My teaching and research has focused at the intersections of environmental thought (environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics; Continental philosophy, poststructuralism, and process-relational thought) and cultural studies (film and visual studies; cultural geography, space/place/landscape, pilgrimage, and identity; (eco)regionalism, nationalism/transnationalism, and globalization; religion and ecology). See my homepage for more information, publications, etc. I publish the ecocultural theory blog Immanence (see under "Websites" on the left).
Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, The Routledge Handbook o... more Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. This selection features the introductory overview of the volume, Adrián Ivakhiv's and Antonio López's programmatic "When Do Media Become Ecomedia?" and Adrian Ivakhiv's "Three Ecologies: Ecomediality as Ontology." The entire volume is available open access here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecomedia-Studies/Lopez-Ivakhiv-Rust-Tola-Chang-Chu/p/book/9781032009421
A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury u... more A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial.
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
(Complete e-book is available for free download at Punctum Books web site, as is a Reader's Guide.)
Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series, 2013), Jul 2013
"Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both w... more "Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both we and our worlds have changed. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images have moved viewers over the last 120 years in ways that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe. Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media." (If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at aivakhiv@uvm.edu.)
In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to ... more In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to Glastonbury, England and Sedona, Arizona. He discusses their efforts to encounter and experience the spirit or energy of the land and to mark out its significance by investing it with sacred meanings. Their endeavors are presented against a broad canvas of cultural and environmental struggles associated with the incorporation of such geographically marginal places into an expanding global cultural economy.
Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.
A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.
April 2001 384 pages, 24 b& w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / 28.50
Contents I DEPARTURES 1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web 2 Reimagining Earth 3 Orchestrating Sacred Space II GLASTONBURY 4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon 5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces III SEDONA 6 Red Rocks to Real Estate 7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape IV ARRIVALS 8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
This book is about the complicated and provocative ways nature, science, and religion intersect i... more This book is about the complicated and provocative ways nature, science, and religion intersect in real settings where people attempt to live in harmony with the physical environment. Scholars of philosophy, religious studies, and science and technology have been at the forefront of critiquing the roles of religion and science in human interactions with the natural world. Meanwhile, researchers in the environmental sciences have encountered disciplinary barriers to examining the possibility that religious beliefs influence social–ecological behaviors and processes simply because the issue resists quantitative assessment. The contributors to this book explore how scientific knowledge and spiritual beliefs are engaged to shape natural resource management, environmental activism, and political processes.
Contents
1. Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv 2. Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons 3. On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea Joel Robbins 4. Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests Andrew S. Mathews 5. Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico Kristin Norget 6. Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras Catherine M. Tucker 7. Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities Anne Motley Hallum 8. Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps Scott Schnell 9. The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America Andrea Ballestero 10. Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows Marthinus L. Daneel 11. Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Home Browse Authors Browse Titles My Account Title: Claiming Sacred Ground. Author(s): Ivakhiv, A... more Home Browse Authors Browse Titles My Account Title: Claiming Sacred Ground. Author(s): Ivakhiv, Adrian J. A print version is also available by visiting IUP books. Shopping Cart Alphabetical Listing of All Titles. Collections. African ...
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, 2021
An essay on the role of imagination in religion, including the way religion itself is imagined. F... more An essay on the role of imagination in religion, including the way religion itself is imagined. Features a critical assessment of recent books including T. M. Luhrmann's How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others; Jeffrey Kripal's The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge and the same author's Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion; J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei's The Life of Imagination; Revealing and Making the World; David Morgan's Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment; Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters; and Jack Miles's Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story.
Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, 2013
This is the first part of chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wil... more This is the first part of chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). It explores cinema's contribution to the territorialization of nation-states, with a focus here on the Hollywood Western, Alexander Dovzhenko's 'Earth,' and Pare Lorentz's 1930s documentaries. The remainder of the chapter examines alternative territorializations, "existential landscapes," post-Westerns, "kinetic landscapes," the eco-sublime, and much else.
In this article, I address the multiplicity of "posthumanisms" including posthumanism as a period... more In this article, I address the multiplicity of "posthumanisms" including posthumanism as a periodizing gesture, a description of what follows humanism; as a problematique or "predicament" ; and as a move that heralds something else-a "critical" posthumanism, a "techno-philic" or "animaphilic" decentering of the human into a networked entanglement of substances, or a "posthumous" post-posthumanism. Comparing posthumanism to previous "posts" including postmodern-ism, I argue that its nature as a "post" means that posthumanism cannot avoid the "postal system" described by Jacques Derrida, whereby discursively constituted goals fail to reach their intended destinations. Drawing upon a process-relational conception of the human (and of the cosmos), I argue that the human has never been human such that it can be overcome or transcended. Our humanity is always ever in process, which means that any posthumanity will always be unstable and always tied to the realm of "alternative humanisms." There is, however, one form of posthumanism that is worth conceiving as such: this is posthumanism, the "close encounter of the third kind" whereby we humans contend with our ultimate erasure, that of extinction.
