The Usufructuary Ethos

The Usufructuary Ethos PDF Author: Erin Drew
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081394581X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Who has the right to decide how nature is used, and in what ways? Recovering an overlooked thread of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century environmental thought, Erin Drew shows that English writers of the period commonly believed that human beings had only the "usufruct" of the earth—the "right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage or prejudice." The belief that human beings had only temporary and accountable possession of the world, which Drew labels the "usufructuary ethos," had profound ethical implications for the ways in which the English conceived of the ethics of power and use. Drew’s book traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and legal writings of the seventeenth century through mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it. Although a study of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in the face of climate change and mass extinction.

The Usufructuary Ethos

The Usufructuary Ethos PDF Author: Erin Drew
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081394581X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who has the right to decide how nature is used, and in what ways? Recovering an overlooked thread of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century environmental thought, Erin Drew shows that English writers of the period commonly believed that human beings had only the "usufruct" of the earth—the "right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage or prejudice." The belief that human beings had only temporary and accountable possession of the world, which Drew labels the "usufructuary ethos," had profound ethical implications for the ways in which the English conceived of the ethics of power and use. Drew’s book traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and legal writings of the seventeenth century through mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it. Although a study of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in the face of climate change and mass extinction.

The Unnatural Trade

The Unnatural Trade PDF Author: Brycchan Carey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
A look at the origins of British abolitionism as a problem of eighteenth-century science, as well as one of economics and humanitarian sensibilities How did late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a "dread perversion" of nature? Focusing on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travelers' accounts of West Africa, Brycchan Carey shows that before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. These natural histories were often ambivalent toward slavery, but they increasingly adopted a proslavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a "natural" phenomenon. From the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement. Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travelers with an interest in natural history, including Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, Griffith Hughes, Samuel Martin, and James Grainger. These environmental writings were used by abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano to build a compelling case that slavery was unnatural, a case that was popularized by abolitionist poets such as Thomas Day, Edward Rushton, Hannah More, and William Cowper.

Prolific Ground

Prolific Ground PDF Author: Nicolle Jordan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 168448541X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Land ownership—and engagement with land more generally—constituted a crucial dimension of female independence in eighteenth-century Britain. Because political citizenship was restricted to male property owners, women could not wield political power in the way propertied men did. Given its foundational sociopolitical function, land necessarily generated copious writing that vested it with considerable aesthetic and economic value. This book, then, situates these issues in relation to the historical transformation of landscape under emergent capitalism. The women writers featured herein—including Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Sarah Scott, and Elizabeth Montagu—participated in this transformation by celebrating female estate stewardship and evaluating the estate stewardship of men. By asserting their authority in such matters, these writers acquired a degree of independence and self-determination that otherwise proved elusive.

The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics

The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics PDF Author: C. L. Crouch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108630359
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics offers an engaging and informative response to a wide range of ethical issues. Drawing connections between ancient and contemporary ethical problems, the essays address a variety of topics, including student loan debt, criminal justice reform, ethnicity and inclusion, family systems, and military violence. The volume emphasizes the contextual nature of ethical reflection, stressing the importance of historical knowledge and understanding in illuminating the concerns, the logic, and the intentions of the biblical texts. Twenty essays, all specially commissioned for this volume, address the texts' historical and literary contexts and identify key social, political, and cultural factors affecting their ethical ideas. They also explore how these texts can contribute to contemporary ethical discussions. The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics is suitable for use in undergraduate and graduate courses in liberal arts colleges and universities, as well as seminaries.

The Counterhuman Imaginary

The Counterhuman Imaginary PDF Author: Laura Brown
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501772570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
The Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways presence and power of the nonhuman—weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of love—not only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, The Counterhuman Imaginary offers an original repudiation of the centrality of the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture.

Grasping the Changing World

Grasping the Changing World PDF Author: Vaclav Hubinger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134852924
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
As different societies merge into one global society and face the concomitant crisis of identity, of purpose and interest, social anthropology urgently needs to bring its methodology up to date: new methods are needed to analyse, compare and understand different cultures across space and time. Grasping the Changing World collects papers read at the second biannual EASA conference in Prague in 1992. The conference took place in an extraordinary 'postmodern' setting. With the fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe old certainties and time-honoured concepts had become obsolete; at the same time, anthropology too was in upheaval, and long-established patterns of thought seemed inadequate to grasp the rapidly changing realities. These doubts and tensions are reflected in this collection. The first half of Grasping the Changing World focuses on ways of conceptualising, modelling and perceiving the present, while the second half reassesses the theoretical strength or otherwise of social anthropology as a modern science. Combining methodological rigour and originality, this collection will make invaluable reading for all students of social anthropology, sociology and politics and its methodology as it is applied to the comparison and understanding of societies across space and time.

