agenda, curricula and pedagogy, and governance. This in turn undermined transformativity and transcultural border-crossing potential at the school and triggered a neoliberal process of commodification. Yet it also emerged that students still succeed in crossing national and religious identity-borders and in overcoming hegemonic perspectives of their essentialized identities. Conclusions Many obstacles stand between a counterhegemonic school and being socially meaningful, including sociohistorical and political factors. No less important, however, are the broader structural aspects to creating a space in which transformative schools can succeed. Although bottom-up attempts may push hegemonic forms to incorporate certain aspects of their vision, they cannot have meaningful and widespread impact if unaccompanied by broad support and action at the policy level and if they do not become organic parts of a larger transformative agenda.

scholarly journals The Transportation of Narain Sing: Punishment, Honour and Identity from the Anglo–Sikh Wars to the Great Revolt

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 1115-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLARE ANDERSON
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis paper examines fragments from the life of Narain Sing as a means of exploring punishment, labour, society and social transformation in the aftermath of the Anglo–Sikh Wars (1845–1846, 1848–1849). Narain Sing was a famous military general who the British convicted of treason and sentenced to transportation overseas after the annexation of the Panjab in 1849. He was shipped as a convict to one of the East India Company's penal settlements in Burma where, in 1861, he was appointed head police constable of Moulmein. Narain Sing's experiences of military service, conviction, transportation and penal work give us a unique insight into questions of loyalty, treachery, honour, masculinity and status. When his life history is placed within the broader context of continuing agitation against the expansion of British authority in the Panjab, we also glimpse something of the changing nature of identity and the development of Anglo–Sikh relations more broadly between the wars of the 1840s and the Great Indian Revolt of 1857–1858.

Dewey’s Criticisms of Traditional Philosophy

1998 ◽  
pp. 13-19
Author(s):  
Charles Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Error Characteristic ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Great Insight ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophic Tradition ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Modern Thinking

In this paper I address some of John Dewey’s more generally applicable criticisms of the philosophic "tradition," and show how his criticisms stem from his naturalistic approach to philosophy. This topic is important because Dewey gives great insight into discussions that are relevant today regarding the role of philosophy. In 1935 he anticipated many of the criticisms of the "later" Wittgenstein regarding the establishment of post facto standards as a cause, the separation of language from behavior and the privatization of mind—yet Dewey still finds use for metaphysics or "thinking at large." I believe the essence of Dewey’s criticisms are found in a few key distinctions. Therefore, I cover the history of philosophy with blanket criticisms of the blanket categories of "classical" and of "modern" thought. For Dewey, the fundamental error characteristic of both Greek and Modern thinking is the artificial bifurcation of our thoughts, feelings and actions from the natural world. As I see it, the heart of this metaphysical mistake is captured by the distinctions he draws between the "instrumental" and "consummatory," and between the "precarious" and "stable."

ÜBERLEGUNGEN ZU EINEM KULTFEST DER ALTMESOPOTAMISCHEN GÖTTIN INANNA

Numen ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-46
Author(s):  
Barbara Böck
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Religious System ◽  
Literary Composition ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe present study aims at interpreting a Sumerian hymn pertaining to the cult of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, Inanna/Ištar. Though this literary composition belongs to the realm of royal religion, and centres on the relationship between the goddess and the royal personage, the hymn also provides an insight into a cultic feast of rather popular character. The text describes a ritual; its inner logic follows the course of a cultic ceremony. Accordingly, the term "implicit ritual" as opposed to "explicit ritual", or liturgical order, can be applied. Until now the Sumerian hymn in question has been treated mainly from a text critical point of view. Certain aspects of the ritual performance, viz. the playful change of gender roles, are expressed through the epithets of the goddess. Recently, attention has been given to those epithets that allude to the power of the goddess to change her sex, and it has been proposed that they show a shamanistic side of the goddess. In what follows we shall put forward an alternative interpretation of the change of gender roles by using the concept of play and game as intrinsic to a religious system. The cultic feast of the goddess Inanna/Ištar will thus be traced back to a ritual of inversion which serves to reconstitute the moral and social order as well as to consolidate religious belief. Since our hymn is considered to be one of the main sources for the reconstruction of the so-called "sacred marriage" we shall also touch upon this ancient rite.

Educational Reconstruction "By the Dawn's Early Light": Violent Political Conflict and American Overseas Education Reform

2009 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Sobe
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Overseas Education ◽  
Educational Reconstruction

Using a historical approach, Sobe examines the myths and ideals that have underlain U.S. educational initiatives in postconflict nations abroad. Building on its tradition of modern schooling designed to advance civic and social order, America has sought to extend its political and cultural values overseas through educational reforms in postconflict countries. Sobe tracks the development of these reform efforts,highlighting their significance as symbols of American forms of government and civic life and a belief in social transformation through education. Sobe draws upon this history to caution that educational reforms alone rarely accomplish social transformation,and that future U.S. initiatives must honor local and shared cultural values above American ideals.

Lebanon’s new electoral law favours sectarian parties

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Border Security ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Government Performance ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Syrian Refugee ◽  
The Law ◽  
Electoral Law

Significance Parliament on June 16 ratified a new electoral law, averting the looming political crisis that threatened to leave the country without a legislature. Impacts New, non-sectarian political movements could launch street protests against the law, as they plan a strategy for the 2018 elections. Redistricting could incentivise collaboration between the larger Christian parties. Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri will try to boost his re-election prospects through improved government performance. Border security, Syrian refugee fears, infrastructure spending and rubbish collection will be key areas of focus. Only a major regional crisis such as war between Israel and Hezbollah would be sufficient to postpone elections again.

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