This chapter tells the story of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in a series of layered vignet... more This chapter tells the story of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in a series of layered vignettes. Its overarching thesis is that the accident, and the "Zone of Estrangement" created in its wake, constitute a microcosm of the tensions held together within the twentieth century Cold War, within industrial modernity, and within the geological Anthropocene. The event affected relations between Chernobyl's multiple surrounding worlds, of which I focus on four: its immediate environment of forested north-central Polissia in northern Ukraine; the national imaginary of Ukraine as a soon-to-depart republic of the soon-to-implode Soviet Union; the Soviet industrial system as a superpower within a bipolar global military-political order; and the technological modernity of the era increasingly known as the Anthropocene. The accident was not merely an event; it was a "hyper-event." In its confluence of trajectories and flows, it triggered chain reactions that rearranged agential relations operating on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Its reverberations rang far beyond the scope of its apparent origins, permanently rupturing the ontology of its social order and expanding the circle of affective horizons by which its effects reverberated out into the universe. The role of media was/is central in each layer of this hyper-event examined here: in the visuality of the nuclear sublime, media treatments of Ukraine in the post-Cold War global information (dis)order, the cinematics of the postnuclear and posthuman Zone, and visualizations of the Anthropocene.
This article introduces a thematic stream of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journa... more This article introduces a thematic stream of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Media+Environment. Revisiting C. P. Snow's Rede Lecture on the "Two Cultures" of the sciences and humanities, we ask how media today reflect the continuation of this split or its bridging. Articles address media’s relationship to these historical “two cultures” in recent films, visualization technologies, collaborative eco-interventions, and more.
JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION, NATURE AND CULTURE, 2019
This article advances a four-fold contribution to theorizing the relationship between images, rel... more This article advances a four-fold contribution to theorizing the relationship between images, religion, and the Anthropocene. First, it proposes a ‘process-semiotic’ definition of the image as a sensorially perceptible form that mediates agential relations both between humans and between humans and the larger world. Second, it argues for a conception of religion and of spirituality that sees the world as varying on a scale between the ‘polytropic’ and the ‘monotropic’, where ‘tropism’ refers to the ‘turning’ toward sources of sustenance, relief, hope, authority, and the like. This turning is commonly, if not universally, accomplished with the aid of images. Bringing these ideas together, it then advances a typology of ‘image regimes’, each of which establishes relationships between understandings of images and of reality, relationships which can be traced across diverse religious and cultural contexts. Finally, it proposes a set of questions by which to bring ecocritical analysis to expressions of these image regimes in the emerging ‘image-world’ of digital culture, a culture that is coterminous, if not causally linked with, the growing recognition of the Anthropocene. It ends with a brief application of these questions to the Anthropocene Project, an art exhibition, film, and book project by Edward Burtunsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas De Pencier.
ECOCRITICISM 2018: Proceedings of the International Conference on Literature, Arts and Ecological Environment. Ed. by Isabel Ponce de Leão, Maria do Carmo Mendes & Sérgio Lira. Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development. Barcelos, Portugal, 2018. , 2018
This article builds on the Pierre Hadot’s and others’ suggestions that philosophy can and should ... more This article builds on the Pierre Hadot’s and others’ suggestions that philosophy can and should constitute not only an analysis of life, but also a “way of life” concerned with actualizing how to live in accordance with an aesthetics, ethics, and logic grounded in philosophical thought. To do this, it develops two key insights taken, respectively, from Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and from Charles Sanders Peirce’s pan-semiotic categoreal phenomenology, to propose a “process-relational” “eco-ethico-aesthetics” of existence.
This bibliographic essay introduces the process-relational philosophical tradition. It is excerpt... more This bibliographic essay introduces the process-relational philosophical tradition. It is excerpted from my book "Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times" (Punctum, 2018), where it appears as an appendix. The entirety of the book is available for free download as an e-book from Punctum Books.
Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam (ed. by Antón M. Pazos, Ashgate), 2014
With the growth of environmental awareness and novel forms of "green" or "ecological" religion an... more With the growth of environmental awareness and novel forms of "green" or "ecological" religion and spirituality, new forms of pilgrimage have also emerged. Yet they have has not been well defined, documented, or analyzed. This chapter begins such an analysis by proposing and considering two definitions of "green pilgrimage." The first, “pilgrimage that is ecologically sustainable,” is examined in relation to the broader movement of the “greening of religion,” which in recent years has included growing efforts to make traditional pilgrimage practices more sustainable. The second, “pilgrimage that is ecological in its themes or orientation,” is considered in relation to the growth of environmentalism as a kind of “global civil religion,” and to that of new religious movements whose participants travel to sites considered to be emblematic of a “sacred Earth.” Following an examination of both of these phenomena, I consider some problems and prospects for the further growth of green pilgrimage, particularly in terms of its potential contributions to ecology and peace-building.
Overview of the meanings and uses of "nature," as both concept and referent, in studies of religi... more Overview of the meanings and uses of "nature," as both concept and referent, in studies of religion and in contemporary religious belief and practice. Covers "nature in itself" (including debates over its "social construction"), "nature in and with religion," "religion in and with nature," "nature religion" and "ecological religion," and "religious ecologies in practice" (including Creation care, sacred groves, green pilgrimage, eco-paganism, et al.).
