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| 1538115506
| 9781538115503
| 4.00
| 4
| unknown
| Sep 19, 2019
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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May 22, 2023
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ebook
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| 1552385264
| 9781552385265
| 1552385264
| 3.57
| 14
| Mar 2011
| Apr 06, 2011
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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May 20, 2023
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not set
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May 20, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1575240718
| 9781575240718
| 1575240718
| 4.00
| 1
| Apr 01, 2000
| Dec 01, 2002
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Very mixed bag of essays and chapters in this book. My favourite in this book was likely Lisa Mighetto’s Researching Endangered Species, because it wa
Very mixed bag of essays and chapters in this book. My favourite in this book was likely Lisa Mighetto’s Researching Endangered Species, because it was focused on extinct fish species in various waterways (a significant aspect of my own research project). The most valuable chapters for me were near the beginning of this book. There were quite a few chapters on professionalization pathways for environmental historians outside of academia and public history, including fields like law, engineering, and business (which was the weirdest of the bunch). These were interesting, but strange contributions. Not sure I’d really recommend this book to anyone. I read it for comps, because a number of notable scholars that work at the intersection of public history and environmental history are included in this volume, but the quality of contributions varied a lot in this book (at least as it pertains to the sort of writing that interests me).
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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May 16, 2023
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Jul 28, 2023
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May 16, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1597265136
| 9781597265133
| 1597265136
| 3.80
| 5
| Jul 26, 2011
| Jul 26, 2011
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I found the first few chapters most interesting, especially the section that explored the intersection of theological and religious history with ecolo
I found the first few chapters most interesting, especially the section that explored the intersection of theological and religious history with ecological restoration. There were interesting comments in passing about St. Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, the Benedictines, St Francis, Anselm and so on. There were also some useful sections on Aldo Leopold, and a helpful contextualization regarding his notion of land as “a community to which we belong.” There were some useful overview sections on important academic contributors to ecological restoration such as Eric Higgs, who I also read for comps. I ultimately disagreed with a good portion of this book however, especially its dichotomy between ecocentric restoration as an altruistic orientation and utilitarian restoration as more self-interested. It ultimately lacks an adequate accounting of global inequality. I think an excellent counterpoint to this is Rob Nixon’s chapter in the book Curating the Future, because it takes seriously the heterogeneity of human interests. Humans obviously do not act as a homogenous actor (and this is his fundamental critique of the Anthropocene). Nixon more fully accounts for class interests and imperialist interests in his work, the utilitarian interests of rich imperialist countries are not the same as poor colonized countries or neo-colonies, and growing food to meet the basic needs of humans or generating electricity to operate a public hospital is not the same as expending huge amounts of fossil fuels on extracting gold from ore or operating a munitions factory. Indigenous emphasis on good relations I think is more productive rhetorically than the term ecocentric per se (and certainly compared to altruism and self-interest) The one other thing I found helpful about this book was concrete examples it provided about how struggles for Indigenous self-determination overlapped with ecological restoration (with specific examples). It didn’t quite put it in those terms, but I think decolonization (in the sense of returning control of lands to Indigenous nations) must be fundamental to any project of ecological restoration in North America. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 13, 2023
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Jul 14, 2023
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May 13, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0773512489
| 9780773512481
| 0773512489
| 3.83
| 42
| Aug 29, 1994
| Aug 29, 1994
|
really liked it
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This was a surprisingly interesting book that I read for comps. I was not familiar with Ian McKay before reading this, but glad someone on my comps co
This was a surprisingly interesting book that I read for comps. I was not familiar with Ian McKay before reading this, but glad someone on my comps committee recommended him to me. McKay cited many left theorists early on in this book, and after following up on this, I found out McKay is a prolific historian of the Canadian left and I hope to read more of his work in the future. He basically demonstrates in this book that Maritime folk identity was carefully crafted and dictated from above by a class of elite outsiders who enacted a form of Gramscian hegemony to further its own class interests and perpetuate a form of neo-nationalism and antimodernism, while often benefiting off the backs of poor rural folks whose stories and craft work were transformed into commodities in service of a capitalism very accommodating to the tourist gaze. He traces the work of women who worked as folk music compilers and tastemakers in maritime handicrafts, whose projects worked to hide the urban and capitalist character of Nova Scotia in place of a bucolic and slower-paced traditional society that preserved some imagined notion of a pure past: “The place of praxis in Marx's thought, however, mitigated an élitism which in Folk theorists, with their often violently mournful and backward-looking sense of cultural decay, could run unchecked. The most élitist of the Folk theorists deprived the living human beings among the peasants of all creativity and transformed them into mere vessels of national essence, bearers of cultural treasures whose true value they themselves could never understand. A conservative vision of cultural entropy allied easily with an equally conservative sense of the cultural inferiority of the unlettered Folk. It was in the name of this vivid sense of history as entropy that so much energy could be spent in the search for pristine origins and in spinning out fantasies about what the true “Folk culture” must have been like before its sad decline. If the young Marx's “essences” were inherently dynamic, containing with themselves their own opposites, those of the conservative Folk theorists were inherently static and timeless.” As far as I remember McKay does not comment upon Indigenous crafts in this book, but I think the insights of this book are very conducive to thinking about how capitalism exploits the artistic traditions and craftwork of Indigenous peoples as well, in different but also comparable ways. McKay draws on three major theoretical resources in this book, each of which are intimately related to the other: “Reflecting on the three theoretical currents that have structured this study — Marxian political economy, contemporary cultural studies, and neo-Gramscian theories that attempt to synthesize them both in a new understanding of how modern culture works — I conclude this book by showing how the crisis of the concept of the Folk represents some surprising opportunities for progressive cultural change. In a now classic (if still controversial) 1984 article, the literary critic Frederic Jameson made the important suggestion that postmodernism represents the cultural logic of late capitalism… Aesthetic production today, Jameson argued, has been integrated into commodity production generally: “The frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” As Jameson suggests, the culture of consumption, far from being inconsistent with Marx's analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism, in fact constitutes the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” particularly Nature and the unconscious. For the cultural logic of this epoch he reserves Plato's conception of the “simulacrum” — the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. The “culture of the simulacrum” comes to life, writes Jameson, “in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced,” and the image itself becomes the final form of commodity reification.” And in another place McKay again attempts to explain his book’s attempt to bring together Marxist and Foucauldian analysis (which was a common theme in many of the books on my comps list, and was something I was made interested in as an undergrad student, though I am glad theoretical currents are leaning away from Foucault now, though faculty I encounter are still very wedded to Foucauldian theory): “The position from which I have written this study, and which commends itself to me as the most promising for future academic and political work, represents an attempt to reconcile these two positions — Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy — by combining their strengths in a third, neo-Gramscian framework. I have used this neo-Gramscian framework throughout this book. It might prove useful in other attempts to think through alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” advisedly, because (as Stuart Hall has remarked) “the purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic reputation but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain — to produce a more adequate knowledge of — this historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.” Over the past two decades the Marxian approach has made tremendous gains in its analysis of the Maritimes, and it seems unlikely that a genuinely counter-hegemonic reorganization of regional culture could avoid drawing heavily on this body of theory and evidence. Within this perspective, “ideology” is traditionally a negative term — a word that designates a systematic distortion of reality that strengthens the ruling class by confirming its economic and political privileges. This is surely part of what is going on in Innocence, which has enriched a legion of gift-shop owners, advertisers, and tourism developers.” McKay appeals to Stuart Hall to justify his turn to Foucault: “As Hall suggests, Foucauldian insights into the workings of power/ knowledge can be incorporated into a neo-Marxist approach without necessarily committing the researcher to accepting a self-refuting relativism or abstention from active politics. It is necessary to go beyond the enraged critique of the Folk as bourgeois ideology to a more sophisticated analysis of how this network of things and words actually worked as a body of applied social thought. In particular, such valuable work on the constitution of subject-positions could be brought into relationship with the Gramscian concept of hegemony, because Gramsci, an orthodox Marxist in many respects, nonetheless made a decisive and irrevocable break with both culturalism and economism. Transforming such hypotheses as that of direct translation into politics of the economic needs of the capitalist class, or that of the predominant place of coercion and force in cementing capitalist control over a pliant state, Gramsci opened the way to a far different sense of how power works in a modern capitalist state. By focusing attention on those components of the dominant culture that require the consent of subordinates, Gramsci suggested a culture in constant process, where the state of play between the classes can be changed very rapidly. Against the closed and complete world of essentialist antimodernism, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony stressed incomplete- ness and unevenness, the overlapping and confusion of identities, and (by inference) the non-reducibility of the cultural to the economic. Thus, to go back to our question, “Why go beyond the folk?” the neo-Gramscian might answer — and in my opinion this answer is better than that of either the classical Marxist or the poststructuralist theorist - “Constructed as a subject-position within a new hegemonic framework in the 1920s, the concept of the Folk was and remains a powerful obstacle to the formation of a counter-hegemonic cultural politics, without which a new, profoundly emancipatory politics of class, gender, and racial equality is inconceivable.” A neo-Gramscian approach which has learned from but not capitulated to critical theory can, in resisting the temptations of economistic and culturalist reductionisms, help us understand both the power and fragility of ideologies in a fragmented and fragmenting postmodern world.” I basically inserted the theoretical sections of the book here. Most of the book is not focused on theory, but is far more preoccupied with empirical history. The two are not always well integrated. The theory mostly serves as bookends, but I think it perhaps was necessary. It would have felt repetitive to keep returning to theoretical elaborations throughout the book. I wanted to finish with two excerpts of particular interest to me, which are more empirical in nature. The first is a hilarious story about Lillian Burke, one of the elite tastemakers and overseers of folk handicrafts: “A carpet of hundreds of square feet would occupy ten women working for weeks or even months on end. As was so often the outcome of the scientific redesign of work, conception and execution were separated: conception of the carpets took place in New York, while the rugs were executed in Chéticamp [Cape Breton, Nova Scotia]. Burke would send precise design instructions from her New York gallery, leaving nothing to accident or to the untutored aesthetic choices of her workers. (Burke knew rather little about the actual techniques of making the carpets.) If, having seen finished carpet on the floor, Burke was displeased with some nuance, even one she herself had earlier desired, the colouring would have to be redone. As Anselme Chiasson notes in his fascinating study of the process, Burke would stand on a chair to acquire a good view of the large carpets together, and, indicating a particular person and a particular carpet, would remark, “A little more pinkish there” or “a little more yellowish here.” To make a carpet a “little more pinkish” meant an immense amount of work: it had to be replaced in the frames, the wool with the unsatisfactory tint had to be removed, and other wool had to be tinted to the desired colour and crocheted once again back into the carpet. Small wonder that the exasperated craftswomen would, after Burke had left the room, mock her with their own versions of “A little more pinkish there,” “Yellowish here and there.’” The second excerpt I wanted to share, and perhaps the most interesting thing I encountered in this book, was about one of the folklorists this book focuses on, Helen Creighton, and her anticommunist politics which involved asking the RCMP to investigate Pete Seeger for his communist beliefs: “Perhaps the most revealing and important single document from Creighton’s career as a definer of cultural commonsense was written as part of her intervention against leftist influences in folklore in 1960. Creighton attempted to have the RCMP investigate Pete Seeger, and expressed grave concerns about the political leanings of Edith Fowke, whom she sought to discredit. Any dispute between two professionals in the same small field is, of course, susceptible to a variety of readings. One might, for example, emphasize personal rivalry. This was probably an element in the Creighton—Fowke controversy of 1960. Creighton’s attitude towards Fowke was hardly warm by the late 1950s. Creighton and Fowke came from opposite ends of the country and had different ways of thinking about society. Fowke had grown up in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. She was not a Communist, but she did have an interest in the left, and had been involved in experiments in socialist education on the Prairies. Unlike Creighton, she was interested in songs of industrial protest, which she thought were rather thin on the ground in Canada. Nonetheless she highlighted the extent to which traditional songs in Canada, including those of the east, raised social issues: “A Crowd of Bold Sharemen” was about fishermen who went fishing for cod and turned on their captain when he refused to share the cod livers; and Larry Gorman’s famous songs were often (in her eyes) satirical attacks on employers.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 07, 2023
