Resuming Gynocratic Principles: Cultural Reterritorialization of Native Traditions in Linda Hogan’s Fiction

Native Americans’ cultural system has been utterly undermined in the early colonial conquest and the later neo-colonial expansion. Cultural annihilation is primarily caused by the forced cultural assimilation, especially by the white government’s practice of eradicating native traditions and beliefs. To rebuild the native culture system, Native American writer Linda Hogan attempts to employ the pre-colonial gynocratic principles in her literary creation, thus reterritorializing their cultural identity among the modern natives. This paper reveals how Hogan effectively resumes the ancient gynocratic principles by portraying a series of typical female images in the woman-centered native community, with an aim to fight against cultural assimilation guided by the white male-dominated western metaphysical epistemology.

The World at Risk: Vulnerability, Precarity, and Connectedness

This article considers the world at risk; in particular it focuses on the three topics covered at the international conference of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church in 2018 in Sarajevo: climate change, its impact on marginalized populations, and the tragic banality of contemporary political leadership. The article turns to a proposal by Trinity College’s Linda Hogan to develop an ethics of vulnerability so as to respond to the triple crisis. After examining contemporary writings on both vulnerability and precarity by Judith Butler and others, it concludes by applying the ethics of vulnerability to other urgent cases as well.

Disrupting the Discourse Behind the Zoning of the Native Americans: Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit in the Environmental Racist Perspective

This paper disrupts the Euro Americans’ environmental colonialist discourse which involves the practices of racist policies that result in the relocation of the Native Americans to a confinement called reservation. More specifically, it discusses this relocation which is termed as zoning as a dilemma for the Natives because this practice by the Euro Americans, which is primarily involves their economic agenda, not only restricts the Natives to their reservation and denies life opportunities for them but puts the responsibility of their plight on themselves. A qualitative content analysis, the research explores this idea in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit in the light of the joint critique of environmental racism and critical discourse analysis. Linguistically, the study applies critical discourse analysis focusing on van Dijk’s concept of discourse and manipulation. The analysis reveals that the discursive and cognitive strategies employed by the Euro Americans for the zoning of the Natives help the former rationalize and legitimize their environmental colonial practices. The discursive process first involves the creation of “othering” and then the tactful presentation of this “othering”. The study also highlights the counter actions taken by the Natives on the basis of the same or similar strategies as have been employed against them, to resist their zoning.

II. Just War and Imagination Are Not Mutually Exclusive

The Appeal declares, “We believe that there is no ‘just war,’” because it has been “used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war,” and it “undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.” In what follows, I offer a response to the latter part of the Appeal’s criticism, one that has been similarly made by the Protestant pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas and the Irish Catholic theological ethicist Linda Hogan—namely, that JWT prevents us from imagining alternatives to war. For Hauerwas and Hogan, “just war” has been a dangerous figment of our imagination since the time of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, and it has thereby impeded Catholics’ ability to imagine nonviolence as a faithful and practical way for addressing conflict. Similarly, the Appeal asks us to imagine a church without “just war” and, instead, with “just peace.” However, while I take both the Appeal’s criticism of just war and its call for nonviolence seriously, I think its portrayal of just war is a distortion and fails to acknowledge that just war theorists actually have imaginatively developed tools and capacities for addressing conflict that are directed toward protecting and building just peace. In the end, I will also suggest that the Appeal lacks consideration of the ethic behind just war, which actually provides a method for moral thinking about the use of all forms of force—not only war, but also nonviolent resistance, which is also a form of force—and, indeed, many other questions in applied ethics.