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2016
Commentary on Bruno Latour's "An Inquiry into Modes of Existence" project (part of a special sect... more Commentary on Bruno Latour's "An Inquiry into Modes of Existence" project (part of a special section on AIME in Resilience journal)
Chapter in Temenuga Trofonova, ed., Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (NY: Routledge, 2... more Chapter in Temenuga Trofonova, ed., Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (NY: Routledge, 2018), pp. 42-51.
The era of cinema, some have argued, is ending. As the photo-realist recording of reality, the ca... more The era of cinema, some have argued, is ending. As the photo-realist recording of reality, the capture of reflected light on photochemical film, cinema is already a thing of the past. Defined as the production of moving images, however—as animation and transformation, the continual generation of new forms from material that may be “real,” indexical and mimetic, or that may be entirely composed and composited, reproductions without an original—cinema is still very much alive. In this latter sense, cinema is about morphogenesis: the generation of new forms from old ones, reproduced, reassembled, recomposed, and reimagined. This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it? The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?
Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, The Routledge Handbook o... more Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. This selection features the introductory overview of the volume, Adrián Ivakhiv's and Antonio López's programmatic "When Do Media Become Ecomedia?" and Adrian Ivakhiv's "Three Ecologies: Ecomediality as Ontology." The entire volume is available open access here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecomedia-Studies/Lopez-Ivakhiv-Rust-Tola-Chang-Chu/p/book/9781032009421
A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury u... more A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial.
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
(Complete e-book is available for free download at Punctum Books web site, as is a Reader's Guide.)
Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series, 2013), Jul 2013
"Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both w... more "Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both we and our worlds have changed. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images have moved viewers over the last 120 years in ways that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe. Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media." (If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at aivakhiv@uvm.edu.)
In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to ... more In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to Glastonbury, England and Sedona, Arizona. He discusses their efforts to encounter and experience the spirit or energy of the land and to mark out its significance by investing it with sacred meanings. Their endeavors are presented against a broad canvas of cultural and environmental struggles associated with the incorporation of such geographically marginal places into an expanding global cultural economy.
Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.
A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.
April 2001 384 pages, 24 b& w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / 28.50
Contents I DEPARTURES 1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web 2 Reimagining Earth 3 Orchestrating Sacred Space II GLASTONBURY 4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon 5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces III SEDONA 6 Red Rocks to Real Estate 7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape IV ARRIVALS 8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
This book is about the complicated and provocative ways nature, science, and religion intersect i... more This book is about the complicated and provocative ways nature, science, and religion intersect in real settings where people attempt to live in harmony with the physical environment. Scholars of philosophy, religious studies, and science and technology have been at the forefront of critiquing the roles of religion and science in human interactions with the natural world. Meanwhile, researchers in the environmental sciences have encountered disciplinary barriers to examining the possibility that religious beliefs influence social–ecological behaviors and processes simply because the issue resists quantitative assessment. The contributors to this book explore how scientific knowledge and spiritual beliefs are engaged to shape natural resource management, environmental activism, and political processes.
Contents
1. Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv 2. Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons 3. On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea Joel Robbins 4. Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests Andrew S. Mathews 5. Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico Kristin Norget 6. Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras Catherine M. Tucker 7. Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities Anne Motley Hallum 8. Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps Scott Schnell 9. The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America Andrea Ballestero 10. Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows Marthinus L. Daneel 11. Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Home Browse Authors Browse Titles My Account Title: Claiming Sacred Ground. Author(s): Ivakhiv, A... more Home Browse Authors Browse Titles My Account Title: Claiming Sacred Ground. Author(s): Ivakhiv, Adrian J. A print version is also available by visiting IUP books. Shopping Cart Alphabetical Listing of All Titles. Collections. African ...
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, 2021
An essay on the role of imagination in religion, including the way religion itself is imagined. F... more An essay on the role of imagination in religion, including the way religion itself is imagined. Features a critical assessment of recent books including T. M. Luhrmann's How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others; Jeffrey Kripal's The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge and the same author's Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion; J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei's The Life of Imagination; Revealing and Making the World; David Morgan's Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment; Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters; and Jack Miles's Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story.
Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, 2013
This is the first part of chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wil... more This is the first part of chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). It explores cinema's contribution to the territorialization of nation-states, with a focus here on the Hollywood Western, Alexander Dovzhenko's 'Earth,' and Pare Lorentz's 1930s documentaries. The remainder of the chapter examines alternative territorializations, "existential landscapes," post-Westerns, "kinetic landscapes," the eco-sublime, and much else.