|
Jul 12, 2023
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May 07, 2023
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0773521577
| 9780773521575
| 0773521577
| 3.89
| 9
| Apr 23, 2001
| Apr 23, 2001
|
really liked it
|
A fairly interesting book to my pleasant surprise. Did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The book’s subjects focuses on the first four national
A fairly interesting book to my pleasant surprise. Did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The book’s subjects focuses on the first four national parks that were established in the Atlantic maritime provinces, during the years 1935-1970. After detailing the history of their establishment (Part 1) MacEachern introduces to his reader James Harkin and the National Parks Branch under his tenure as Commissioner, from the agency’s establishment in 1911 to the 1930s (Chapter 2). The book then describes the process of choosing where to site the parks, expropriation struggles and conflicts, and finally their establishment and development (Chapters 3-6). Then in Part 2, we get chapters about all four parks. We get a glimpse at the role of tourism and business concessions in the park and issues of class and discrimination (Chapter 7), preservation issues regarding vegetation, fish, and other wildlife (Chapter 8), and finally the way these national parks related to communities surrounding them (Chapter 9). One particular passage in Chapter 7 about racial discrimination at the level of the Parks Branch itself is extremely interesting (and also revolting). I will tuck it away as a spoiler in case you want to encounter it in context. “The Parks Branch reacted in like manner to another incident of racial discrimination in the summer of 1960. A professor of theology at Boston University, Harold DeWolf, wrote the owner of the Fundy Park Chalets to confirm a reservation for himself and his wife. There was also, he added, a young couple he wished to invite to come with them: “Canada’s history being what it is, we feel confident that you would treat them well, but we want to make sure, to avoid any possi- bility of embarrassment. The friends of whom I speak are a fine Negro minister and his wife. They might want to take also their young children, but would more likely leave them with relatives. The young man is university-trained, with four degrees, an author and in every sense a cultivated gentleman. His wife is also a cultured person of superior character.”33 DeWolf waited for a response throughout May, throughout June, and finally received it just before leaving for New Brunswick at the beginning of July. Robert Friars, who had bought the bungalow court from the Parks Branch in 1957 and now operated it, confirmed the DeWolfs’ reservation, but noted, “With regard to your friends whom you mentioned ... I feel that I cannot accept the possibility of embarrassment which may arise from this situation. Each day we have over one hundred guests at our site of which a great many are from the New England States, as well as those farther South. For this reason we feel that it would be better not to accommodate your friends.”34 So the DeWolfs travelled to Canada alone, without their young black friends, Dr and Mrs Martin Luther King, Jr. Harold DeWolf was King’s professor and mentor at the Boston University school of theology, and they had stayed friends after King received his Ph.D. there in 1955.36 It would seem that King periodically relied on DeWolf to help him get away from the rigours of the civil rights movement. Biographer Stephen Oates recounts that in 1956, King was feeling run down from a long speaking tour and talked to DeWolf “about arranging a retreat for him in Boston, a sanctuary where he could be alone for ’spiritual renewal and writing.› In 1960, DeWolf (who eight years later would be the only white per- son to speak at King’s memorial service) again tried to help relieve his old friend of the stresses that came with being Martin Luther King. It was a very hectic spring for the young preacher. He was the inspirational leader of student sit-ins in the South against lunch- counter segregation. He had been arrested on trumped-up charges of income tax fraud in February and acquitted by an all-white jury in late May. In June, he met privately with presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy. King never learned why the planned summer vacation to the Maritimes fell through. Harold and Madeline DeWolf travelled alone to Fundy, and while there tried to meet with Robert Friars and Super- intendent J.D.B. MacFarlane, but without success. Upon his return to the US, DeWolf wrote the Parks Branch in Ottawa and told of the of- fending correspondence, concluding, “Mr. Friars’ letter, when it came, while putting the blame on possible guests who might object – as is customary in discrimination practices – quite flatly declined to accept our friends at the Chalets.”38 To its credit, the Parks Branch responded quickly and unequivo- cally. Chief B.I.M. Strong told Superintendent MacFarlane, “The ac- tion of Mr. Friars in refusing accommodation on the basis of colour is certainly something we cannot condone. ... I want you to make it clear to Mr. Friars that his arbitrary decision ... was certainly not in keeping with the democracy and freedom of which Canada is so justly proud. He should also be informed that if another incident of this nature comes to our attention corrective attention will be taken by the Department.”” My favourite chapter overall though was the one on preservation (Chapter 7). It is a good demonstration of just how highly managed park spaces are in terms of how plants, animals, and humans are controlled. In this chapter, MacEachern pays special attention to the role science had in the Maritime parks system, claiming in contrast to existing literature that science was used to justify many managerial interventions including the killing of “surplus” wildlife, large-scale fish stocking programs to attract anglers, Rotenone poisoning to kill local fish and predatory eels, the introduction of non-native trout, DDT pesticide spraying, the removal of dead trees, and most notably running a sawmill in a quiet section of the park to supply another historic park with spruce lumber. There were actually a few chapters that discussed various sawmills that operated on these parks. The main thing this book is lacking is how these parks were part of an ongoing project of colonialism. I think this has to do with the period it focuses on, a period when the ongoing nature of settler colonialism is not addressed because it's relegated to the 19th century and earlier. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 03, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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May 03, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0822342367
| 9780822342366
| 0822342367
| 3.18
| 11
| Jan 01, 2008
| Jan 16, 2009
|
really liked it
|
This is an edited collection composed of papers originally published in the Public History section of a journal called the Radical History Review, whi
This is an edited collection composed of papers originally published in the Public History section of a journal called the Radical History Review, which I occasionally read, though the material in this book was of varying interest to myself. There was a chapter on traditional religion in Cuba that had an interesting premise, but I didn’t enjoy some aspects of the paper… politically I suppose. There was also a chapter on Kathmandu and another on Oaxaca, both places of interest to me, particularly the prior because my master's research was done in the context of Nepal. The chapters on the anglo-settler colonies were likely of greatest interest to me. There’s a fairly interesting chapter on the once-called Canadian Museum of Civilization. I recall going there as a middle-schooler on a field trip. It is now called the Canadian Museum of History. It’s interesting to see how long Indigenous nations have been struggling with museums on this issue, and the wins they have had over the decades. Anti-imperialist critiques of the museum have come from other sectors also; there’s this interesting mention of a boycott of a ROM exhibit entitled "Into the Heart of Africa": “A year later, equally fierce debates erupted around Into the Heart of Africa, organized by Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. In retrospect, the boycott of this exhibit seems to have been sparked more by racial tensions in Toronto than by the exhibition’s curatorial content, which put forward a critique of the colonial origins of the Royal Ontario Museum’s African collections and the complicity of Victorian Canadians in the British imperial project. These two painful episodes marked a turning point in Canadian museology, and both contributed in a significant degree to the articulation of a new, pluralist museum ethos.” I will just interject here to say there are still many objects in ROM collection that have been called to be rematriated to no effect. There is an interesting account of conservative backlash on a museum exhibit in Australia that dealt with Indigenous dispossession and colonial violence: “Since it opened in 2001 the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra has averaged about eight hundred thousand visitors per year, both foreign and domestic. These are very good numbers for a country of just twenty million, and they reflect the successful reorientation of the museum sector away from education and toward leisure and tourism in the last few years, as well as the museum’s role in the national capital circuit. But the museum has been the object of attacks. There is a kind of inevitability about these set pieces. Initially, there was quite strong media criticism: one reporter insisted that the NMA represented “A Nation Trivialized.” Conservatives both in and outside the museum condemned it for its “sneering ridicule at white history.” Some visitors claimed that it was “profoundly offensive,” “letting the country down, [with] too much ‘blackfella history.’ ” One of the most controversial areas is the section in the Gallery of First Australians which deals with dispossession and death and the problematic nature these events pose for object-based institutions in terms of representation. The main caption for this exhibit states: “Guerilla wars were fought along a rolling frontier for a century and a half.” This caption reflects al- most thirty years of scholarship, but according to Peter Read, a scholar of Aboriginal history, it is, “if anything, a pretty conservative depiction of frontier violence.”” These are some other excerpts from the book, mostly from the introduction: “For countries that have been linked by colonial or imperial bonds, historical memory is often contested between metropole and colony (or for- mer colony). For former colonial powers like Britain or France, their own glorious tales of nation-building usually conveniently underplay or ignore the role played by their overseas possessions—and most particularly, the slave labor on Caribbean plantations. This point has been brilliantly argued by Caribbean scholars such as Eric Williams and C. L. R. James but has occupied a marginal place in much European historiography. French historians—even radical or Marxist ones—have been notably uncomfortable about discussing the history of slavery in the French empire and its repercussions in both metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean. One moment when the silence was—at least momentarily—broken came when two Caribbean heroes of African descent—Toussaint Louverture of Haiti and Louis Delgrès of Guadeloupe—were installed in the hallowed Pantheon in Paris. Laurent Dubois’s essay, “Haunting Delgrès,” uses this unlikely event to explore how the legacy of slavery and racial oppression has been understood—and silenced—in France and the French Caribbean.” “The conflicts that animate these stories reflect some of the contemporary tensions and contradictions facing public historians who seek to en- gage public audiences and win their favor and financial support, even while telling them stories that may upset them, stories they may not wish to hear… such tensions can be traced even further back in these nations’ histories: they also underlay John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s censorship and destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center depicting Marx and Lenin in the 1930s.” “Some of the most far-reaching challenges to Western museology have come from the scholarly disciplines most implicated in its practices— history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists were forced to question their own epistemologies and disciplinary practices in the wake of decolonization, the Vietnam war, and the “new social movements,” in particular the newly invigorated movements of indigenous or “first” peoples, particularly in the Americas and the Antipodes. Although indigenous groups have been challenging and resisting Western and colonialist categorization and systems of knowledge production since the 1500s, these efforts have become more visible and urgent, starting in the 1960s and 1970s.” I read this book fairly quickly for comps, so this reflection certainly does not do it justice, nor the brief and hurried time I spent with this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 30, 2023
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Jul 2023
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Apr 30, 2023
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0262082373
| 9780262082372
| 0262082373
| 3.91
| 235
| Apr 18, 1995
| Jan 01, 1995
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really liked it
|
A fairly interesting book on public history in urban environments. Hayden describes a really cool project in LA called the Power of Place that brought
