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.

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.

Nature and the Sublime

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.

scholarly journals Book Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Judith B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Genocide Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Perspective

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's, An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States, confronts the reality of settler-colonialism and genocide as foundational to the United States. It reconstructs and reframes the consensual narrative from the Native Indian perspective while exposing indoctrinated myths and stereotypes. This masterful and riveting journey provides truth and paths towards the future progress for all peoples. It is a must read and belongs in every classroom, home, library, and canon of genocide studies.

Между природой и культурой: экологические мотивы в поэзии Баира Дугарова

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-293
Author(s):  
Galina P. Dondukova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Ecological Problems ◽  
Nomadic Life

The article analyses the motif of contrasting the natural world and the technical civilization in the works of the Buryat poet Bair Dugarov as one of the aspects forming the ecological problems of the present. Dichotomy between nature and culture reflected in the opposition of a countryside and a city that is characteristic of Russian-language poetry of Buryatia, in Dugarov’s works gains a deep tone and expresses inner thoughts of the persona about the past and present, about forgotten nomadic life and modern globalization. Keywords: Buryat literature, environmental motifs, nature and culture

Beyond the Bower

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Heather Braun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Poetic Creation ◽  
Female Poets

Romantic male poets typically describe bowers as lush, ecological spaces for quiet introspection and poetic creation within a distinctly masculinize landscape. In contrast to these idyllic spaces in Nature, the word bower meant something quite different for many nineteenth-century British women writers. For Romantic female poets, these garden bowers were isolated and fragmented spaces where artistic production was inhibited rather than nurtured. Their poems imagine a very different kind of bower, one that is aligned most directly with a second definition of the term: namely, a lady’s apartment in which “embowered” characters are trapped in interior spaces. These barren, claustrophobic bowers offered the antithesis of the freedom and inspiration male poets of the Romantic-era associated with outdoor garden bowers. Poet, essayist, and activist Caroline Norton demonstrates how these artificial domestic prisons produced paralysis and self-division rather than comfort and poetic inspiration. Cut off from the ecological spaces available to their male contemporaries, Norton’s female characters are silenced, distracted, and confined unable to leave their stifling bowers to create space for themselves in the natural world. Many nineteenth-century women writers reconfigured the Romantic garden bower as an unnatural lady’s bower from which female artists must flee in order to create.

Social landscapes

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brück
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Population Pressure ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Natural Rock ◽  
Middle Bronze Age ◽  
Field Systems

In 1960 a rock climber found a small Middle Bronze Age pot wedged in a cleft in the rock halfway down the eastern face of Crow’s Buttress, a granite outcrop on the southern edge of Dartmoor in Devon (Pettit 1974, 92). The Middle Bronze Age was a period during which extensive field systems were constructed on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988). As we shall see later in this chapter, these have often been thought to indicate the intensification of agriculture and an increasing concern to define land ownership in response to population pressure (e.g. Barrett 1980a; 1994, 148–9; Bradley 1984, 9; Yates 2007, 120–1; English 2013, 139–40). Such models imply the commodification of the natural world: the landscape is viewed primarily as a resource for economic exploitation. Yet this small pot calls such assumptions into question, for it can surely be best interpreted as an offering to spirit guardians or ancestors associated with a striking natural rock formation. This hints at a quite different way of engaging with and understanding the landscape. In this chapter we will explore the links between people and landscape, beginning with the monumental landscapes of the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, moving then to consider what the appearance of field systems during the Middle and Late Bronze Age tells us about human–environment relationships during the later part of the period, and finally considering some of the ways in which animals were incorporated into the social worlds of Bronze Age communities. Funerary and ceremonial monuments of various sorts are the most eye-catching feature of the Early Bronze Age landscape and have dominated our interpretations of the period. By contrast, as we have seen in Chapter 4, settlement evidence of this date is relatively sparse. This, and recent isotope analyses of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age inhumation burials (Jay et al. 2012; Parker Pearson et al. 2016), suggest a significant degree of residential mobility.

scholarly journals Novas Tecnologias Reprodutivas: Natureza e Cultura em Redefinição

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naara Luna
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Assisted Reproduction ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Infertility Treatment ◽  
Medical Procedures ◽  
Reproductive Process ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Ethnographic Observation ◽  
Definition Of

As novas tecnologias reprodutivas, procedimentos médicos que substituem o ato sexual para a concepção, são objeto privilegiado na Antropologia para se debater a relação entre Natureza e Cultura. Schneider lança a hipótese que, sendo a conexão biogenética a definição fundante da concepção norteamericana de parentesco, a descoberta pela ciência de novos fatos sobre a relação biogenética transformaria noções nativas ocidentais. A assistência dessas tecnologias questiona não somente a naturalidade do processo reprodutivo, ao ampliar as margens de escolha na reprodução e na constituição do parentesco, mas afeta a noção de natureza como condições de vida isentas de intervenção. Baseado em observação etnográfica e entrevistas, o artigo analisa o discurso de profissionais e pacientes envolvidos com a reprodução assistida e tratamentos convencionais de infertilidade. O foco está em como concepções de pessoa e parentesco formuladas sobre vivências e práticas concernentes às tecnologias reprodutivas se referem às categorias de Natureza e Cultura. New Reproductive Technologies: redefining Nature and Culture Abstract Anthropology has discussed Nature/Culture opposition through the analysis of the new reproductive technologies, medical procedures aiming at conception which replace sexual intercourse. According to Schneider’s hypothesis, Western notions of kinship will change if Science discovers new facts regarding biogenetic relationships, which is the basis of American kinship conception. Technologies’ assistance questions not only the natural aspect of the reproductive process, by broadening the margin of choice in the reproduction and constitution of kin, but also compromises the definition of nature as conditions of life from which intervention is absent. The article is based on ethnographic observation and interviews with professionals and patients dealing with assisted reproduction and conventional infertility treatment, and analyses their discourse. The text focuses on how notions of personhood and kinship related to the new reproductive technologies refer to the concepts of Nature and Culture.

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