In this article, I address the multiplicity of "posthumanisms" including posthumanism as a period... more In this article, I address the multiplicity of "posthumanisms" including posthumanism as a periodizing gesture, a description of what follows humanism; as a problematique or "predicament" ; and as a move that heralds something else-a "critical" posthumanism, a "techno-philic" or "animaphilic" decentering of the human into a networked entanglement of substances, or a "posthumous" post-posthumanism. Comparing posthumanism to previous "posts" including postmodern-ism, I argue that its nature as a "post" means that posthumanism cannot avoid the "postal system" described by Jacques Derrida, whereby discursively constituted goals fail to reach their intended destinations. Drawing upon a process-relational conception of the human (and of the cosmos), I argue that the human has never been human such that it can be overcome or transcended. Our humanity is always ever in process, which means that any posthumanity will always be unstable and always tied to the realm of "alternative humanisms." There is, however, one form of posthumanism that is worth conceiving as such: this is posthumanism, the "close encounter of the third kind" whereby we humans contend with our ultimate erasure, that of extinction.
This chapter tells the story of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in a series of layered vignet... more This chapter tells the story of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in a series of layered vignettes. Its overarching thesis is that the accident, and the "Zone of Estrangement" created in its wake, constitute a microcosm of the tensions held together within the twentieth century Cold War, within industrial modernity, and within the geological Anthropocene. The event affected relations between Chernobyl's multiple surrounding worlds, of which I focus on four: its immediate environment of forested north-central Polissia in northern Ukraine; the national imaginary of Ukraine as a soon-to-depart republic of the soon-to-implode Soviet Union; the Soviet industrial system as a superpower within a bipolar global military-political order; and the technological modernity of the era increasingly known as the Anthropocene. The accident was not merely an event; it was a "hyper-event." In its confluence of trajectories and flows, it triggered chain reactions that rearranged agential relations operating on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Its reverberations rang far beyond the scope of its apparent origins, permanently rupturing the ontology of its social order and expanding the circle of affective horizons by which its effects reverberated out into the universe. The role of media was/is central in each layer of this hyper-event examined here: in the visuality of the nuclear sublime, media treatments of Ukraine in the post-Cold War global information (dis)order, the cinematics of the postnuclear and posthuman Zone, and visualizations of the Anthropocene.
This article introduces a thematic stream of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journa... more This article introduces a thematic stream of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Media+Environment. Revisiting C. P. Snow's Rede Lecture on the "Two Cultures" of the sciences and humanities, we ask how media today reflect the continuation of this split or its bridging. Articles address media’s relationship to these historical “two cultures” in recent films, visualization technologies, collaborative eco-interventions, and more.
JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION, NATURE AND CULTURE, 2019
This article advances a four-fold contribution to theorizing the relationship between images, rel... more This article advances a four-fold contribution to theorizing the relationship between images, religion, and the Anthropocene. First, it proposes a ‘process-semiotic’ definition of the image as a sensorially perceptible form that mediates agential relations both between humans and between humans and the larger world. Second, it argues for a conception of religion and of spirituality that sees the world as varying on a scale between the ‘polytropic’ and the ‘monotropic’, where ‘tropism’ refers to the ‘turning’ toward sources of sustenance, relief, hope, authority, and the like. This turning is commonly, if not universally, accomplished with the aid of images. Bringing these ideas together, it then advances a typology of ‘image regimes’, each of which establishes relationships between understandings of images and of reality, relationships which can be traced across diverse religious and cultural contexts. Finally, it proposes a set of questions by which to bring ecocritical analysis to expressions of these image regimes in the emerging ‘image-world’ of digital culture, a culture that is coterminous, if not causally linked with, the growing recognition of the Anthropocene. It ends with a brief application of these questions to the Anthropocene Project, an art exhibition, film, and book project by Edward Burtunsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas De Pencier.
ECOCRITICISM 2018: Proceedings of the International Conference on Literature, Arts and Ecological Environment. Ed. by Isabel Ponce de Leão, Maria do Carmo Mendes & Sérgio Lira. Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development. Barcelos, Portugal, 2018. , 2018
This article builds on the Pierre Hadot’s and others’ suggestions that philosophy can and should ... more This article builds on the Pierre Hadot’s and others’ suggestions that philosophy can and should constitute not only an analysis of life, but also a “way of life” concerned with actualizing how to live in accordance with an aesthetics, ethics, and logic grounded in philosophical thought. To do this, it develops two key insights taken, respectively, from Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and from Charles Sanders Peirce’s pan-semiotic categoreal phenomenology, to propose a “process-relational” “eco-ethico-aesthetics” of existence.
This bibliographic essay introduces the process-relational philosophical tradition. It is excerpt... more This bibliographic essay introduces the process-relational philosophical tradition. It is excerpted from my book "Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times" (Punctum, 2018), where it appears as an appendix. The entirety of the book is available for free download as an e-book from Punctum Books.
Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam (ed. by Antón M. Pazos, Ashgate), 2014
With the growth of environmental awareness and novel forms of "green" or "ecological" religion an... more With the growth of environmental awareness and novel forms of "green" or "ecological" religion and spirituality, new forms of pilgrimage have also emerged. Yet they have has not been well defined, documented, or analyzed. This chapter begins such an analysis by proposing and considering two definitions of "green pilgrimage." The first, “pilgrimage that is ecologically sustainable,” is examined in relation to the broader movement of the “greening of religion,” which in recent years has included growing efforts to make traditional pilgrimage practices more sustainable. The second, “pilgrimage that is ecological in its themes or orientation,” is considered in relation to the growth of environmentalism as a kind of “global civil religion,” and to that of new religious movements whose participants travel to sites considered to be emblematic of a “sacred Earth.” Following an examination of both of these phenomena, I consider some problems and prospects for the further growth of green pilgrimage, particularly in terms of its potential contributions to ecology and peace-building.