A fairly interesting book on public history in urban environments. Hayden describes a really cool project in LA called the Power of Place that brought a lot of neglected and overlooked communities (racialized, migrant, women, etc.) into the commemorated domain of public history. The first part of the book focuses on theory that suggests new ways to conceptualize cultural landscapes in urban contexts, the relationship between the social, political, and aesthetic — particularly as it pertains to ethnic and women’s history. It theorizes on memory in relation to place, and the ways public history connects to architectural preservation, environmental protection, and public art. There's a lot of Henri Lefebvre in Chapter 2 in case you're into that sort of marxist theory. The second part of the book focuses on praxis, with real case studies from LA where most residents are women and people of colour. Another chapter focuses on working class lives and landscapes, in ranches, agricultural fields, and factories. Another chapter focuses on the life of an African American midwife, formerly enslaved and later freed in court. There’s a chapter on a union hall used by Latina and Russian Jewish garment workers, one on Little Tokyo, Japanese American immigrants, and the Japanese American National Museum. A little passage from the introduction: “These chapters sketch the story of Los Angeles as African American, Latina, and Asian American women and their families have known it, the often overlooked history of the majority of Los Angeles citizens. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to make an urban life for themselves, their families, and communities. “Storytelling with the Shapes of Time” sums up the transformations of roles and expectations that these projects demanded from many of the participants, and explores some of the obstacles to community processes and interdisciplinary work, as well as some of the rewards.” A few other excerpts I appreciated: "Broadway also included the Bradbury Building, an architectural treasure with a romantic interior courtyard, constructed by an obsessed draftsman of the 1890s who wanted to test ideas about architecture for a socialist city that were expressed in Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward." "Edward Soja’s fascinating Postmodern Geographies portrays Los Angeles as the product of the spatial machinations of international capital, decipherable only by a new kind of Marxist analysis that stresses the regional and global structure of economic power and emphasizes space (geography) rather than time (history). ...Mike Davis’s absorbing City of Quartz also provides an extensive analysis of the white, male power structure, its police force and prisons, as well as its cultural apparatus and spatial aggressiveness. Missing in both Postmodern Geographies and City of Quartz are sympathetic accounts of women and ethnic communities, situated historically as well as spatially. The old conquest histories of the city relied on an outworn ideal of a universal, white male citzen, and relegated women and people of color—workers who should be at the center of any city’s story—to the fringes. For a new spatial analysis to be balanced, the active roles of diverse workers searching for a livelihood in the city need to be discussed as fully as the decisions of banks, corporations, police, and the military.* But Soja writes: “The centre has thus also become the per- iphery, as the corporate citadel of multinational capital rests with consummate agility upon a broadening base of alien populations.” In context, these “alien” populations seem to be new immigrants, but Soja has little interest in distinguish- ing them from people of color who have lived and worked in the city for a long time. He conflates them all, and women, in another description of the labor force: “the reserve army of migrant and minority workers (augmented by a massive entry of women into the workforce) has grown to unprecedented levels.’’" ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 26, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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Apr 26, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1558492429
| 9781558492424
| 1558492429
| 4.00
| 7
| May 11, 2000
| Apr 24, 2000
|
it was amazing
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4.5 stars. I read this book for comps, which is finished now (yay!) but I have quite the backlog of books I wish to comment upon briefly on goodreads f 4.5 stars. I read this book for comps, which is finished now (yay!) but I have quite the backlog of books I wish to comment upon briefly on goodreads from those lists. I did not expect to finish reading all the books on my lists but somehow I did, though I read through some books extremely quickly and less than carefully. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. You might have had a professor like James Green who spends quite a bit of time bragging about all the time he spent around renowned celebrity academics. Perhaps you find this sort of namedropping bothersome. I, however, love it. I had a professor like that two years ago and enjoyed his class very much. Green spends many pages in this book describing his experiences rubbing shoulders with various celebrated Marxist and New Left historians like Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson. Green seems to be in the New Left camp himself, and I have many political disagreements with him, but I still enjoy reading stuff by people like him. It was interesting to see how university history departments changed during the course of his academic life, and the various struggles that were involved in that transformation. I happened to arrive at Green’s excellent May Day chapter on International Workers’ Day itself which was excellent happenstance. May Day ended up being so rainy and wet though (as it was last year when I decided to stay home). The turnout was rather low understandably, and by the end I was exhausted, drenched, cold, and covered in random paint stains from the bleeding signs I was holding. But afterwards I ended up at a wonderful Myseum exhibit called Patuloy ang Laban (The Fight Continues) on the history of Filipino activism in Toronto that my comrades put together, and it was so re-energizing to be there. Green talked a lot about public history in this book and how historians can produce history in support of workers’ struggles and aims, and how monuments and May Day rallies are capable of memorializing important figures and events in working class history. It was so cool to see a manifestation of something like that in real life by Filipino diaspora and allies in my community, who work closely with Filipino migrant workers, in some cases are Filipino migrant workers and international students, and so on, coming together to create an exhibit that was so engaging. The exhibit was crowded the entire time I was there, shoulder to shoulder. And so many people were so interested in the little parts of it, and it was honestly beautiful with so much wonderful art. It convinced me that artistic public history interventions, organized by activist groups themselves, are powerful tools in political struggle and worth time, attention, and organizing energy. ...more |
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Apr 24, 2023
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| 0820343927
| 3.85
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| Nov 01, 2012
| Nov 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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An excellent work that draws on Bourdieu’s theories to analyze the increasing neoliberalization of stream restoration in the United States. The first c An excellent work that draws on Bourdieu’s theories to analyze the increasing neoliberalization of stream restoration in the United States. The first chapter is a great overview of the work of Bourdieu that is relevant to the book’s arguments. Lave writes: “In this book I build that bridge on the analytical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, whose insistence on the centrality of political economy, power, and domination makes his work very compatible with political ecologists’ typical concerns. …Bourdieu’s key intervention in STS was also one of the first formulations of his field concept, which, along with capital and habitus, forms the heart of his analytical framework (Bourdieu 1975). A field is a bounded, structured social arena that provides a particular set of opportunities and constraints to those who participate in it: religion, science, art, and the state are the core fields, but he also acknowledged the utility of field analysis for understanding the dynamics and structure of any field of practice, from amateur boxing to beauty pageants… To understand the specificity of a field, Bourdieu argues, focus on the forms of power and prestige (capital) that are valued within it and the particular ways in which it shapes the conscious and subconscious practice of participants (the habitus it instills). Struggle—to delimit the boundaries of the field, to determine conditions of entry, and, most especially, to define the types of capital of most value — is a defining feature of Bourdieu’s profoundly agonistic (combative) field concept. This struggle takes place within the hierarchical structure provided by fields, each of which is organized around an axis whose poles Bourdieu defines as autonomous and heteronomous. At the autonomous end of any field are those actors whose production is controlled most thoroughly by the forms of capital specific to that field; at the heteronomous end are those whose production is shaped primarily by outside forces (figure 1.5). For example, in the literary field, writers with deep artistic credibility but few readers would sit at the autonomous end of the field; Danielle Steele would reign at the heteronomous pole. The relative autonomy of a field can be measured by “the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers,” including those closest to the heteronomous pole, who are “therefore the most responsive to external demands” (Bourdieu 1983, 321).” The main guy this book sort of revolves around is Dave Rosgen, who's sort of this outsider maverick hydrologist. He's a bit of an entrepreneur that develops Natural Channel Design courses that get widely adopted (via market contacts) by several federal agencies like the EPA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Forest Service. Rosgen is disdained within academic restoration science circles as a charlatan with a PhD that required no course work and was supervised by someone who was effectively his employee. He also refuses to subject his publications to peer review, nor transparently share his data sets for review. The conflict that emerged between Rosgen and more established restoration scientists in academia has come to be known as the Rosgen Wars. Lave then takes Chapter 2 to provide some context for these skirmishes. She gives a little primer on what stream restoration science is about and what Rosgen’s Natural Channel Design is like as well. Lave then introduces her reader to Rosgen, how he relates to the field of stream restoration, and the remarkable shift he was able to actualize in the internal power structure of the field — drawing particularly from a case study in North Carolina (Chapter 3). Next, we follow Rosgen as he climbs in legitimacy as his critics descend. We look at what sort of claims and counterclaims were made in this contestation, and why no one has bothered accumulating data to resolve what are seemingly empirical questions in the debate. We get a good glimpse here of Bourdieu’s theory in action as we follow various forms of capital and credentials deployed, ranging from practical experience, empirical knowledge, modelling skills, and academic status (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, Lave explains how Rosgen was able to garner his support base by focusing on day-today practice of stream restoration, and how Natural Channel Design has become central to stream restoration and the field’s new habitus, as Bourdieu would call it. After this, Lave takes time to propose why Rosgen’s habitus prevailed, and she believes it has to do with the forces of political economy at the time which favoured “market-based environmental management” as well as the “neoliberalization of the production of scientific knowledge claims.” (Chapter 6). Finally, Lave’s conclusion returns to how the field concept productively brings together STS and political ecology, and then speculates that the Rosgen Wars are just the start, and neoliberalization will likely spread further into the environmental sciences. ...more |
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Apr 21, 2023
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| 1773630709
| 9781773630700
| 1773630709
| 4.00
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| unknown
| Nov 10, 2018
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it was amazing
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I loved this book. It was so interesting. It’s not really an academic book per se, though it’s written by academics and their children. I don’t think
I loved this book. It was so interesting. It’s not really an academic book per se, though it’s written by academics and their children. I don’t think the professor overseeing the particular comps list this was on wanted this to be on the list, but I’m glad I kept it on. It describes this very ordinary seeming urban park in Vancouver and the various ways it was part of the larger settler-colonial project of Canada. The book talks about various forms of racism, Indigenous discrimination, sexual and physical violence, community, recreation, use of psychotropic substances, and all sorts of other things that happened at this park and ways to think about that complex assemblage of stuff happening on a small patch of land. There is also a running photography project that threads through the book, as well as historical work that looks into the history of the land, both in colonial deeds and the process of Indigenous dispossession that made this park possible. I’ll just include some excellent excerpts from the introduction: “This is a book about parks and how parks act on stolen land. It is a book about occupation, which we mean in both senses: first, the occupation of Indigenous land by settlers, and second, how parks are occupied by pluralities of users. Our submission here is that thinking closely about the latter can shed some light on the former; that is, looking carefully at what parks do — how they behave and how they are deployed in cities — offers unique opportunities to catch a glimpse of a decolonial horizon. Parks are particularly fertile places to talk about land. Whether referring to national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks or humble urban patches of grass, people tend to speak of parks as unqualified good things — maybe the best possible use of land. It is easy to think of parks as land that makes all of us better. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as “natural” oases, and urban parks are often spoken of as “nature” in the midst of the city — but that’s absurd. Parks, urban or not, are exactly as “natural” as the roads or buildings around them, and they are just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism on an everyday basis. Parks occupy all kinds of middle grounds: they are not private property, they are called “public” places, and they are highly regulated. People like to think of parks as part of the “commons,” but they normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Cities are defined by land management policies; they discipline movement and demarcate who can occupy which space, why, where, how and when. Parks are a certain kind of property — usually owned by a level of the state and thus creations of law — but they are also subject to all kinds of cultural presumptions about what they are for and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks as they are currently constituted are always colonial enterprises. As four white settlers living on səliwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and xʷməθkʷəəm (Musqueam) territory, we are interested in our relationships with this land and how to we might challenge and change our modes of living as colonial visitors. We encounter parks in everyday and bodily senses, and most particularly, we encounter one small park beside our house every[…]” “We encounter parks in everyday and bodily senses, and most particularly, we encounter one small park beside our house every day: Victoria Park, known mostly as Bocce Ball Park. This book is one small attempt to confront our colonial attitudes toward land and to remake our relationships with parks, especially Victoria Park. There are four threads entwined in this project: 1. The first thread considers the uses and histories of parks (and specifically Bocce Ball Park) to understand and complicate how they have been, and are, deployed. We want to throw the occupation of parks into doubt. 2. The second piece notes the complicity of parks in creating and regulating narratives of control and domination that are bound up with race, class and gender. Parks, including Bocce Ball Park, are inflected heavily by performances of whiteness, and we want to continually poke at that. 3. At the same time, parks are key instruments of settler colonialism. Parks make arguments about the occupation of land and, as such, are colonial exercises. We ask how parks — and Bocce Ball Park in particular — actively construct colonial relations. 4. Finally, we are curious about how parks, and Bocce Ball Park especially, can be remade. Much is laudable about parks, and we are especially interested in how the overlapping and shared uses, the malleable sovereignties and the fluidity of parks might point to new ways to think about land and occupation.” There’s also a closing section called “Forward!” written by Glenn Coulthard. ...more |
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May 23, 2023
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Apr 16, 2023
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| 1138241164
| 9781138241169
| 1138241164
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Mar 12, 2018