Re-Reading the Prophets through Corporate Globalization

Re-Reading the Prophets through Corporate Globalization PDF Author: Matthew J. M. Coomber
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666700754
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Judah faced radical and rapid societal change as it was absorbed by the Assyrian Empire in the eighth century BCE. But while Judean prophets displayed outrage for the injustices these changes caused, their texts are often devoid of socio-economic context. Identities of perpetrators, victims, and even the nature of their actions are often absent. This book sheds light on those contexts by employing a recurring pattern found around the world and across time as subsistence communities are absorbed into complex economic systems. In addition to outlining this pattern’s presence in Judah’s archaeological record, Coomber turns the lens in the other direction to gain new insights from a recent example of this pattern’s unfolding: Tunisia’s absorption into international capitalism. The result is an interpretive tool that asks new questions of ancient prophetic texts, while also revealing threads through which the prophets find voice in addressing a radically different circumstance with similar consequences pertaining to land use, the weaponization of debt, and exploitation of labor.

Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere

Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere PDF Author: A. Martin Byers
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806153776
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Multiple Hopewellian monumental earthwork sites displaying timber features, mortuary deposits, and unique artifacts are found widely distributed across the North American Eastern Woodlands, from the lower Mississippi Valley north to the Great Lakes. These sites, dating from 200 b.c. to a.d. 500, almost define the Middle Woodland period of the Eastern Woodlands. Joseph Caldwell treated these sites as defining what he termed the “Hopewell Interaction Sphere,” which he conceptualized as mediating a set of interacting mortuary-funerary cults linking many different local ethnic communities. In this new book, A. Martin Byers refines Caldwell’s work, coining the term “Hopewell Ceremonial Sphere” to more precisely characterize this transregional sphere as manifesting multiple autonomous cult sodalities of local communities affiliated into escalating levels of autonomous cult sodality heterarchies. It is these cult sodality heterarchies, regionally and transregionally interacting—and not their autonomous communities to which the sodalities also belonged—that were responsible for the Hopewellian assemblage; and the heterarchies took themselves to be performing, not funerary, but world-renewal ritual ceremonialism mediated by the deceased of their many autonomous Middle Woodland communities. Paired with the cult sodality heterarchy model, Byers proposes and develops the complementary heterarchical community model. This model postulates a type of community that made the formation of the cult sodality heterarchy possible. But Byers insists it was the sodality heterarchies and not the complementary heterarchical communities that generated the Hopewellian ceremonial sphere. Detailed interpretations and explanations of Hopewellian sites and their contents in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia empirically anchor his claims. A singular work of unprecedented scope, Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere will encourage archaeologists to re-examine their interpretations.

Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands

Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands PDF Author: A. Martin Byers
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 075912034X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
The book presents an account of the Ohio Middle Woodland period embankment earthworks, ca 100 B.C. to A.D. 400, that is radically different from the prevailing theory. Byers critically addresses all the arguments and characterizations that make up the current treatment of the embankment earthworks and then presents an alternative interpretation. This unconventional view hinges on two basic social characterizations: the complementary heterarchical community model and the cult sodality heterarchy model. Byers posits that these two models interact to characterize the Ohio Middle Woodland period settlement pattern; the community was constituted by autonomous social formations: clans based on kinship and sodalities based on companionship. The individual communities of the region each have their clan components dispersed within a fairly well-defined zone while the sodality components of the same set of region-wide communities ally with each other and build and operate the embankment earthworks. This dichotomy is possible only because the clans and sodalities respect each other as relatively autonomous; the affairs of the clans, focusing on domestic and family matters, remain outside the concerns of the sodalities and the affairs of the sodalities, focusing on world renewal and sacred games, remain outside the concerns of the clans. Therefore, two models are required to understand the embankment earthworks and no individual earthwork can be identified with any particular community. This radical interpretation grounded in empirical archaeological data, as well as the in-depth overview of the current theory of the Ohio Middle Woodland period, make this book a critically important addition to the perspective of scholars of North American archaeology and scholars grappling with prehistoric social systems.

Georgic Literature and the Environment

Georgic Literature and the Environment PDF Author: Sue Edney
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000779181
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This expansive edited collection explores in depth the georgic genre and its connections to the natural world. Together, its chapters demonstrate that georgic—a genre based primarily on two classical poems about farming, Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’s Works and Days—has been reworked by writers throughout modern and early modern English-language literary history as a way of thinking about humans’ relationships with the environment. The book is divided into three sections: Defining Georgic, Managing Nature and Eco-Georgic for the Anthropocene. It centres the georgic genre in the ecocritical conversation, giving it equal prominence with pastoral, elegy and lyric as an example of ‘nature writing’ that can speak to urgent environmental questions throughout literary history and up to the present day. It provides an overview of the myriad ways georgic has been reworked in order to address human relationships with the environment, through focused case studies on individual texts and authors, including James Grainger, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Judith Wright and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This is a much-needed volume for literary critics, academics and students engaged in ecocritical studies, environmental humanities and literature, addressing a significantly overlooked environmental literary genre.