scholarly journals “We Planted Rice and Killed People:” Symbiogenetic Destruction in the Cambodian Genocide

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-67
Author(s):  
Andrew Woolford ◽  
Wanda June ◽  
Sereyvothny Um
Keyword(s):  
Constitutive Relations ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Khmer Rouge ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Genocide Studies ◽  
Group Life ◽  
The Social

In recent years, genocide scholars have given greater attention to the dangers posed by climate change for increasing the prevalence or intensity of genocide. Challenges related to forced migration, resource scarcity, famine, and other threats of the Anthropocene are identified as sources of present and future risk, especially for those committed to genocide prevention. We approach the connection between the natural and social aspects of genocide from a different angle. Our research emanates out of a North American Indigenous studies and new materialist rather than Euro-genocide studies framework, meaning we see the natural and the social (or cultural) as inseparable, deeply imbricated, phenomena. We argue that those entities designated natural are often engaged in co-constitutive relations with the social and cultural groups that are the focus of genocide studies. Simply put, groups become what they are through interaction—or symbiogenesis—with their natural world(s). Symbiogenetic destruction, then, is the destruction of this symbiogenesis. We use this term to draw attention to how relations with more-than-human entities are integral components of the ongoing formation of group life, and how they are put at risk by genocide. In particular, we examine testimony that centers on the relationship between Khmer people and rice, including rice cultivation and consumption, as it was impacted by the Khmer Rouge. In so doing, we highlight the cultural consequences of social/natural death in the Cambodian genocide.

scholarly journals Book Review: Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-126
Author(s):  
Jeremy Ritzer
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
Population Pressure ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Genocide Studies ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
Environmental Infrastructure

The subtitle of Emmanuel Kreike’s Scorched Earth foreshadows the goal of this impressive and comprehensive contribution to the field. His goal is to chip away at the Nature-Culture dichotomy that he argues drives, and limits, much of the analysis that is produced of historical, and modern, warfare. Kreike uses the concept of environcide, which he defines as “intentionally or unintentionally damaging, destroying, or rendering inaccessible environmental infrastructure”, and argues that the traditional assumptions about nature and culture in the study of warfare obscure the importance of the natural world in determining who lives and who dies. For the field of genocide studies, Kreike’s work promotes the analysis of mass violence and potentially genocidal conflicts by looking not simply at actions taken by perpetrators directly against victims, but also at a litany of actions that perpetrators might take that could reasonably result in mass death, joining those in the field who promote a shift in the definition of genocide that includes actions that do not simply meet the definition of dolus specialis to also those that demonstrate dolus eventualis. While confiscating food and burning fields may not fit our current understanding of genocidal acts, they can certainly have the same eventual outcome as the use of machine guns and poison gas. And, recent scholars of risk factors do note the importance of “crises, resource scarcity, population pressure, natural disasters” as increasing the likelihood of genocide.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

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.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Gary Totten
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.

scholarly journals Rule-governed Practices in the Natural World

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-181
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Huemer
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
The Social ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Community Rule

AbstractI address the question of whether naturalism can provide adequate means for the scientific study of rules and rule-following behavior. As the term “naturalism” is used in many different ways in the contemporary debate, I will first spell out which version of naturalism I am targeting. Then I will recall a classical argument against naturalism in a version presented by Husserl. In the main part of the paper, I will sketch a conception of rule-following behavior that is influenced by Sellars and Haugeland. I will argue that rule-following is an essential part of human nature and insist in the social dimension of rules. Moreover, I will focus on the often overlooked fact that genuine rule-following behavior requires resilience and presupposes an inclination to calibrate one’s own behavior to that of the other members of the community. Rule-following, I will argue, is possible only for social creatures who follow shared rules, which in turn presupposes a shared (first-person plural) perspective. This implies, however, that our scientific understanding of human nature has to remain incomplete as long as it does not take this perspective, which prima facie seems alien to it, into account.