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars. An edited collection that I did not expect to enjoy so much. A lot about how industrial heritage has been used to develop working class iden 4.5 stars. An edited collection that I did not expect to enjoy so much. A lot about how industrial heritage has been used to develop working class identity, bring labour organizing and unions into public history, and memorialize leftist politics. But also the weird ways it interfaces with tourism and capitalism. One of my favourite chapters is on France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In this chapter, Marion Fontaine describes how mining heritage became a celebrated cause of Socialist politicians in the region to promote the region’s rich tradition of labour movements and an electoral history of Socialists and Communists administering the majority of the region’s mining communities. If I have time in the future, I'll have to return to this review to comment more extensively. ...more |
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May 23, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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| 0773551255
| 9780773551251
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| 3.88
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| Aug 09, 2017
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really liked it
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I was assigned to read this book in an environmental history class last year, but the reading load was very heavy that semester so I only strategicall
I was assigned to read this book in an environmental history class last year, but the reading load was very heavy that semester so I only strategically read the Intros and Conclusions of both the book and its individual chapters. I had a chance to re-read through the whole thing for comps. For some reason, this book was not a very memorable read for me, in the sense, that I often struggle to remember what its about. I’ve been told though that Campbell is a bit of a gadfly within the Canadian Parks system, which is often annoyed by Campbell’s interpretation of Parks Canada history, though at the same time takes it quite seriously. Here, Campbell looks at notable Canadian historic sites — five of the largest in the country: (1) L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland: so-called “gateway to the New World” and Canada’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, its a medieval Norse settlement in maritime North America, which Campbell says erases Indigenous histories while also missing an opportunity to underscore the critical issues of climate change and species exhaustion. (2) Grand Pré, Nova Scotia: another UNESCO Site remembered mostly as Acadian farmland made possible through the draining of Bay of Fundy saltwater marshes in the 17th and 18th centuries. It offers a way of underscoring the environmental costs of industrial agriculture which completely surrounds the site, and the early logics of dominance over nature embodied by settler land relations that also existed in Acadian agricultural practices. (3) Fort William, Ontario: a fur trading post at the northwest tip of Lake Superior that was reconstructed in the 1970s at some distance from its original site, for the sake of tourist access. More than anything it is an imagined wilderness developed by a private contractor and devoid of content that addresses the site’s role in historic environmental change. (4) Forks of the Red River, Manitoba: the only one I believe I’ve visited out of the five, its an urban park that represents patches of various historical periods while primarily serving as a site of post-industrial gentrification and market economics. (5) Bar U Ranch, Alberta: Campbell points out that there has been oil and gas production in this area almost as long as there have been ranches, and this site is emblematic of the great Canadian resource frontier and the extractive economy to which it is committed. I think what Campbell does is interesting because in this book she is emphasizing connections between historic sites and ongoing economic activity occurring around these sites and its environmental implications. These sites should not remain imagined as insulated places devoid of context, but in relation to the contemporary world that surrounds them. She comments on this Canadian heritage advertisement by Cenovus: “Sites that heroize imperial and industrial expansion without environmental context quietly sanction and perpetuate the same ethos in contemporary Canada. A recent advertising campaign by oil company Cenovus showed an unbroken expanse of boreal forest overlain with a chronology of Canadian technological achievements: the telephone, the transcontinental railway, the Canadarm. The message is that the land inspires our actions but is never affected or harmed by them – a message that is simply untrue. We need to stop divorcing the historical record from current economic activity, a rhetorical romance of wilderness from active resource development. Yet our system of protected places has merely encouraged this self-deception. This is precisely the paradoxical raison d’être we have always assigned to our national parks: “dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education, and enjoyment [while] maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for future generations.” Secondly, Campbell emphasizes the role historic sites play in constructing Canada’s national identity, citing Benedict Anderson: “As Benedict Anderson observed, easily reproduced images of landmarks provide the nation-state with “a sort of pictorial census,” one of several tools by which to foster an imagined community between people who will never meet face to face, but among whom the state wishes to cultivate a feeling of membership or belonging in a common heritage and territory. In short, the environment is essential to this national narrative, as territory, storehouse, and symbol. But there is no political purpose served by drawing attention to the environmental consequences of nation building. Instead, the narrative must focus on national growth without cost. While scholars of public history have focused on the civics of commemoration, we need to think about the environmental implications of constructing a national identity and the environmental messages embedded in – or possible for – history education.” While a grad student, academics were dismissive about public history and its possibilities, whereas Campbell thinks (rightly in my view) that they are important sites of political contestation: “When I was a graduate student in the public history program at the University of Western Ontario, a professor in the history department tried to get me to rethink my chosen path. “Why,” he asked, in an ac- cent coloured by a few years at Cambridge, “would you want to spend your career in a gingham dress working a butter churn?” Clearly, that was not how historians were to tell Canadians anything of substance, let alone how the future ought to look. Professional bigotries aside, can historic sites challenge the status quo, engage in political debate, or merely reify positive and well-sanctioned stories? Public historians may speak to more people, but they are more constrained than their university counterparts by a wider range of political and material factors, both immediate and ideological. There is the capricious nature of government funding (which has resulted in a problematic emphasis on marketing and sites-for-rent, as we’ll see) and the burden of bureaucratic oversight. There is the relative availability of different kinds of artifacts; a disproportionate number of forts and fur trade posts, inherited from earlier generations of designation, compared to stories of the urban poor or immigrant groups or those marginal from central Canada. There is the obligation to cultivate political allegiances and public participation, the result being “heritage”: a gentler, more appealing form of history.” “Scholarship on public history and heritage has focused on the politics of commemoration: how and what people decide to remember and celebrate; who is involved in or excluded from the decisions; how this changes over time; and how physical monuments become lieux de memoire or “structural supports” of public memory” She mentions a site like the Gooderham & Worts distillery district, which I think has been a heritage site that has functioned similarly to Forks of the Red River as an even more exalted site of gentrification and market economics. The historical interpretation I’ve seen there speaks little of class dynamics of workers there, the serious inequalities and dangers they faced. I am interested in this site because Gooderham & Worts also owned a watermill on the Missinihe (Credit River) in what is now Meadowvale Village in Mississauga (the first Ontario Heritage Conservation District) and had a retail emporium in the area that rivalled Eaton’s at the time which was operating in Toronto. The environmental history of these sites is severely lacking, and I wonder if there is government incentive to fund future historical interpretation that underscores the military and environmental violence of colonialism, or if that will have to happen through direct action (as many activists have already done around Toronto). ...more |
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| Jul 12, 2019
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Unfortunately, not the sort of book I wanted to read for comps. I have no one to blame but myself for not making more effort to choose a book. I wish
Unfortunately, not the sort of book I wanted to read for comps. I have no one to blame but myself for not making more effort to choose a book. I wish I had found some way to justify Mike Davis's City of Quartz instead. For some reason I was expecting a more critically oriented book, that thought through the implications of tourism's interactions with cultural heritage and various processes of commodification. There was a bit of that, but a portion of this book felt like it was about how to make waterway areas more profitable tourist attractions. It was a mixed bag. One chapter I did sort of find interesting was Elena Kochetkova's one on the Soviet heritage canal around its Finnish borderlands. Stephen Daniels' chapter had interesting mentions of how the Trent River was featured in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Eliot's Mill on the Floss, and D.H. Lawrence's Son and Lovers, as well as some mention of a museum with a mill site containing Arkwright's cotton mill. The Giada Peterle and Francesco Visentin chapter on the Po Delta waterscape also covered a lot of its literary connections to Gianni Celati's narratives (an Italian writer who knew Italo Calvino and Carlo Ginzburg). Also surprisingly quite a number of references to Erik Swyngedouw, who is a Marxist of sorts who wrote about hydropower under Franco's fascist regime in Spain. But some of the practical stuff on tourism in this book surprised me a little. Felt like I was in a business class (or what I imagine they're like having never been in one).
...more
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Mar 13, 2023
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| 1317217969
| 9781317217961
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| 4.40
| 5
| unknown
| Aug 12, 2016
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really liked it
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As any edited volume is like, there were some chapters I enjoyed more than others. But overall, an interesting book, edited by Jennifer Newell, who te
As any edited volume is like, there were some chapters I enjoyed more than others. But overall, an interesting book, edited by Jennifer Newell, who teaches Museum Anthropology at Columbia and is the curator of Pacific Ethnography at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The book is divided up into four sections or ‘trajectories’. The first, called “Welcoming new voices: opening museums” is about projects of decolonization, climate justice, and the authorization of diverse forms of knowledge including subaltern voices and communities resisting injustice. There are chapters here written by residents of islands that will soon be submerged because of climate change, stories about how artifacts have revived cultural practices lost in Indigenous communities, exhibits on climate migration, and so on. Perhaps my favourite chapter in both this section and the whole book was Rob Nixon’s. One dichotomy that often exists in both conservation and environmental discourse more broadly is the one that asks whether conservation is done to fulfill ‘self-interested’ human goals or ‘altruistically’ ecological goals – whether it is cultural or natural. Rob Nixon’s text challenges this dichotomy by emphasizing the heterogeneity of human interests. Nixon identifies two framings of environmental interpretation in tension with one another: environmental justice and the Anthropocene. Nixon thinks about these two issues through the artifact of the chainsaw – originally a medical instrument of the Scottish Enlightenment that was taken up by the Industrial Revolution and later facilitated widespread deforestation. He compares two videos about the chainsaw. The first is a David Attenborough BBC clip of the lyrebird, shown mimicking the sounds of other birds, tourist cameras, car alarms, and then most notably, the sound of chainsaws. Nixon argues the chainsaws in this video remain abstract; the viewer does not know who is holding the chainsaw. Rather the chainsaw stands in for a monolithic humanity that is encroaching on a nonhuman world. The second video is of an Israeli Defense Force soldier holding a chainsaw a cutting down a Palestinian family’s olive trees to the shouts of protest and despair from local Palestinian residents. Here, there is no unified species actor representing a monolithic humanity. The chainsaw does not merely represent human encroachment of the non-human, but it is also a settler technology that enables forceful seizure of territory by way of felling trees. The second part of this book is called “Reuniting nature and culture.” It challenges human exceptionalism, proposes things like “ecological museology”, highlights exhibits on bicycles, water, and food security, approaches sea history from the perspective of a turtle, displays a tracking collar worn by a dog who saved people from a climate-induced flood, and also a chapter on extinction focused on a snail which is the last of its species. The third part is called “Focusing on the future” and it has chapters on coral collections and ocean acidification, food security and agriculture under a changing climate, a chapter by Sharon Willoughby a curator of sorts at a royal botanic gardens that describes the strange garden tool of a cucumber straightener, and finally some ways that art galleries have been theming exhibits around the Anthropocene. The fourth part is entitled “Representing change and uncertainty” and it focuses on the shift away from absolute and universal truths. The first chapter in this section examines an Inuit artifact made from a seal gut as well as an art project that stretched an animal gut over a car as commentary on unequal global exchanges driven by fossil fuels. There is another chapter on how Swedish museums have been engaging in environmental change, and another chapter on a fish museum exhibit on climate change that imagines New York under water. Finally there is a piece on climate change in the media beyond museums and its relation to slow media like museums. The final chapter is about how the Anthropocene is engaged with in museum exhibitions and how an old coal-mining village has become both a tourist site for both cultural heritage and as a resource for climate science research. ...more |
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May 23, 2023
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Mar 07, 2023
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| 3.97
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| Apr 25, 2003
| Jan 01, 2003
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really liked it
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Comps reading. A clarifying book about what ecological restoration is about. In my view, ecological restoration in settler colonial countries like Can