Overview of the meanings and uses of "nature," as both concept and referent, in studies of religi... more Overview of the meanings and uses of "nature," as both concept and referent, in studies of religion and in contemporary religious belief and practice. Covers "nature in itself" (including debates over its "social construction"), "nature in and with religion," "religion in and with nature," "nature religion" and "ecological religion," and "religious ecologies in practice" (including Creation care, sacred groves, green pilgrimage, eco-paganism, et al.).
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2016
Commentary on Bruno Latour's "An Inquiry into Modes of Existence" project (part of a special sect... more Commentary on Bruno Latour's "An Inquiry into Modes of Existence" project (part of a special section on AIME in Resilience journal)
Chapter in Temenuga Trofonova, ed., Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (NY: Routledge, 2... more Chapter in Temenuga Trofonova, ed., Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (NY: Routledge, 2018), pp. 42-51.
The era of cinema, some have argued, is ending. As the photo-realist recording of reality, the ca... more The era of cinema, some have argued, is ending. As the photo-realist recording of reality, the capture of reflected light on photochemical film, cinema is already a thing of the past. Defined as the production of moving images, however—as animation and transformation, the continual generation of new forms from material that may be “real,” indexical and mimetic, or that may be entirely composed and composited, reproductions without an original—cinema is still very much alive. In this latter sense, cinema is about morphogenesis: the generation of new forms from old ones, reproduced, reassembled, recomposed, and reimagined. This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it? The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?
Music-making manifests variously in different times and places. In Western modernity, it emerged ... more Music-making manifests variously in different times and places. In Western modernity, it emerged as "composition"--the creative activity of individual composer-subjects trained in the rules of composition and praised for their mastery of musical forms. Recently this tradition has been deconstructed by post-Cagean techniques and subsumed in a sea of hybrid, postmodern styles, blurring boundaries between serious and popular, composed and improvised, acoustic and technological, and between various musiclal traditions, with composition replaced to some extent by sampling and mixing. This paper probes and "decomposes" modernity's language of "composition" to get at its suppressed connections to ecological processes. If, as I argue, the soundtrack of postmodernity is the sound of decomposition, what is it that is decomposing around us, and what fungal growth emerge from its decomposing body? What are the implications of modernity's decomposition in the context of the ecotopian visions of green politics and the realities of global capital? The choice, I argue, is between a technocratic path that engineers global fashions and a bioregional path that attends to the decompositional moment of cultural productions and its interaction with local cultural "soils" and traditions.
A response to Graham Harman's Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, part of a book symposium ... more A response to Graham Harman's Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, part of a book symposium featured in the journal Global Discourse (2015).
Along with other forms of enchantment that put in question the notion of a 'disenchantment of the... more Along with other forms of enchantment that put in question the notion of a 'disenchantment of the world,' popular fascination with occult, paranormal, mysterious or 'Fortean' phenomena takes many and varied forms in today's global world. Drawing on theorists of modernity including Latour and Luhmann alongside a Whiteheadian understanding of life as process, this article examines the geographies of such phenomena as ghosts, zombies, conspiracies, and 'Earth energies' in light of their relationship to the separation of the onto-epistemic systems of science, politics, and religion. While contemporary theory has brought sufficient attention to power and desire as factors in the shaping of socio-spatial relations, the study of such Fortean phenomena suggests that more attention needs to be paid to imagination or 'imaginality.' The growing interest in affect and 'non-representational theory' are laudable moves in this direction, but the gap between representational and psychological (including psychoanalytical) theories will remain inadequately bridged without a more refined understanding of the imaginal. This paper proposes a reading of these 'modern marginalia' as processual constructions aiming toward the ideals, respectively, of knowledge, trust, and vision or ultimate truth. Published as a chapter in Orpheus' Glance: Selected Papers on Process Psychology. The Fontareches Meetings, 2002-2017, ed. by Paul Stenner and Michel Weber. Les Editions Chromatika, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 2018.
Short contribution to a special theme issue of Rachel Carson Center Perspectives on "Minding the ... more Short contribution to a special theme issue of Rachel Carson Center Perspectives on "Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies"
Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, 2014
Analysis of the blockbuster 2010 James Cameron film Avatar. The article uses process-relational c... more Analysis of the blockbuster 2010 James Cameron film Avatar. The article uses process-relational cinema theory to focus in on the multiple dimensions of the film's impacts: from its spectacular filmic world and its narrative and discursive structures, which lent themselves to multiple interpretations, to the multiple audience engagements with the film, including those of young fans, indigenous communities (and the anthropologists who study and engage with them), and others.
