Nature and culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti
Keyword(s):  
Nature And Culture

SWAZI ORAL LITERATURE, ECO-CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Enongene Mirabeau Sone
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Resource Base ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
Critical Resource ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Conservation Of Biodiversity

The main objective of this paper is to show how oral literature is engaged by Swazis with regards to environmental sustainability. It demonstrates the relationship between nature and culture as reflected in Swazi oral literature and how indigenous knowledge embedded in this literature can be used to expand the concepts of eco-literature and eco-criticism. The paper argues that the indigenous environmental expertise among the Swazi people, encapsulated in their oral literature, can serve as a critical resource base for the process of developing a healthy environment. Furthermore, the paper contends that eco-criticism, which is essentially a Western concept, can benefit by drawing inspiration from the indigenous knowledge contained in Swazi culture and expressed in their oral literature. The paper concludes by recommending the need to strengthen traditional and customary knowledge and practices by protecting and recognising the values of such systems in the conservation of biodiversity for sustainable development.

Medianatures

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
Jussi Parikka
Keyword(s):  
Planetary Scale ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Visual Technologies

The article outlines the concept of medianatures. The term is a neologism and in debt to Donna Haraway’s rather eloquent and important coinage naturecultures that already functioned to mark the constant co-becomings of supposedly separated spheres of nature and culture. Medianatures is a further elaboration that elaborates the tie between the earth materialities that are mobilized for technological infrastructures, visual technologies, applications and devices, and the onto- epistemological stance that then feeds back into understanding those planetary scale earth materialities in the first place: the techniques of vision, observation, calculation, and circulation that are part of the governance of the earth and its various localities.

Theological Ethics through a Multispecies Lens

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia E. Deane-Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Individual Decision ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Radical Approach

There are two driving questions informing this book. The first is where does our moral life come from? The presupposition is that considering morality broadly is inadequate. Instead, different aspects need to be teased apart. It is not sufficient to assume that different virtues are bolted onto a vicious animality, red in tooth and claw. Nature and culture have interlaced histories. By weaving in evolutionary theories and debates on the evolution of compassion, justice, and wisdom, the book shows a richer account of who we are as moral agents. The second driving question concerns our relationships with animals. There is dissatisfaction with animal rights frameworks and an argument instead for a more complex community-based multispecies approach. Hence, rather than extending rights, a more radical approach is a holistic multispecies framework for moral action. This need not weaken individual responsibility. The intention is not to develop a manual of practice, but rather to build towards an alternative philosophically informed approach to theological ethics, including animal ethics. The theological thread weaving through this account is wisdom. Wisdom has many different levels, and in the broadest sense is connected with the flow of life understood in its interconnectedness and sociality. It is profoundly theological and practical. In naming the project the evolution of wisdom a statement is being made about where wisdom may have come from and its future orientation. But justice, compassion, and conscience are not far behind, especially in so far as they are relevant to both individual decision-making and institutions.

Intelligence and Intelligibility

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. R. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Intellectual Disciplines

This study investigates the tension between two conflicting intuitions, our twin recognitions: (1) that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities; and yet (2) their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. How can we reconcile our sense of what links us all as humans with our recognition of these deep differences? All humans use language and live in social groups, where we have to probe what is distinctive in the experience of humans as opposed to that of other animals and how the former may have evolved from the latter. Moreover, the languages we speak and the societies we form differ profoundly, though the conclusion that we are the prisoners of our own particular experience should and can be resisted. The study calls into question the cross-cultural viability both of many of the analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture) and of our usual categories for organizing human experience and classifying intellectual disciplines, mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics. The result is a robust defence of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility while recognizing both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document