Comps reading. A clarifying book about what ecological restoration is about. In my view, ecological restoration in settler colonial countries like Canada would involve the end of colonial occupation, but that is not what this book is about. However, there are obviously parallels. When we speak of ecological restoration some people ask, what baseline are we restoring a landscape to? Some want to restore it to a time before human contact, a point in time that keeps getting pushed back farther and farther in North America, as it becomes evident humans have been living here for a very long time. It would be difficult to adequately retrieve what those landscapes were like, and why would we want to restore it to such a state, when humans would continue to live there? This also is little different that projects of Indigenous dispossession and removal used to create various national parks in the U.S.. Others want to restore landscapes to the early 19th century, when deforestation was still quite minimal and settlers imagine it was a bucolic time (and this is a lot of what heritage conservation is about). And then others have said the baseline should be before colonial contact. Higgs rejects the notion that ecological restoration is about returning a landscape to a previous state or baseline. But he does think there is a central role for the historian and ecological restoration is in many ways a historical project because the two main goals for him are ecological integrity and historical fidelity, where the landscape still has a comprehensible continuity with its past. Then it is not a romantic project that attempts to return to Eden, but it is one that does not erase its past (Higgs likes citing Disney’s Wilderness Lodge as an example for this a lot for some reason lol). I think what becomes evident is that many interventions that fall under the guise of 'ecological restoration', at least ones done on a scale that is of consequence, are done under sanction of a fairly powerful state that has the coercive means to decide questions like the one I raised above. The book starts in Jasper National Park and with Higgs being questioned why ‘pristine wilderness’ would need restoration. Higgs reminds the reader that humans had been using and living in the area for many thousands of years and that wilderness is an idea that has more to do with our own understanding of nature than what is actually on the ground. He then asks what distinguishes a park like Jasper from Disney’s Wilderness Lodge? (Chapter 1) Then we have a good overview of the theoretical issues at stake in ecological restoration and as well as issues of praxis (Chapters 2-3). These were the most useful chapters for me and ones I will likely return to. There are some interesting case studies sprinkled through these sections including the Dorney Ecology Garden at the University of Waterloo, which I walked by when visiting a friend last summer who is studying there. Chapter 4 is also useful for thinking about how restoration is connected with history. I am an aspiring historian and so it was interesting to see the way history relates to both restoration theory and practice, covered in the previous two chapters. I still think some of Higgs commentary on authenticity are unsatisfying. He thinks history is important for establishing the authenticity of restoration projects, but I’m not sure I think authenticity is a concept I fully understand. I don’t have a coherent way to parse through that issue, but I think someone with a philosopher’s patience could do it more justice. Next, Higgs addresses an important issue, which is the commodification of restoration, which increasingly moves away from ‘focal restoration’ towards technological restoration. Ecosystems are being turned into commodities according to Higgs that are being alienated and divorced from the social and natural processes to which they are deeply connected. I think Rebecca Lave’s book Fields and Streams is an excellent about how this has played out in stream restoration (a book that people into Bourdieu’s field theory would enjoy). So what does Higgs mean by ‘focal restoration.’ Chapter 6 has got you covered. I think this would be of interest to STS people because this form of restoration is about bringing scientific rigour and clarity into restoration. I think STS theory could significantly revise this perspective. Finally, we close the book with why Higgs uses the term design. Restoration involves creative interventions that follow ideas that are subject to healthy democratic discussion. Restoration should not be a way of disguising human agency behind justifications that appeal to ecology but is “always about people working with and within natural process”. Higgs describes this intentionality as ‘wild design’ which is the last pillar that accompanies the other keystones of ecological integrity, historical fidelity, and focal practices. Though I diverge from a lot of what Higgs says, I think this book is a useful way into understanding the theoretical and academic landscape of ecological restoration, and some of the key issues at stake. ...more |
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Hardcover
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| 1611322383
| 9781611322385
| 1611322383
| 3.12
| 8
| Oct 01, 2012
| Nov 15, 2012
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really liked it
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Comps reading. Was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. A number of similarly titled books have not been as pleasurable to read. Dian
Comps reading. Was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. A number of similarly titled books have not been as pleasurable to read. Diane Barthel-Bouchier is a sociology professor at Stony Brook University, and was formerly a visiting professor at Cambridge and did her doctorate at Harvard. The book delves into the various contradictions involved at the intersection of cultural heritage and sustainability — namely that it is often high-emission air flights taken by affluent tourists that allows access and often justification for resources to be directed towards conservation. These pilgrimages to take in a new form of the sacred seem very much in contradiction with the pressing and related problems of climate change and inequality. Beyond that, there are fascinating accounts of how corporations are involved in this sector and the strange ironies that these dynamics entail. Ultimately, I think this book’s value lies in the attention it does provide regarding issues of inequality and the legacies of colonialism (particularly around questions about whether cultural heritage is a human right). Some excerpts that I found noteworthy: “Cultural heritage organizations and agencies had already significantly deviated from their classic mission of heritage conservation by altering their relationship with the tourism industry and by adopting heritage tourism as a major part of their activities. Over the course of the late twentieth century, heritage professionals moved from critiquing tourism’s impact on cultural sites to the eager embrace of tourism through the formation of partnerships with travel-oriented corporations such as American Express, Expedia, and Royal Caribbean cruises. …It is nonetheless well recognized that global tourism is contributing to climate change and resource depletion, as when tourists from Europe or North America board planes to vacation in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.” (p. 8) “Heritage professionals would prefer that we see cultural heritage embedded not simply in old objects and practices but rather as living history incorporating social processes of both continuity and change.” (p.9) “Some people prefer a relatively narrow definition [of sustainability] that emphasizes the importance of living within the limits of our natural resources. Others believe the problem is not simply one of the levels of natural resources available but of their distribution. This argument holds that, in today’s world, social inequality is itself unsustainable. Proponents of this latter view hold that any definition of sustainability must extend to cover issues of social justice, including recognition of the claims of disadvantaged populations, however constituted and defined.” (p. 9) Lowenthal [suggested that] History “explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time,” whereas heritage “clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes… Lowenthal’s presentation errs on the side of normalizing social conflict and social exclusion by stating simply that they are part and parcel of what is, in the end, an act of creation in which we can all participate. The idea that heritage implies a power relationship is more evident in the work of Brian Graham, G. J. Ashworth, and J. E. Tunbridge. They define heritage as “almost any sort of intergenerational exchange or relationship, welcome or not, between societies as well as individuals.” (p. 12) “Indeed, Victor Turner and Edith Turner claim that “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.” They continue, “Even when people bring themselves in anonymous crowds on beaches, they are seeking an almost sacred, often symbolic mode of communitas, generally unavailable to them in the structured life of the office, the shop floor, or the mine.”44 Dean Mac- Cannell develops the parallel by discussing the processes of site sacralization and ritual visitation involved in tourism, and by seeing in the very diversity of sites a certain reflexive contemplation about the human condition.” (p. 18) “This is most evident in the convention that established the World Heritage List and that promulgates the concept of universal ownership of sites of outstanding significance. Although the first people to benefit from other human rights tend to be the poor and/or the persecuted, the first people to benefit from this universal ownership are affluent cosmopolitans who are able to travel the globe and visit the sites that they now own, at least in theory.” (p. 31-32) “It is not just coastal cities that are at risk: inland cities and towns have suf- fered from rivers overflowing their banks. Although this phenomenon must be considered separately from the destruction caused by rising sea levels, what we see all too often in both settings is how failures of stewardship com- pound the forces of natural destruction and lead to disastrous consequences.6 In many cases, such failures involve localities and organizations working at cross-purposes: that is, trying to safeguard historic sites and landscapes, all the while encouraging development and destroying features of the landscape that have traditionally served to protect communities.” (p. 80) “Usually when one hears the word “deforestation,” one thinks not of temperate Europe but of the tropical regions and their shrinking rainforests. It is estimated that tropical rainforests are being reduced by some 30 million acres annually.41 As rainforests are reduced, so too is the world’s biodiversity. Tropical rainforests are home to some 80 percent of the known species of flora and fauna.42 The richness of the forests leads to a competition for their resources involving multinational corporations, national governments, local businesses, criminal organizations, and, of course, the ethnic groups who live in and bordering on the forests.43 Heritage professionals would like to believe their knowledge and activism can help protect the intangible heritage of affected peoples, but this is not always the case. Based on his research in the Ecuadorean Amazon, Benavides argues that, “It is not lost on anybody, especially archaeologists, that the last decade has seen an increase of archaeological research in the area, funded by the same foreign oil companies that are responsible for decimating the region.”” (p. 114) “…changes in the permafrost have led to the exposure of graves and other archaeological remains… UNESCO became involved by starting a multiphase project in 2005 that involved locating and taking an inventory of the tombs and monitoring the permafrost to see how quickly the tombs are thawing. If necessary, some evacuation of material may have to be done in order to save it. …Already in 2001 the IPHC was concerned that its efforts not be interpreted as a manifestation of “lingering neocolonialism,” and there was considerable discussion about the most appropriate wording to convey the committee’s desire to collaborate with indigenous political and cultural bodies.” (p. 117) “In addition to the challenge of deciding the scope of their actions, cultural heritage organizations face fundamental issues around what Bourdieu sees as the tension between autonomy and heteronomy.11 The first term suggests a field relatively free of government interference or market demands. Bourdieu offers the example of symbolist poetry, wherein poets essentially produce poems for the attention of other poets. Heteronomy indicates that a measure of control over the organizational field is exercised by another field. With his theory heavily influenced by the French example, Bourdieu saw the state as the ultimate adjudicator of struggles between and among organizational fields and as the dominant source of power. With the development of cultural heritage as a truly global phenomenon, the organizational field is increasingly extending beyond the national setting and thus beyond the specific terms of Bourdieu’s analysis.” (p. 182) “For Pierre Bourdieu and those who follow the intellectual path he laid out, the concept of organizational field includes the idea that every field is a field of combat, and that competition for power occurs both between actors within the field and between actors across different fields.14 The very defini- tion of a heteronomous situation for an organizational field means that other organizational fields have a degree of power over its programs and opera- tions. Over the course of its development, cultural heritage conservation has gone from a situation of relative autonomy, answering in varying measures to the state, to one that has embraced alliances with wide range of businesses.15 A “world market of heritage” is being created and has already spread to such an extent that fears are being expressed that heritage will “leave the sphere of values to dissolve into the economy of organized leisure.”” (p. 183) “By way of illustration, a recent report described the polluting effect of the large numbers of tourists who come to see the Sistine Chapel. And, while it cannot be put in a sealed container, Lascaux Caves have been largely isolated from polluting human contact, with few visitors allowed and constant monitoring of environmental conditions. Thus heritage conservationists themselves are well aware of the contra- dictions between expanding tourist visitation and protecting heritage sites and the wider environment. …Conservationists know that to behave in a fully equitable way in terms of energy consumption would require restricting their activities to local- or perhaps national-level conservation. They would be following the example of those active in the 2000 Watt Society, who calculated what their per capita share would be of the world’s resources if everyone were living according to the sustainable needs of our one planet instead of the numerous fictitious planets required to fulfill our present consumption needs. This is actually achievable, but it requires building energy-efficient housing, using public transportation, and restricting personal consumption. It also means not getting on an airplane. Most heritage conservationists are aware of this, grosso modo. None that I met is willing to live accordingly; indeed, to do so would violate many professional and social class norms.” (p. 187) [note: this is very much the position of academics, who are notorious jet-setters] “The Environmental Justice Foundation anticipates up to 150 million climate refugees will move to other countries within the next 40 years, while the International Organization for Migration puts the figure at 200 million. …In Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis, Tung describes the scene at Cairo’s City of the Dead, a vast Muslim cemetery of extravagant monuments, which has become an illegal permanent home to some 100,000 impoverished squatters. Nearby in Cairo, he tells us, “the largest medieval Muslim city extant, an apogee of human social enlightenment during the Middle Ages, is now a scene of destitution, disease, and premature death, as shoeless children play in garbage-strewn streets stained with leaking sew- age.” (p.187-188) “In Djenné, Mali, for example, residents resent the money lavished on the restoration of the Grand Mosque and the fact that only a few leading families have reaped the profits from tourism while the rest of the population lives in squalor. …If Marx drew our attention to the social relations of production, we need now also to pay attention to the social relations of conservation.” (p.189) ...more |
Notes are private!
