Download Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison PDF

By Robert Pogue Harrison

During this wide-ranging exploration of the position of forests in Western idea, Robert Pogue Harrison enriches our figuring out not just of the forest's position within the cultural mind's eye of the West, but in addition of the ecological dilemmas that now confront us so urgently. continually insightful and wonderfully written, this paintings is mainly compelling at a time while the wooded area, as a resource of ask yourself, appreciate, and that means, disappears day-by-day from the earth.

"Forests is likely one of the so much amazing essays at the human position in nature i've got ever learn, and belongs at the small shelf that incorporates Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The kingdom and the City. Elegantly conceived, superbly written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a version of scholarship at its passionate top. nobody who cares approximately cultural background, in regards to the human position in nature, or concerning the way forward for our earthly domestic, may still pass over it.—William Cronon, Yale Review

"Forests is, between different issues, a piece of scholarship, and one in every of giant price . . . one who we now have wanted. it may be learn and reread, further to and commented on for your time to come."—John Haines, The long island instances booklet Review

Show description

Read Online or Download Forests: The Shadow of Civilization PDF

Best culture books

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Selected by means of the hot York occasions e-book overview as a striking ebook of the yr

the writer of the hot York instances bestseller The Stuff of concept bargains a arguable background of violence.

Faced with the ceaseless move of stories approximately conflict, crime, and terrorism, you could simply imagine we are living within the such a lot violent age ever noticeable. but as big apple occasions bestselling writer Steven Pinker indicates during this startling and fascinating new paintings, simply the other is real: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we will be dwelling within the such a lot peaceable time in our species's life. for many of historical past, warfare, slavery, infanticide, baby abuse, assassinations, pogroms, grotesque punishments, lethal quarrels, and genocide have been traditional positive aspects of lifestyles. yet at the present time, Pinker indicates (with the aid of greater than 100 graphs and maps) some of these varieties of violence have faded and are commonly condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking e-book maintains Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, blending psychology and historical past to supply a notable photo of an more and more nonviolent international. the main, he explains, is to appreciate our intrinsic explanations- the internal demons that incline us towards violence and the higher angels that steer us away-and how altering situations have allowed our higher angels to be successful. Exploding fatalist myths approximately humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this formidable and provocative booklet is certain to be hotly debated in dwelling rooms and the Pentagon alike, and may problem and alter the best way we take into consideration our society.

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The concern of tradition is a severe ethnography of the West in its altering family with different societies. studying cultural practices corresponding to anthropology, commute writing, accumulating, and museum screens of tribal paintings, Clifford exhibits authoritative debts of alternative methods of lifestyles to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts.

Americana: Dispatches From the New Frontier

Harley-Davidson bikers . . . Grand Canyon river rats. . . Mormon archaeologists. . . Spelling bee prodigies…

For greater than fifteen years, best-selling writer and historian Hampton facets has traveled commonly around the continent exploring the the USA that lurks simply at the back of the scrim of our mainstream tradition. Reporting for out of doors, the recent Yorker, and NPR, between different nationwide media, the award-winning journalist has demonstrated a name not just as a wry observer of the modern American scene but additionally as one among our extra artistic and flexible practitioners of narrative non-fiction.

In those dozen items, accrued the following for the 1st time, aspects provides us a clean, appealing, and now and then startling the United States brimming with attention-grabbing subcultures and weird characters who may well stay nowhere else. Following aspects, we crash the redwood retreat of an obvious cabal of fabulously robust military-industrialists, drop in at the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and sign up for a massive techno-rave on the lip of the Grand Canyon. We meet a various gallery of yankee visionaries— from the impossibly perky founding father of Tupperware to Indian radical Russell potential to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. We retrace the path of the historical Bataan dying March with veterans from Sides’ acclaimed WWII epic, Ghost infantrymen. facets additionally examines the state that has emerged from the ashes of September eleven, recounting the harrowing trips of 3 global exchange middle survivors and figuring out on the final attainable minute to not "embed" at the Iraqi front-lines with the U. S. Marines. Americana offers us a glowing mosaic of our kingdom this day, in all its wild and poignant charm.

Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity (Theory, Culture & Society) (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

Society and tradition reclaims the classical history, offers a clear-eyed evaluation of the promise of sociology within the twenty first century and asks even if the `cultural flip' has made the research of society redundant. Sociologists have objected to the increase of cultural experiences considering it produces cultural relativism and lacks a sturdy study time table.

Additional info for Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

Sample text

THE DEMON OF GILGAMESH Vico's imaginative reconstruction of the beginnings of things human tells the story of a fundamental hostility, religious in origin, between the institutions of humanity and the outlying forests. Humanity in its very essence is a historical, that is, extraforestial, phenomenon for Vico. To be human means to dwell in the openness of time, in defiance of the oblivion of nature, and hence to be governed by memory, which maintains the temporal coherence between past and future.

By dismembering their victims in a moment of ecstatic vision, the maenads merely destroy the illusions of formal integrity. All becomes indefinite in the Dionysian frenzy, for Dionysos, like Artemis, liquidates the boundaries of form. Forms maintain themselves in the world through a kind of restraint. Restraint is active resistance against the amorphous chaos of matter, which forever wants to draw phenomena back into the matrix oflife. The hero of such resistance in The Bacchae is Pentheus, king of Thebes.

Ancient Greece witnessed similar religious revolutions during its prehistory, but in Greece too this goddess lived on in various transfigured versions even after the Olympian gods emerged victorious over the Titans. Her name in Greek is Artemis. She is one of the oldest, most enigmatic of Greek deities. Her worship goes back to the PreHellenic period, but even in historical times she was widely worshipped as a fertility goddess in Asia Minor, her cult being based at Ephesus. From that city there has come down to us the famous marble statue that depicts her standing upright with arms extending outward from the elbows.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.28 of 5 – based on 7 votes
This entry was posted in Culture.