Cosmos & Hearth

Cosmos & Hearth PDF Author: Yi-fu Tuan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816627301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality - world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict - from riots in U.S. cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the "cosmopolitan hearth," that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one's own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being "at home in the cosmos."

Cosmos & Hearth

Cosmos & Hearth PDF Author: Yi-fu Tuan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816627301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book

Book Description
In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality - world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict - from riots in U.S. cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the "cosmopolitan hearth," that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one's own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being "at home in the cosmos."

Textures of Place

Textures of Place PDF Author: Paul C. Adams
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637577
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works. The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos PDF Author: Brian Swimme
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781570750588
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
Following the most recent scientific discoveries about the birth of the universe, this text shows how these new insights replace outmoded ways of seeing the world, bridging the chasm between science and spirituality, the physical realm and the soul. This book will help readers to grasp the larger significance of the human enterprise in this evolving universe.

Hidden Heart of the Cosmos

Hidden Heart of the Cosmos PDF Author: Swimme, Brian Thomas
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 160833807X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description


Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective PDF Author: A. Buttimer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401723923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective presents 20 essays which explore diverse cultural interpretations of the earth's surface. Contrasted with each other and with the potentially cosmopolitan culture of science, these detailed studies of ways in which different cultures conceptualise nature appear in the context of global environmental change. Understanding across cultural lines has never been more important. This book shows how individual cultures see their own histories as offering protection for nature, while often viewing others as lacking such ethical restraints. Through such writing a discourse of understanding and common action becomes possible. The authors come from the places they discuss, and offer passionate as well as scholarly visions of nature within their cultural homes. Audience: This volume is of interest to academics and professionals working in the fields of cultural geography, environmental history, environmental studies, history of environmental ideas, environmental education, landscape and literature, nature and culture. It can be used for courses in the above-mentioned areas and seminars in comparative literature. It can also be used as a complimentary text to provide cultural context to literary readings, and for seminars on cultural aspects of the environment.

Ancient Mythology of Modern Science

Ancient Mythology of Modern Science PDF Author: Gregory Allen Schrempp
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773539891
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Examining the nature of myth-making and its surprising appearance in popular science writing.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures PDF Author: Carlos Rojas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199383324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
With over forty original essays, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures offers an in-depth engagement with the current analytical methodologies and critical practices that are shaping the field in the twenty-first century. Divided into three sections--Structure, Taxonomy, and Methodology--the volume carefully moves across approaches, genres, and forms to address a rich range topics that include popular culture in Late Qing China, Zhang Guangyu's Journey to the West in Cartoons, writings of Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan, the Chinese Anglophone Novel, and depictions of HIV/AIDS in Chu T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man.

Poe and Place

Poe and Place PDF Author: Philip Edward Phillips
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319967886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This collection of fifteen original essays and one original poem explores the theme of “place” in the life, works, and afterlife of Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849). Poe and Place argues that “place” is an important critical category through which to understand this classic American author in new and interesting ways. The geographical “places” examined include the cities in which Poe lived and worked, specific locales included in his fictional works, imaginary places featured in his writings, physical and imaginary places and spaces from which he departed and those to which he sought to return, places he claimed to have gone, and places that have embraced him as their own. The geo-critical and geo-spatial perspectives in the collection offer fresh readings of Poe and provide readers new vantage points from which to approach Poe’s life, literary works, aesthetic concerns, and cultural afterlife.

Inhabited Spaces

Inhabited Spaces PDF Author: Nicole Guenther Discenza
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487500653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In Inhabited Spaces, Nicole Guenther Discenza examines a variety of Anglo-Latin and Old English texts to shed light on Anglo-Saxon understandings of space.

Key Thinkers on the Environment

Key Thinkers on the Environment PDF Author: Joy A. Palmer Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134852908
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Key Thinkers on the Environment is a unique guide to environmental thinking through the ages. Joy A. Palmer Cooper and David E. Cooper, themselves distinguished authors on environmental matters, have assembled a team of expert contributors to summarize and analyse the thinking of diverse and stimulating figures from around the world and from ancient times to the present day. Among those included are: philosophers such as Rousseau, Kant, Spinoza and Heidegger activists such as Chico Mendes and Wangari Maathai literary giants such as Virgil, Goethe and Wordsworth major religious and spiritual figures such as Buddha and St Francis of Assissi eminent scientists such as Darwin, Lovelock and E.O. Wilson. Lucid, scholarly and informative, the essays contained within this volume offer a fascinating overview of humankind’s view and understanding of the natural world.