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| Oct 29, 2019
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really liked it
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Comps reading. A fairly fascinating book. One thematic focus for my comps list on public history is on so-called ‘restoration’ projects — both ecologi
Comps reading. A fairly fascinating book. One thematic focus for my comps list on public history is on so-called ‘restoration’ projects — both ecological restoration and also the restoration of land back to Indigenous nations. This book in some sense addresses the first and not really the second, but it offers some conceptual insights useful for both those subjects. I am fascinated by this question because many heritage sites in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) where I live, focus on ‘restoring’ 19th century settler heritage infrastructure. Leanne Simpson joked about this in her book This Accident of Being Lost, writing: “They're also trying to make our neighbourhood into an Ontario heritage designation; I think that mostly means you can't do renovations that make your house look like it isn't from the 1800s or rent your extra floors to the lower class.” This is the case for watermill sites around the GTA, where substantial capital is invested into ‘restoring’ these mill sites into artistic, fine dining, and wedding venues with a sort of heritage aura. Interestingly in the 19th century, watermill sites did not connote such a bucolic mood, but were dangerous industrial sites that settlers knew were destroying salmon populations. Settlers like Samuel Wilmot, who previously participated in colonial deforestation and sawmill projects that harmed fish, began fish restoration projects, which persist today through conservation authority projects of environmental management. The predominant salmon in GTA rivers like the Missinihe (Credit) are Pacific salmon species that were introduced in stream restoration projects. The local salmon species were extirpated from these rivers in the 19th century and attempts to reintroduce them have never been as successful as the introduction of Pacific species. Salmon were absolutely vital for the Anishinaabe and the salmon population collapses around the GTA were very closely connected with their dispossession and alienation from their land. So this paragraph on fisheries was particularly memorable for me: “Cultures create associations with the landscape over generations, while at the same time individuals connect personally with it. Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauley launched the idea of shifting baseline syndrome into scientific discourse in 1995. In his work, he argued that fisheries scientists and managers were guilty of basing calculations on degraded ecosystem numbers rather than pristine ones: “Essentially, this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline.” This theme of recovering some type of past was a central through-line in the book. The book’s central theme is one of recovery (Chapter 1), and it focuses on three particular practices of recovery: 1. Reintroduction (Chapter 2) - namely of beavers in Sweden, a project in large measure motivated by emotions of guilt. 2. Rewilding (Chapter 3) - namely of Norwegian and Swedish landscapes where muskoxen used to live, driven largely by fear and hope. 3. Resurrection (Chapter 4) - also known as de-extinction (of course Jurassic Park is discussed), this case study here focusing on attempts to bring back the passenger pigeon, largely driven by emotions of grief and a desire to reproduce hope (also love how that emotion is paired with the cheekily religious word, resurrection; perhaps this would make for some good holy week reading for those that are into that sort of stuff). Next are reflections on how these three practices of recovery are remembered (Chapter 5) through public history, namely within the halls of natural history museums and nature tourist destinations. This chapter raises broader questions about environmental history, and its importance in any task that presumes itself to be involved in ‘restoration’. And finally, there is a final reflection on reconnecting (Chapter 6) through narrative, and the importance of emotions like love in this task and the “emotional attachment to past environments” that is often involved. For a book that was about affect, I was surprised that term was deployed so sparsely (no mention of Sara Ahmed in here). One of the few places it was used was in this paragraph on the importance of narratives in museums: “Museums feature in many of the remembrance places I discuss in this chapter. That is because they have the ability to construct “plots” that bridge the gap between the scientific and the affective, to arouse emotions in the public; exhibits can incorporate private memory to develop a shared public experience.11 Natural history exhibits, like the one featuring Bruno, have long been designed to impart a moral education as much as a natural history one. Natural history museums often have an explicit mission to advance public understanding of the natural world and our human history in it, as well as instill an environmentally friendly ethos.” Nonetheless, emotion was a central focus of the book: “In general, scholars working in the history of emotions acknowledge that there are some common physical responses to particular events (e.g., increased heart rate if scared or sweating if nervous)—which are often called affect—while simultaneously arguing that emotions, the outward expressions of feelings that may be brought on through affect, are socially constructed and socially interactive. In this book, I am not interested in tracing the emotions tied to these animal lost-and-found stories for themselves, but rather as windows into understanding the motivations of the historical actors. Focusing on emotions allows me to move beyond discourse analysis, which, as Lyndal Roper has rightly pointed out, “offers no account of the relationship between language and psychology, and that makes it hard to explain why particular discourses might be appealing, or what the relationship is between thought and action.”51 The idea that emotions are practices—“something people experience and something they do”—allows us to see emotions in both what people say and how they act.52 As historian of memory Alan Confino remarked, emotions are “a force giving shape to politics, society and culture, to beliefs and values, and to everyday life, institutional settings, and the processes of decision making.” Emotions, then, are a way to understand conservation motivations and decision processes.” This affective focus is interesting to anyone involved in public history because most humans connect with historical narratives that are emotionally rich and I think it’s such a vital part of communicating history and fostering collective memory: “Collective memory is also dependent on the histories told—the explanations given of how things were in the past and why they are the way they are now. History (whether it happens in formal history writing or other history-creating enterprises, such as monuments and museums) reinterprets the past through the present, which in turn changes how we remember the past. Of course, memories are not just about the past, but also about imagining futures.” I’ll just end with a number of memorable passages, many of which are about beavers, which I am particularly fascinated by because they constructed dams in Ontario long before European settlers constructed watermill dams, and they are great examples of how other organisms are also involved in modifying the environment in significant ways. What’s interesting is that when I heard an Haudenosaunee elder talk about beavers, he described their dams as things that protected trees. When they flooded areas, it made it more difficult for settlers to come and chop down the trees. Watermill dams were stores of energy used to power sawmills. They encouraged more trees to be cut down to make the capital investments into water-powered sawmills pay off. Anyway, some fragments about beavers and other projects of recovery: “Despite dwindling numbers, some beavers in Europe were killed for food, as evidenced by recipes for beaver in medieval and early modern cookbooks. In his highly influential Natural History, Pliny the Elder classifies them as amphibious animals, a categorization that carried over to cooking manuals, such as John Russell’s Boke of Nurture from circa 1460, which starts the “Carving of Fish” section with the recommendation to serve beaver tail as the meat in pea soup or frumenty (a kind of cracked wheat porridge).12 A 1650 version of De Alimentorum Facultatibus (On foodstuffs) likewise starts its chapter “De Animalibus amphibiis” (The amphibian animals) with beaver, followed by otter and frog. The classification of beaver as an aquatic animal, instead of as a land animal, may have made it acceptable to eat beaver during Christian fasting seasons such as Lent. Gerald of Wales wrote that “in Germany and the arctic regions, where beavers abound, great and religious persons, in times of fasting, eat the tails of this fish-like animal, as having both the taste and colour of fish.”13 Beaver meat consumption, particularly by hunters who would then go on to sell the skins and scent glands, appears to have been common in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Sweden. Beavers in Sweden were hunted as much for medicine as they were a source of furs or meat. Beavers have scent glands called castoreum sacs located near the base of the tail. Humans harvested these glands to extract the castoreum, often by either drying them to make a powder or infusing the glands in an alcohol to cause the castoreum to leech into the liquid.” “The importance of castoreum as a motivator of beaver hunts is evident in an ancient legend stating that when beavers are being hunted, they stop and bite off their testicles, which are then thrown to the hunter so that the hunter receives what he is after and the beaver is allowed to live. The legend confuses the castoreum sacs with testicles, but it is understandable: the castoreum sacs are paired, so they resemble testicles; they are located at the base of tail near where testicles would be expected; and beaver testicles are not descended, which makes it appear that the male beavers have lost theirs. This legend, which is repeated from the works of Pliny the Elder to the early modern period, is commonly used in illustrations of the beaver in books of beasts (figure 2.1).” “According to Pliny, the oily castoreum was used in a variety of medicinal applications, including being taken internally to treat brain swelling, epilepsy, bowel irritation, vertigo, and paralysis, among others, as well as being applied topically to reduce bite and sting inflammation, toothaches, and earaches.15 Arabian medieval medicine employed castoreum in preparations to treat headache, urinary leakage, cramps, and mental illness. Such medicinal uses for castoreum were common until the twentieth century. The Norwegian pharmacopeia of 1879, for example, contains recipes for two castoreum tinctures.16 Old apothecary collections in museums almost invariably have a jar of castoreum. Oral history accounts of events in the early nineteenth century measure the beaver catch by the weight of the castoreum glands and note the medicinal uses for the beaver. For example, when the family of Olof Jonsson started trapping beavers in Flakaträsk in northern Sweden in 1810, they reported catching eleven animals with a total of 150 lod (approximately 2 kg) of castoreum sacs, which were sold along with the skins in Umeå. In 1828, hunters caught one beaver that yielded castoreum glands weighing 92 lod (approximately 1.2 kg).” “The ties between cultural heritage and nature protection played a large part in building interest around the beaver project. Jämtland, where the beavers would be released, had a history with beavers. According to Eric Festin, “the legends about the beaver still live on on the people’s lips.”34 These legends of human-beaver interaction would be repeated time and again in publications about the reintroduction efforts. Stories were told: stories from old men from the Jämtland region of the great beaver trappers and the slaying of the last beavers; stories from grandmothers whose grandmothers used medicine made from beavers; stories of how the beaver once lived and died on the land. The memories of the beaver, though the stuff of legend, were integral to the decision to reintroduce it.” “Bjurälvdalen was an area that the Society for Nature Conservation was keen to protect, and linking its protection to beavers seemed like the perfect way forward: “As a geologic peculiarity of the first order Bjurälvdalen should be protected, and that at the same time Sweden’s first resurrected beaver colony should have its sanctuary in this previous beaver paradise.”43 The religious imagery of a resurrection in paradise reflects well the nearly religious fervor with which Festin would pursue the reintroduction idea.” “Lamenting the loss of the last was paramount. The Cincinnati Enquirer announced her death on September 2 this way: “‘Martha’ is dead. In one great respect she resembled Chincatgook, the ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ for she was the last of the Passenger Pigeons.”” “The shifting baseline syndrome has been applied in conservation science to discuss things such as perceptions of ecological change, how to plan for ecological restoration, and integration or rejection of newly introduced (or reintroduced) species. People tend to view the environment of their childhood as the “right” one, and thus things that changed before that are imperceptible unless they hear stories told about the way it used to be. In other words, shifting baseline syndrome is about memory practices: what’s remembered and what’s forgotten.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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| 9780195142433
| 0195142438
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| Nov 02, 2000
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really liked it
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Comps reading. A fairly interesting book by Métis historian, Mark David Spence, about the history of national parks in the United States and their rol