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives o... more The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it more rather than less difficult to make sense of things. The infodemic has included a rapid spread of (what are being called) conspiracy theories. In this article (which represents work in progress), I outline an intentionally simplified theory about the Covid-19 “infodemic,” which I call a “media reliability theory,” and I provide an example to support it. I then discuss a few of its limitations and suggest the need for a more comprehensive model of the infodemic and of information in general. I call the latter an “infovirology” model, that is, one that focuses on how information spreads and the forms it takes as it does that. Like viruses, information spreads within ecosystems (information or media ecologies) and it is those ecosystems that need better understanding today. I end with some recommendations for a media regimen around the pandemic.
Part 1 of this two-part article compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradig... more Part 1 of this two-part article compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In this concluding part, I relate each of these to recent social-scientific writing on “affective” or “emotional practices” and to a few key sources of my own efforts to articulate a “philosophy as a way of life,” that is, a contemporary askēsis: specifically, to Spinoza (briefly), Gurdjieff (at greater length), and Shinzen Young (whose mindfulness system I used as a basis for my own, presented in part 2 of Shadowing the Anthropocene). I end with an extended practical exercise that brings these strands of thinking together.
The study of emotions, particularly within the field of affective neuroscience, is a complex fiel... more The study of emotions, particularly within the field of affective neuroscience, is a complex field riven by paradigmatic division. In my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, I proposed a way to engage with one’s experience, including one’s emotional or affective experience, within an “eco-ethico-aesthetic” (or “logo-ethico-aesthetic”) practice that could help us deal with the “Anthropocene predicament.” In this two-part article, I reflect on that attempt in light of recent debates in the field of affective neuroscience. In part one, I summarize my understanding of what’s at stake between two approaches to emotions, represented by two recent popularizations of some fairly complex neuropsychological theory: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. While emerging from rival and in some respects opposite schools of thought, both books proclaim “new paradigms” in the understanding of the human mind.
This project examines the relationship between martial arts and nature. It looks at how us martia... more This project examines the relationship between martial arts and nature. It looks at how us martial arts describe nature, how they use nature as a teaching tool, how they imitate al phenomena and animals in their physical techniques, how they teach their practitioners to ysically interact with nature and how they believe and teach the mind and spirit should be enced by and interact with nature. In order to achieve this goal I have interviewed nine ial arts instructors across eight martial arts; this is the project's primary source of mation.
Abstract By metaphorically taking on the themes of imperialism and the suppression of indigenous ... more Abstract By metaphorically taking on the themes of imperialism and the suppression of indigenous peoples, by implicitly criticizing industrial capitalism with its voracious appetite for natural resources, while also participating in it, by linking militarism with ecocide while finding hope only in redemptive violence, and by presenting a religious worldview at variance with that of billions of people, the film Avatar has generated great controversy.
In the last decade, Vermonters have debated the benefits and costs of wind power in the state. Me... more In the last decade, Vermonters have debated the benefits and costs of wind power in the state. Media accounts of the debate have portrayed opposition—particularly by grassroots groups—to utility-scale wind development in Vermont as being primarily aesthetic in nature. In these accounts, activists are represented as being concerned that such development would alter the aesthetic quality of the landscape and be accompanied by ill effects such as reduced tourism and lower property values.
Editor Stephen Depoe, University of Cincinnati, USA ... Associate Editors Anabela Carvalho, Unive... more Editor Stephen Depoe, University of Cincinnati, USA ... Associate Editors Anabela Carvalho, Universidade do Minho, Portugal Anders Hansen, University of Leicester, UK Libby Lester, University of Tasmania, Australia Laura Lindenfeld, University of Maine, USA ... PRAXIS Co-Editors Cindy Spurlock, Appalachian State University, USA (Contact) Nadarajah Sriskandarajah, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden Kitty Van Vuuren, University of Queensland, Australia ... Editorial Board Julian Agyeman, Tufts University, USA Alison Anderson, University of ...
The 3rd edition of the Environmental Humanities Book Chat is devoted to Adrian Ivakhiv’s Ecologie... more The 3rd edition of the Environmental Humanities Book Chat is devoted to Adrian Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, 2013. Anna Åberg, Royal Institute of Technology, and Seth Peabody, Harvard University, discuss the book with moderator Hannes Bergthaller, National Chung-Hsing University and Würzburg University.
Ecologies of the Moving Image was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press as part of it's Environmental Humanities Series in 2013. For further details, visit the publisher's website at https://wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog...
Anna Åberg defended her PhD in 2013 at the Division for the History of Science, Technology and Environment of the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. Her thesis, "A Gap in the Grid," explores the role of natural gas in late 20th century Sweden. She recently received the Fernand Braudel post-doctoral fellowship for a project on fusion energy research in France and the Soviet Union in which she will examine the narrative and imaginative strategies used by different actors to promote, criticize and interpret technological development. In April 2014, she organized a combined film festival and conference, "Tales from Planet Earth," as a cooperation between KTH’s newly-formed Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the Center for Culture, History and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin.
Seth Peabody is a graduate student at Harvard University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, where he is working on a Ph.D. thesis on German "Mountain Films" of the Weimar Period. He has been affiliated with the Berkeley-Tübingen-Wien-Harvard, BTWH, research network on modernity in German culture since 2009, and spent the past year as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His research focuses on German cinema.
