Popular Romanticism and Krech/Indians
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Announcements:
(1) Bring Krech to class on Friday
(2) Second writing assignment coming up Friday
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I. “The Crying Indian”
From the Keep America Beautiful, Inc. web site
II. Popular Romanticism today, continued
Relevance to environmental ethics and environmental management
Romanticism and the “Noble Savage”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778) and the Noble Savage
III. Romanticism and Native Americans
[SLIDES]:
Annie Booth and Harvey Jacobs
Chris Manes
J. Baird Callicott:
In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (SUNY Pr., 1989), see e.g.,
Chapter 10, “Traditional American Indian and Western European Attitudes Toward Nature: An Overview,” and Chapter 11, “American Indian Land Wisdom”
[SLIDE]:
“Fortunately, American Indian and other traditional patterns of human-nature interaction provide rich and detailed models. As I have more fully argued elsewhere, the Algonkian portrayal of human-nature relationships is indeed, although certainly different in specifics, identical in abstract form to that recommended by Leopold in the land ethic” (Chapter 5, “Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic,” p. 94).
[SLIDE]:
“With few exceptions . . . professional ethnographers and anthropologists consider the American-Indian-as-ecological-guru to be neo-romantic nonsense, a post-sixties edition of the Noble Savage with an environmental spin.” (“Introduction: The Real Work,” p. 9).
[SLIDE]:
Skeptics:
Richard Watson
Calvin Martin
IV. Romanticism and “Orientalism”
Rik Scarce
Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement (Chicago: Noble Press, 1990)
“Radical environmentalists are among those who, like the Taoists and the rarest of Christians, St. Francis of Assisi, have managed to breach this wall within themselves” (Scarce p. 9).
Yi-Fu Tuan
See Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1970. “Our Treatment of the Environment in Ideal and Actuality.” American Scientist 58 (3): 244-249.
[SLIDES]:
Yi-Fu Tuan argues: "Ethnocentrism is characteristic of peoples all over the world. It is difficult for any viable culture to avoid seeing itself as the center of light shining into darkness. In Europe, to be sure, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this glorification of the self was temporarily reversed. . . . In the spirit of that age Europe was viewed as a portion of the earth afflicted with the blight of tyranny and superstition; beyond lay unspoiled Nature, unspoiled and rational people still appareled in celestial light. . . .This romantic spirit has continued to affect the thinking of the West to the present day. Sensitive Westerners are wont to contrast their own aggressive, exploitative attitude to nature with the harmonious relationships of other times and other places. This view should be commended for its generosity, but it lacks realism and fails to recognize inconsistency and paradox as characteristic of human existence" (244).
This touches upon is the classic “man in nature, apart from nature” problem:
"To the question, what is the basic difference between European and Chinese attitudes to nature, many people might answer that whereas the European sees nature as subordinate to man the Chinese sees himself as part of nature. Although there is some truth in this generalization, it cannot be pressed too far. A culture's publicized ethos about its environment seldom covers more than a fraction of the total range of its attitudes and practices pertaining to that environment. In the play of forces that govern the world, esthetic and religious ideals rarely have a major role" (244).
Tuan writes:
"The unplanned and often careless use of land in China belongs, one hopes, to the past. The Communist government has made an immense effort to control erosion and to re-forest. . . . A visitor from New Zealand reported in 1960 that as seen from the air the new growths spread 'a mist of green' over the once bare hills of South China. For those who admire the old culture, it must again seem ironic that the 'mist of green' is no reflection of the traditional virtues of Taoism and Buddhism; on the contrary, it rests on their explicit denial" (248).
VI. Conclusion
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by M. Ritter (London: Sage, 1992)
What “we are witnessing [is] not the end but the beginning of modernity—that is, of a modernity beyond its classical industrial design” [emph. orig.].
Beck writes:
“[T]he counter-modern scenario currently upsetting the world—new social movements and criticism of science, technology, and progress—does not stand in contradiction to modernity, but is rather an expression of modernization beyond [the model of] . . . industrial society” (Risk Society p. 11).