Comps reading. A fairly interesting book by Métis historian, Mark David Spence, about the history of national parks in the United States and their role in the militarization and enclosure of Indigenous land and ultimately Indigenous dispossession. Early colonial accounts perceived landscapes as inhabited by Indigenous nations, but these became replaced by notions of uninhabited wilderness that were realized through militarized colonial force. This book focuses on three national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier) and consists of four main sections: 1. Ideology and historical processes that produced the simultaneous emergence of both national parks and Indigenous reservations after the Civil War (Chapters 1 & 2). 2. Yellowstone before the notion of wilderness and later as the first wilderness, which involved Indigenous removal from the area (Chapters 3 & 4) 3. Glacier National Park with the Blackfoot and their later exclusion (Chapters 5 & 6) 4. The Sierras and Indigenous nations of Yosemite, 1864-1916, which became the national park par excellence, 1916-1969 (Chapters 7 & 8) I personally find this topic interesting because my own visit to Yellowstone, back during one undergraduate summer, was one of the most formative trips of my life. I read Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on that trip, and the otherworldly landscapes of Yellowstone remain the most memorable park experience of my life and was a catalyst for my growing interest in environmental issues. I had very little awareness of Indigenous issues more broadly at the time, nor was I remotely aware of how parks history intersected with colonialism. Though after Yellowstone I visited the Badlands, Black Hills, and that god-awful Rushmore monument. They had these t-shirts there that had an image of Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud standing in front of the monument with the line “Original Founding Fathers” which is perhaps one of the earlier provocations that compelled me to read more about Indigenous resistance to colonialism. A very weird way in. Anyway, I want to start with this opening paragraph from the book that mentions the Badlands and Black Hills: “SHORTLY AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT OF Badlands National Monument in 1929, the Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk expressed profound consternation with the idea of wilderness preservation. For him, the creation of the national monument adjacent to his home on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota seemed only to confirm a disturbing trend. Wind Cave National Park had already been established in the nearby Black Hills, and large areas of land surrounding the park had recently been incorporated into a national forest. Remembering his youth and the time he spent in these areas, Black Elk recalled that his people "were happy in [their] own country, and were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us." Although a considerable portion of this Sioux country received federal protection, native peoples were largely excluded from their former lands. As Black Elk observed, the Americans had "made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds," and every year the two were moving farther and farther apart.2 In short, Black Elk understood all too well that wilderness preservation went hand in hand with native dispossession.” I visited San Francisco a number of years ago also and wanted to visit Yosemite, but it was a family trip and my mom is not an outdoorsy person so we didn't end up going. Anyway, the remainder of this reflection is just number of excerpts that I bookmarked, along with some comments. I am very interested in what makes places special and worth commemorating within public history programming, and this includes what makes a place worth turning into a park. There is another question that is an inverse to that colonial question, which is: what makes a place sacred or worth defending against colonial incursion? Spence writes: “This book is not just about the sacredness of certain places, however. It also addresses the rights and needs of native peoples to maintain their cultural distinctiveness through the exercise of treaty rights and the practice of certain skills that can take place only within a large national park. Recent concerns about hunting or gathering traditional food and medicinal plants on protected lands are frequently associated with a new round of cultural revivalism among various Indian groups, but these activities are rooted in a century of "illegal" and extralegal use of such areas. While these actions have presented a constant challenge to the idealization of pristine, uninhabited landscapes, they also contributed another "cultural construction" of wilderness—in this case, one in which concerns about subsistence gave way to concerns about cultural persistence and political sovereignty.” This is an example of early colonial scientists describing landscapes as inhabited by Indigenous peoples, and not uninhabited as later descriptions would do. This is by Audubon, a pretty awful slave-owner and scientific racist who has a bunch of birding institutions named after him: “Much has been written about Audubon's efforts to preserve wildlife, but scholars have paid scant attention to his concern about the demise of Native American societies. Like Catlin and Irving, Audubon's conception of wilderness and the landscapes he hoped to see preserved included native peoples. While on a trip to Labrador in the summer of 1833 to record specimens for his masterwork, The Birds of America (1827—1838), he repeatedly lamented the rapid destruction of the region and hoped that some "kind government" would intervene to stop its "shameful destruction." As things then stood, the destruction of deer, caribou, birdlife, and "aboriginal man" led Audubon to observe that "Nature herself seems perishing" and that there seemed to be no place left where one could go and "visit nature undisturbed…” This is an interesting excerpt of working class mill workers who advocated for the protection of a large elm tree from being felled: “Nevertheless, an appreciation for the Indian wilderness was manifest in the local concerns of easterners of all social classes. In New Hampshire in 1853, for instance, five hundred working men and women petitioned the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company not to cut down a stately elm tree during the construction of an additional mill. It was "a beautiful and goodly tree," they proclaimed, belonging to the time "when the yell of the red man and the scream of the eagle were alone heard on the banks of the Merrimack." The tree "belonged" in Amoskeag, which could not be said of more "giant edifices filled with the buzz of busy and well remunerated machinery," and every day the workers looked on the giant elm they felt "a connecting link between the past and the present." The mill workers could not travel to the West, but they shared the romantic concern about its destruction and could not bear to have what little of the Indian wilderness that remained in their lives cut out from under them.” This was an interesting excerpt about how colonial military violence became inscribed in the names of places in the western US as frontier settler violence moved farther and farther west: “Between the mid-1850s and the late 1860s, however, vigilante groups, local militias, and U.S. Army troops fought countless battles with native peoples throughout the West. In response to expected conflict, the army built at least six dozen military forts west of the Mississippi, and almost all were used in campaigns against Indian communities. Maps of the western United States reflected this new construction, and policy makers, overland travelers, and even casual newspaper readers became familiar with places like Fort Bridger, Fort Laramie, and Fort Kearny.” This is about some of the colonial violence perpetrated at Yellowstone and the militarization of Indigenous lands there: Already chafing under increased military supervision at Fort Hall, the Bannock headed east toward Yellowstone, where they were pursued by regular troops and the park superintendent's "party of some 20 well armed, mounted, and equipped, resolute and reliable mountaineer[s]."6 After raiding horses and frightening a number of tourists, the Bannock were attacked and subdued just cast of the park by a platoon of soldiers and Crow scouts under the command of General Nelson A. Miles. Yellowstone's "Indian troubles" would not go away, however, and the following year park officials braced themselves once again when the so-called Sheep Eater War broke out in central Idaho. Although this last conflict did not cross into the national park, fears that Yellowstone Tukudeka might become involved must have led many to believe that the "nation's playground" had become a yearly battleground. In many respects, park management in the late 1870 resembled that of a small western military installation. The construction of the first park headquarters in 1879—a heavily fortified blockhouse—wholly reflected concerns about further Indian "depredations." Located on an isolated hill that offered the "best defensive point against Indians," the headquarters building was designed to provide emergency protection for official documents, park personnel, and tourists.9 Superintendent Philetus Norris, who oversaw the construction of the headquarters and managed the park's defenses during the Bannock War, believed the best course of action lay in convincing "all the surrounding tribes . . . that they can visit the park [only] at the peril of a conflict with . . . the civil and military officers of the government.”” This excerpt describes how General Sheridan advocated bringing Yellowstone under military management: Upon returning to Washington in the fall of 1882, the general [Philip H. Sheridan] first appealed to eastern sportsmen and asked them to press the government for greater protection of the park. He quickly garnered the support of several influential senators, who vigorously championed a proposal to bring the park under military management. Sheridan's ideas also received a good deal of coverage from journals such as the Nation and Forest and Stream, which soon inspired numerous petitions from state and territorial legislatures, sportsmen's groups, and concerned individuals. This widespread support quiclky led to the adoption of stronger game rules in 1883 and pushed Congress to authorize the secretary of War to dispatch "the necessary details of troops to prevent . . . [destruction] of the game or objects of curiosity" in the park. Preservationists did not claim success, however, until the military took over complete management of the park three years later…” “By die time Yellowstone received the protection of the U.S. Army in June 1886, the Shoshone, Bannock, and Sheep Eater once again headed the list of perceived threats to the national park. Defining the value of wilderness in terms of animals and trees led advocates of preservation to view Indians as inherently incapable of appreciating the natural world. Hardly a key component of the wilderness condition, native peoples instead represented the one great flaw in the western landscape. According to the complaints of outdoor enthusiasts in the late nineteenth century, it seemed a wonder that any forests or animals remained in North America since Indians practically based their entire existence on the destruction of wilderness. As early as 1879, sport hunters and settlers complained to the commissioner of Indian Affairs about native hunters who "wantonly destroyed game" throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Even worse, they lit fires "in order to obtain dry fuel for winter use, or to drive the deer to one place where they might be easily killed . . . [and thus] large tracts of valuable timber were burned over.”” This was also a really interesting excerpt on mining operations on Indigenous land, something ongoing in Ontario as Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation (Grassy Narrows) has been resisting the Ford administration, who have been handing out mining licences on Indigenous land without Indigenous consent. In the case of the Blackfeet, what were perhaps short-term leases of mineral rights became interpreted as full land cession: “Blackfeet oral history even suggests that the land cession agreement may have been little more than a short-term lease of mineral rights. If mining operations proved successful, the Blackfeet would lose access to a good portion of the so-called ceded strip. Otherwise, they believed the agreement placed no restrictions on their ongoing use of the area. In later years, some Blackfeet would describe the 1895 agreement as the selling of "rocks only," while others recalled that tribal leaders had negotiated for a recession of all lands after fifty years… The Senate ratified the land cession agreement within nine months, but the government could not fully survey the ceded area and open it to mining claimants until April 1898. Still, prospectors trespassed on the reservation in growing numbers, and both Grinnell and his friends in the U.S. Geological Survey worried about the effects of miners' fires on the forests and watersheds of the Glacier area. Consequently, Grinnell worked to have the ceded lands included within a proposed forest reserve that Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, Charles Sargent, and others were then surveying on the western side of the Continental Divide. His efforts succeeded, and on February 22, 1897, President Grover Cleveland signed a proclamation establishing the Lewis and Clark Forest Reserve at the headwaters of the Missouri, Columbia, and Saskatchewan rivers. In doing so, the president made special note that Blackfeet "rights and privileges . . . respecting that portion of their reservation relinquished to the United States . . . shall be in no way infringed or modified” Also later Indigenous peoples were excluded from national parks through different mechanisms, namely not performing their Indigeneity to the satisfaction of the settler gaze: “Native people who did not look appropriately "Indian" presented a unique problem for park officials. On the one hand, they bolstered easy assumptions about vanishing or assimilating peoples, but on the other hand they disappointed tourists who wanted to see picturesque communities. Native people who attempted to practice older traditions, however, were somehow out of place because they had also adapted to new conditions and no longer seemed appropriately aboriginal. This apparent cultural disjunction had troubled tourists for some time, as well as the Army superintendents of the national park, but it apparently never concerned the men who managed the valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove for the State of California. With the incorporation of these two areas into the national park in 1906, however, these concerns became the cornerstone of federal park policy toward the Yosemite Indians for decades to come.” Debates between park administrators and colonial bureaucrats centered around how Indigenous peoples should live their lives: “In the summer of 1914, Acting Superintendent William Littebrandt urged the secretary of the Interior to bring the Bureau of Indian Affairs into a plan that would make the Indian village into "one of the features of the Valley, by attempting to reproduce a village or camp such as the Indians originally built."53 The notion of constructing an "authentic" village for tourism was opposed by C. H. Asbury, a special agent for Indian affairs in the region, who strongly recommended against "establishing an Indian camp in the Valley, for exhibition purposes." As he noted in a letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, "The Indians . . . are there for the purpose of making their living at honest labor . . . and should be encouraged to make their own living, rather than become members of an aboriginal show.”” Anyway, a fairly interesting book for people into the environmental history of national parks in the so-called United States and the important role it played in perpetrating colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Paperback
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| 0521635624
| 9780521635622
| 0521635624
| 3.66
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| Sep 10, 1996
| May 13, 1998
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really liked it
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Comps reading. This book was actually quite fun to read. So many little tidbits of trivia tucked away throughout, almost every other sentence. Exactly