Hannes Bergthaller is associate professor at National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, and currently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the University of Würzburg. He is the author of Populäre Ökologie: Zu Literatur und Geschichte der modernen Umweltbewegung in den USA, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2007, and co-editor of Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and US Cultures, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011; with Carsten Schinko. He is immediate past president of EASLCE and book review editor of the journal Ecozon@.
Adrian Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013) is a book that push... more Adrian Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013) is a book that pushes beyond conventional reflections on film and environmental thought. It is, significantly, a book where ‘the conceptual’ and ‘the material’ enter into co-productive relationships in and through Ivakhiv’s examination of cinema and the worlds it creates. Indeed, a central point of Ecologies of the Moving Image is that films do things. That is, they are capable of becoming ‘affectively generative’ in their capacity to ‘elicit a heightened perceptions of our orientation to the socio-ecological’ (page 300), with their ‘moving images [enticing] us toward a kind of movement across the surface of the earth’ (page 115).
In marshaling a sophisticated framework that draws heavily on the process-relational philosophies of Peirce and Whitehead – in addition to geographical, anthropological, and animal studies scholarships – Ecologies of the Moving Image draws our attention not only to the world-making capacities of film, but also to the intricate relations amongst humans, the earth, and the universe. Its scale and scope exceeds the purview of the humanities and offers far-reaching conceptual and methodological insights of interest to anyone attempting to make sense of our contemporary environmental condition. In early October, I sat down with Adrian to talk about Ecologies of the Moving Image, philosophy, and, of course, film.
To read, click on the link: http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/ivakhiv_ecologies_morehouse/
Collective statement by experts on Ukrainian nationalism on the role of far right groups in Ukrai... more Collective statement by experts on Ukrainian nationalism on the role of far right groups in Ukraine’s protest movement, and a warning about the Russian imperialism-serving effects of some supposedly anti-fascist media reports from Kyiv
In etlichen Reportagen und Kommentaren wird in der einen oder anderen Weise die Rolle, der Stelle... more In etlichen Reportagen und Kommentaren wird in der einen oder anderen Weise die Rolle, der Stellenwert und der Einfluss ukrainischer Rechtsradikaler in Kiew überbewertet bzw. fehlinterpretiert. Einigen Berichten zufolge wird die ukrainische proeuropäische Bewegung von ultranationalistischen Fanatikern unterwandert, getragen oder gar übernommen. Bestimmte Kommentare erwecken den irreführenden Eindruck, dass die ukrainischen Proteste von derartigen Kräften erzeugt wurden oder gesteuert werden.
Environmental thought pursues with renewed urgency the grand questions of the humanities: who we ... more Environmental thought pursues with renewed urgency the grand questions of the humanities: who we think we are, how we relate to others, and how we live in the world. But unlike most humanities scholarship, it explores these questions by crossing the lines demarcating human from animal, social from material, and objects and bodies from techno-ecological networks. Humanistic accounts of political representation and ethical recognition are re-examined in consideration of other species. Social identities are studied in relation to conceptions of the natural, the animal, the bodily, place, space, landscape, risk, and technology, and in relation to the material distribution and contestation of environmental hazards and pleasures.
Established in 2007, the Environmental Humanities series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad: film, literature, television, web-based media, visual arts, and physical landscapes are all crucial sites for exploring how ecological relationships and identities are lived and imagined. The Environmental Humanities series publishes scholarly monographs and essay collections in environmental cultural studies, including popular culture, film, media, and visual cultures; environmental literary criticism; cultural geography; environmental philosophy, ethics, and religious studies; and other cross-disciplinary research that probes what it means to be human, animal, and technological in an ecological world.
Bringing research and writing in environmental philosophy, ethics, cultural studies, and literature under a single umbrella, the series aims to make visible the contributions of humanities research to environmental studies, and to foster discussion that challenges and re-conceptualizes the humanities.
Series Editor:
Cheryl Lousley, English and Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University
Editorial Committee:
Brett Buchanan, Philosophy, Laurentian University
Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Environmental Studies, University of Vermont
Cate Sandilands, Environmental Studies, York University
Susie O’Brien, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Laurie Ricou, English, University of British Columbia
Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
For more information, please contact the WLU Press Acquisitions Editor:
Lisa Quinn
Acquisitions Editor
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON
Canada N2L 3C5
Phone: 519-884-0710 ext. 2843
Fax: 519-725-1399
Email: quinn@press.wlu.ca
Від 1991 року Україна була толерантною та інклюзивною країною. Країною, згідно з Конституцією, дл... more Від 1991 року Україна була толерантною та інклюзивною країною. Країною, згідно з Конституцією, для «громадян України всіх національностей». Підписання законів, ухвалених 9 квітня, стане подарунком для тих, хто хоче посварити українців між собою. Вони відштовхнуть багатьох українців, які тепер опинилися де-факто під окупацією. Вони розділять і засмутять друзів України. Урешті, вони нанесуть шкоду національній безпеці України, і насамперед з цієї причини ми закликаємо Вас відхилити їх.
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The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
(Complete e-book is available for free download at Punctum Books web site, as is a Reader's Guide.)