scholarly journals “Holding Environments”: Creating Spaces to Support Children's Environmental Learning in the 21st Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Malone
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Agenda 21 ◽  
Environmental Learning ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Rights Of The Child ◽  
The Social ◽  
Limited Opportunity

AbstractFor many children across the globe, whether in low or high income nations, growing up in the 21st century will mean living in overcrowded, unsafe and polluted environments which provide limited opportunity for natural play and environmental learning. Yet Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child all clearly articulate the importance of urban environments as the context for supporting children's sense of place, community identity and empathy with the natural world. I will argue in this paper that these attributes are all key drivers for supporting children in their role as future decision makers and environmental stewards. Extending Winnicotts' concept of “holding environments” beyond the social and cultural aspects of communities as sites for placemaking I draw a link to the value of botanical gardens and other green spaces in cities as the “holding environments” for children's environmental learning. I will construct an argument around the premise that to participate in, and contribute to, global sustainability - our children need places and the opportunity to engage, connect and respond to nature.

scholarly journals PENGGUNAAN KIDANG DALAM UPACARA PIODALAN DI PURA DESA, DESA TINGGARSARI KECAMATAN BUSUNGBIU, KABUPATEN BULELENG

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 340
Author(s):  
Komang Tari Karismayanti ◽  
I Ketut Wisarja ◽  
Ni Luh Gede Wariati
Keyword(s):  
Stream Flow ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cultural Preservation ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Balance Of Nature ◽  
The Social

<p><em>Hindu people always hold the teachings of  Tri Hita karana, is three sources that have been happening s a human relationship with Ida Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa called Parhyangan. human relationships with humans called Pawongan and human relationships with the so-called natural world Palemahan. the use of kings in Piodalan ceremony at Pura Desa, Desa Tinggarsari is one form of implementation of the teachings of  Tri hita Karana as a form sraddha and bhakti. niskala to prosperous nature from the influence of bhuta kala. the use of the field is carried out on the fifth full moon, which begins with the tradition of meboros to the forest to get a court. The results of the research obtained are as follows: (1) the procession of the use of the congregation in the ceremony of  Piodalan in Pura Desa, begins with the meboros tradition to the forest to get the deer, from preparation meboros to get a court for ceremonial facilities, and melasti carried out stream flow, 2) the function of the use of yakti religious function to increase sraddha and bhakti to god, the social function of strengthening the cord between all societies and the function of cultural preservation is to be able to preserve the use of the congregation that has long been a tradition. (3) the meaning of the use of the congregation is a form of respect for the god, as well as the importance of maintaining harmony and balance of nature and environment to achieve the welfare and prosperity of this universe.</em><strong><em></em></strong></p>

‘Civil skepticism’ and the social construction of knowledge: A case in dendroclimatology

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 821-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meritxell Ramírez-i-Ollé
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
Blue Intensity

Early Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars recognized that the social construction of knowledge depends on skepticism’s parasitic relationship to background expectations and trust. Subsequent generations have paid less empirical attention to skepticism in science and its relationship with trust. I seek to rehabilitate skepticism in STS – particularly, Merton’s view of skepticism as a scientific norm sustained by trust among status peers – with a study of what I call ‘civil skepticism’. The empirical grounding is a case in contemporary dendroclimatology and the development of a method (‘Blue Intensity’) for generating knowledge about climate change from trees. I present a sequence of four instances of civil skepticism involved in making Blue Intensity more resistant to critique, and hence credible (in laboratory experiments, workshops, conferences, and peer-review of articles). These skeptical interactions depended upon maintaining communal notions of civility among an increasingly extended network of mutually trusted peers through a variety of means: by making Blue Intensity complementary to existing methods used to study a diverse natural world (tree-ring patterns) and by contributing to a shared professional goal (the study of global climate change). I conclude with a sociological theory about the role of civil skepticism in constituting knowledge-claims of greater generality and relevance.

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