Comps reading. This book was actually quite fun to read. So many little tidbits of trivia tucked away throughout, almost every other sentence. Exactly the type of reading I love. Lowenthal’s citation of Hobsbawm here gets at one of the core issues this book deals with: “In asserting our own virtues, we harp on others' vices. The worst fault charged against heritage is that it breeds belligerent antagonism. The abuse of history for chauvinist causes is emphatically censured by the historian Hobsbawm: ‘Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity. As poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction, history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies. [Heritage] is an essential element, perhaps the essential element in these ideologies.’ But resultant havoc shows it a dreadful use of the past.” Lowenthal notes the conservative or reactionary reputation that ‘heritage’ discourse has among academics, and how it is scorned by them for its nostalgia and conservative political instrumentalization. Lowenthal also recognizes others who trouble this assumed distinction between serious academic history and the more populist form of history pejoratively called ‘heritage.’ While some academic history shares some commonalities with heritage, Lowenthal is very much for the distinctions: “Yet history too is a heritage. The history we normally accept without demur stems from seldom-tested faith in the cumulative probity of historians, even when we know their chronicles were forged—often trumpeted—in the crucible of self-interest. Rather than stressing the gulf that divides history and heritage, my critics want partisans of both enterprises to acknowledge that, despite their differences, theirs is truly a common cause. All the more reason, in my view, to underscore distinctions between aims proper to heritage and those proper to history. The two enterprises are inextricably conjoined. But it is crucial to underscore their dissimilar intents. The historian, however blinkered and presentist and self-deceived, seeks to convey a past consensually known, open to inspection and proof, continually revised and eroded as time and hindsight outdate its truths. The heritage fashioner, however historically scrupulous, seeks to design a past that will fix the identity and enhance the well-being of some chosen individual or folk. History cannot be wholly dispassionate, or it will not be felt worth learning or conveying; heritage cannot totally disregard history, or it will seem too incredible to command fealty.” Yet I must admit I am interested in heritage, precisely because I do want to enhance the well-being of some chosen folk (the proletariat). The thing is, heritage is so often the provenance of reactionaries, but I personally think it has great potential as a tool of revolution and subversion. I think of the Situationist interventions on public billboards as one example. Though these interventions, like street art, operate more on the level of aesthetics or propaganda, I think guerrilla public history has the potential to do similar work (I think of printed out plaques that Black historians installed around the city of Toronto, or Indigenous activists who pasted over river or road signs with Indigenous names. History can be interesting and fun for its own sake, but I am a lot more interested in history that does stuff and reaches people who don’t read history in their spare time. I like public history because I am interested in the production of historical knowledge that is connected to a broader collective program of social change. This likely stems from some deeply evangelical urge I failed to fully expunge in my early twenties, the sort Haraway alludes to in the Cyborg Manifesto. And Lowenthal alludes to it here: “At first yours or mine, heritage soon becomes inherently collective. We share what we inherit among colleagues and communities, nations and faiths. Rooted in many allegiances, we may simultaneously be carpenters, communists, Catholics, and Croatians. We are shaped by a congeries of disparate but overlapping legacies; allegiance compels painful choices. Personal bequests conflict with collective patrimonies also at odds. How important is being Pennsylvania Dutch or Navaho, asks a historian, relative to being "also an American, a molecular biologist, a woman, and a Baptist?" Each attachment, whether fixed at birth or freely chosen, presumes our fealty.” Lowenthal mentions a period when industrial heritage was particularly in vogue, both the industrial mills William Blake called ‘satanic’ in the hymn Jerusalem, and the proletarian heritage program rolled out by French socialists in the 1980s: “Rather than "a worms-eye view" of the past, the Trust should "illustrate the finest examples of architecture and furnishings." Yet heritage lovers had already made Our Grimy Heritage (1971) and SAVE Britain's Heritages Satanic Mills (1984) coffee-table best-sellers. The populist trend is worldwide. In 1980s France, a Socialist regime legitimated a wide range of working-class legacies. A heritage once wholly patrician now includes 20th-century factories and merely familiar locales; "a simple oven or a village lavatory elicits the patrimonial ardour once given an artistic masterpiece." Populist in theory since the Revolution, American heritage became visibly proletarian after the Civil War, when (as noted in Chapter 6), George Washington got repackaged from austere aristocrat into common man.” There is some irony though when historic working class places like Wigan Pier became strange little revenue streams under capitalism: “Lancastrians loathed Orwell's caustic expose of slum squalor in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), but they welcome the receipts from Wigan's "The Way We Were" heritage theme park. "Orwell used Wigan and got a lot out of it," says a local councillor, and "we've done the same thing back to him."” There’s an interesting tension that has emerged in places like Wigan that pit productive enterprise against tourism, and the replacement of people who are traditionally well-understood as proletarian to a new type of cultural worker that the tourist industry calls for: “Critics castigate heritage for displacing real industry, with museums breeding like maggots on the graves of enterprise. The sign that once heralded "Chesterfield—Centre of Industrial England" now reads "Chesterfield—Historic Market Town." Loss of skills, prophesy British doomsters, presages "an ill-educated outpost with nothing to sell but our heritage." The advent of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, struck a fan as rock's death knell, implying the great songs had all been written. Heritage is no substitute for hard labor. "I'm glad I've got a job," says a Welsh coal-museum "miner," "but it isn't real work." Heritage stewardship thwarts farmers' productive zeal; the size of the yield, not the look of the field, makes farming worthwhile. Much legacy care cripples enterprise. Michael Herzfeld shows conservation bureaucracy stifling local initiatives in Rethemnon, Crete. …Made famous by Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), Sauk Centre "used to be a town to live in" said its mayor after heritage took over; "now it's Sinclair Lewis's town." There is also a great emphasis on making history not boring (which I agree with), but often people think this can be done by commodifying heritage in some manner, which exactly gets at how Orwell’s legacy serves Wigan or Lewis’s serves Sauk Centre. “Boredom is taboo. A travel brochure purveys such milestones of Connecticut popular culture as the lollipop, the hamburger, the cotton gin, vulcanized rubber, and all- night "I Love Lucy" festivals as "a history lesson without the boring stuff." …Legacy peddles everything from cereal to champagne: Moet & Chandon restored two Versailles drawing rooms to celebrate the champagne firms 250-year union with France s national heritage. …”The sun may have set on the Empire, but the legacy lives on," boasts, the Bombay Company of its Singapore Raffles Serving Table.” Always wondered why my parents were really into stores like Bombay Company. There was also this little excerpt that I found strange, mainly because it reminded be of funny centrist academics who are terrified of their discipline going to shit because it has been taken over by dogmatic woke moralists or something hilarious like that (though it’s interesting how, almost 3 decades later, you could imagine an academic today still saying very similar things): “Mainstream heritage agencies now find it hard to limn a national saga without causing ethnic or religious offense. To mollify Indian sensibilities, the American Bureau of Indian Affairs bolted a steel plate with the word Massacre over the previous Battle at Wounded Knee. But correcting earlier biases often simply inverts them. Embarrassed by a 1920s plaque that celebrated the suppression of Canada's rebel Metis at Batoche, the Canadian Sites and Monuments Board went to the opposite extreme, applauding the Metis' survival. Parks Canada brochures used to describe French colonists at Fort Chambly as "needing protection from the terror of the Iroquois"; they now stress that the Iroquois were there from the start until the "white man disturbed their lives in 1609 ." Newcomers, too, are urged to cling to ancestral legacies or to create new communal enclaves. Immigrant, like indigenous, heritage denotes authentic living attachments, as against the dead orthodoxies of national patriotism. "The American Revolution was not their revolution, the Civil War was not their war, the women's rights' struggle as commemorated at Seneca Falls was not their struggle," newcomers may reasonably contend. Hence tribal and ethnic Americans may well choose to venerate other places than those the nation now holds canonical. Commitment to diversity, multiculturalists suggest, should override consensual national heritage. Mainstream mea culpas hallow minority legacies. To admit that the downtrodden have just cause for grievance assuages historical guilt. Heirs of oppressors eagerly admit ancestral cruelty, greed, and genocide. "We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers," lamented Australian prime minister Paul Keating, launching the Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993. "We almost wiped the Indians out," repents a tourist at a Pueblo Ind**n village. To be sure, these evils are past; "we" no longer do these dreadful things. At a Connecticut tribal site in 1988, local youths chatted with a loinclothed Ind**n about fire making and the horrors of con- quest. Within minutes I watched these outsiders turn insiders. English colonists had wrecked the Indian economy, they agreed, but French cultural genocide was worse…” Perhaps my favourite thing I encountered though was this story of covert rematriation of an Aztec artifact by a Mexican journalist, who liberated (‘stolen’) it from a Paris museum. I just visited Mexico City on my way to a conference in December, and was warned by someone that some exhibits in the Anthropology Museum were not worth spending too much time at because they were full of reproduced artifacts intended to resemble originals. I had wondered if this was because the originals all sat in European or North American holdings, and it’s entirely possible that’s the case. Anyway encountering this story shortly after returning from Mexico was quite fun: “Heritage causes are supremely self-righteous. Seizing land or commodities is censured as criminal; seizing heritage is condoned as self- respect. A Mexican journalist in 1982 stole an Aztec codex from the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; the codex was then given to (and kept by) the Mexican state. This patriotic theft was widely hailed, the heritage end sanctioning the illicit means.” “To this day, the material legacy of Asia and Africa, indigenous America and Oceania is centered in the museums and galleries of London and Paris, Berlin and New York. Beyond Europe and North America no major global repository exists. The concept of global patrimony thus derives from an era of con- quest that leaves much of it in a few privileged hands. The legacy of mankind ends up in the Louvre and the British Museum but is absent from Samoa and Somalia. Universalism endows the haves at others' expense. Few British connoisseurs, dismayed by the 1986 sale to Japan of Newcastle University's collection of Pacific tribal art, spared a moments thought for Micronesians who could not afford to buy back any of the items fashioned by their own forebears. Interest and expertise commonly justify Western custody of other legacies. …The same logic vindicates tomb-robbing today. Arkansas looters of prehistoric graves are "protecting" a heritage to whose beauty Indians are blind.” Interestingly, the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) used that excuse for Chinese artifacts acquired by this dubious Anglican bishop and asshole named William Charles White, who smuggled a bunch of artifacts out of China during a period of extreme famine, claiming he was protecting the artifacts from revolutionaries and a poor unstable society in upheaval. For some reason, even though China is prosperous and stable today, the artifacts of the Bishop White Gallery remain on the ground floor of the ROMt. Linfu Dong’s book “Cross Culture and Faith” has the full story. Anyway, commodifying the material culture was commonplace among colonial occupiers and imperialists, and it continues to shape the heritage industry today. Lowenthal even points out a case of Papua New Guinea man’s DNA being patented by the US government, mentioning Haraway immediately after: “Global demand sanctions the removal of other indigenous legacies— genetic property in plants, animals, and human beings marketed for medicinal and other uses by multinational firms. Human genes, too, as we have seen, are now part of the heritage industry. Despite previous indigenous protests from Brazil, in 1995 the U.S. government patented the DNA of a Papua New Guinea tribesman seemingly resistant to leukemia. Yet again, global interests justify "sharing" Third World legacies, even "the bloody issues of life," in Donna Haraway's censure, by submitting them to Western technological exploitation.” More on Third World anti-colonial engagements with heritage looters: “In times past, to the victor belonged the spoils; losers' legacies were routinely purloined. Only at the turn of this century did heritage rights gain even lip service. Third World retrieval was orchestrated in the 1970s, ethnic and minority claims in the 1980s. Skulls and grave goods are withdrawn from public display; museums and academies yield sacred relics to tribal heirs; a spate of rulings mandates repatriating smuggled antiquities. Legacies illicitly dispersed are ever less acceptable to reputable museums and galleries. Chronic victims of rapine are most apt to curtail outside involvement in their heritage. Even though (or because) they have trained and equipped locals, Western archaeologists are often banned from Third World digs. American fossil hunters charged in 1995 with invading an Ethiopian site were warned that Ethiopia would not tolerate "neocolonialist" academics.” Finally, another fun fact I encountered. I especially love this one because I better understand Malcolm Hulke’s 1970 Dr. Who serial on the Silurians (reptilian humanoids who used to live on the surface of the earth millions of years before humans, in a technologically sophisticated society but went far below the earth’s surface). For the last few months, I’ve been seeing someone for a few months who is a big Whovian and have been working my way through seasons of Dr. Who. I’m particularly drawn to Hulke because he was a communist (specifically a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, on and off for 15 years) and I now understand why he was compelled to name those creatures in his serial the Silurians: “Professions of priority extend to fossil traces and rock layers. Ancient strata became British national emblems; in 1835 the oldest rocks known were named Silurian, after a tribe famed for resisting Roman invaders. Parallels drawn in 1849 between a British fossil crocodile and a petrified creature from conquered Sind implied, for British imperialists, "a prior claim to the territory justifying the occupation" of that Indian province. The 1995 Chinese quarry fossil find of Eosimias sinensis, the "first" proto-human, launched a Peking claim to primate primacy antedating Africa's "Lucy" by 45 million years.” Amazing, Silurians were an anti-imperialist tribe that resisted Roman invasion of ancient Britain. There are so many layers to Hulke’s work, literally putting anti-imperialist communist sci-fi out on BBC. ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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really liked it
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really liked it
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