This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media."
(If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at aivakhiv@uvm.edu.)
Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.
A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.
April 2001 384 pages, 24 b& w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / 28.50
Contents
I DEPARTURES
1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web
2 Reimagining Earth
3 Orchestrating Sacred Space
II GLASTONBURY
4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon
5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces
III SEDONA
6 Red Rocks to Real Estate
7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape
IV ARRIVALS
8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
Contents
1. Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction
Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv
2. Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest
Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons
3. On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea
Joel Robbins
4. Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests
Andrew S. Mathews
5. Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico
Kristin Norget
6. Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras
Catherine M. Tucker
7. Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities
Anne Motley Hallum
8. Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps
Scott Schnell
9. The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
Andrea Ballestero
10. Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows
Marthinus L. Daneel
11. Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics
Adrian J. Ivakhiv
This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it?
The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
(Complete e-book is available for free download at Punctum Books web site, as is a Reader's Guide.)
This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media."
(If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at aivakhiv@uvm.edu.)
Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.
A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.
April 2001 384 pages, 24 b& w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / 28.50
Contents
I DEPARTURES
1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web
2 Reimagining Earth
3 Orchestrating Sacred Space
II GLASTONBURY
4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon
5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces
III SEDONA
6 Red Rocks to Real Estate
7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape
IV ARRIVALS
8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
Contents
1. Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction
Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv
2. Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest
Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons
3. On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea
Joel Robbins
4. Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests
Andrew S. Mathews
5. Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico
Kristin Norget
6. Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras
Catherine M. Tucker
7. Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities
Anne Motley Hallum
8. Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps
Scott Schnell
9. The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
Andrea Ballestero
10. Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows
Marthinus L. Daneel
11. Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics
Adrian J. Ivakhiv
This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it?
The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?
Published as a chapter in Orpheus' Glance: Selected Papers on Process Psychology. The Fontareches Meetings, 2002-2017, ed. by Paul Stenner and Michel Weber. Les Editions Chromatika, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 2018.
Ecologies of the Moving Image was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press as part of it's Environmental Humanities Series in 2013. For further details, visit the publisher's website at https://wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog...
Anna Åberg defended her PhD in 2013 at the Division for the History of Science, Technology and Environment of the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. Her thesis, "A Gap in the Grid," explores the role of natural gas in late 20th century Sweden. She recently received the Fernand Braudel post-doctoral fellowship for a project on fusion energy research in France and the Soviet Union in which she will examine the narrative and imaginative strategies used by different actors to promote, criticize and interpret technological development. In April 2014, she organized a combined film festival and conference, "Tales from Planet Earth," as a cooperation between KTH’s newly-formed Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the Center for Culture, History and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin.
Seth Peabody is a graduate student at Harvard University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, where he is working on a Ph.D. thesis on German "Mountain Films" of the Weimar Period. He has been affiliated with the Berkeley-Tübingen-Wien-Harvard, BTWH, research network on modernity in German culture since 2009, and spent the past year as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His research focuses on German cinema.
Hannes Bergthaller is associate professor at National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, and currently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the University of Würzburg. He is the author of Populäre Ökologie: Zu Literatur und Geschichte der modernen Umweltbewegung in den USA, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2007, and co-editor of Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and US Cultures, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011; with Carsten Schinko. He is immediate past president of EASLCE and book review editor of the journal Ecozon@.
In marshaling a sophisticated framework that draws heavily on the process-relational philosophies of Peirce and Whitehead – in addition to geographical, anthropological, and animal studies scholarships – Ecologies of the Moving Image draws our attention not only to the world-making capacities of film, but also to the intricate relations amongst humans, the earth, and the universe. Its scale and scope exceeds the purview of the humanities and offers far-reaching conceptual and methodological insights of interest to anyone attempting to make sense of our contemporary environmental condition. In early October, I sat down with Adrian to talk about Ecologies of the Moving Image, philosophy, and, of course, film.
To read, click on the link: http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/ivakhiv_ecologies_morehouse/
Established in 2007, the Environmental Humanities series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad: film, literature, television, web-based media, visual arts, and physical landscapes are all crucial sites for exploring how ecological relationships and identities are lived and imagined. The Environmental Humanities series publishes scholarly monographs and essay collections in environmental cultural studies, including popular culture, film, media, and visual cultures; environmental literary criticism; cultural geography; environmental philosophy, ethics, and religious studies; and other cross-disciplinary research that probes what it means to be human, animal, and technological in an ecological world.
Bringing research and writing in environmental philosophy, ethics, cultural studies, and literature under a single umbrella, the series aims to make visible the contributions of humanities research to environmental studies, and to foster discussion that challenges and re-conceptualizes the humanities.
Series Editor:
Cheryl Lousley, English and Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University
Editorial Committee:
Brett Buchanan, Philosophy, Laurentian University
Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Environmental Studies, University of Vermont
Cate Sandilands, Environmental Studies, York University
Susie O’Brien, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Laurie Ricou, English, University of British Columbia
Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
For more information, please contact the WLU Press Acquisitions Editor:
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Acquisitions Editor
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