Adrian Ivakhiv

Toward a Geography of “Religion”: Mapping the Distribution of an Unstable Signifier

Abstract Recent religious studies scholarship has examined the historical and cultural variability by which “religion” and “the sacred” have been constructed by scholars and by the public. This article argues that geographers of religion must take these deconstructive arguments to heart. Rather than assuming there is a universal feature of human life called “religion,” the author argues that the religious and the sacred should be studied by geographers as ways of distributing particular kinds of significance across geographic spaces. Rooted in modern distinctions of religious/secular and sacred/profane and in the Enlightenment urge to classify, constructs of religion are efforts to demarcate, purify, and territorialize. Postmodernization exacerbates the individualization of religion but also destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane. If religion is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, a “recent invention” that, with a shift in structural relations, might “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” the elements that have made up this thing called religion will certainly persist in other forms, and it is the task of geographers of religion to trace the changing orchestrations of those significances across space and place.

Nature and Self in New Age Pilgrimage

Several scholars have argued that New Age spirituality is best understood as a form of ‘self-spirituality’ and as an expression of the consumer capitalist tendency to commodify all things, in the process converting religion into a ‘spiritual marketplace’. This article examines the phenomenon of New Age pilgrimage, especially pilgrimage to natural ‘power places’, with a focus on New Age practices at Sedona, Arizona, USA. The author assesses New Age notions of sacred space, nature, and the self, and compares pilgrim practices and sensorial interactions with Sedonas red rock landscape to forms of tourist practice and commodification more prevalent in Sedona. He argues that New Age pilgrimage, in theory and sometimes in practice, rejects the consumerist impulse, and that the New Age ‘self’ is both more open-ended and ‘postmodern’, and less central to New Age practice, than is suggested by the characterisation of New Age as ‘self-spirituality’.

Toward a multicultural ecology

The debate between realists and constructivists has polarized environmental scholarship in recent years. Situating this debate within the longstanding modernist tradition of categorically distinguishing “nature” from “culture,” and the natural sciences from the social sciences and humanities, this article suggests that we need to find a non-dualistic space for rethinking cultural-ecological relations. Such a space has been articulated by actor-network theory (ANT), but this theory leaves significant gaps in its understanding of agency and of macro forces. To fill in these gaps, the author draws on perspectives that theorize perception and agency as embodied, animate, and ecologically embedded and that theorize macro forces as discursively shaped and causally multidirectional and multiscalar. The author proposes the concept of multicultural ecology as a way of articulating the indivisibility of nature and culture and the multiplicity of cultural-ecological practices, and suggests a normative dimension by which such practices can be compared and evaluated.

Teaching Ecocriticism and Cinema

In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) suggested that the history of ecocriticism be considered in terms analogous to Elaine Showalter’s three stages in the development of feminist criticism. First, in this scenario, comes the examination of ‘images of nature’ (or of women, in Showalter’s account). Next comes the ‘literary tradition’ stage, which, for ecocritics, involves uncovering and revalorising the tradition of ‘nature writing’ and of fiction and poetry that illustrates ‘ecological awareness’. Finally comes the ‘theoretical’ phase, which draws ‘on a wide range of theories to raise fundamental questions’ about the ‘symbolic construction’ of nature and the non-human world (pp. xxii–iv).

Nature's Nation: Improvisation, Democracy, and Ken Burns' National Parks

In his recurrent examination of what makes Americans “American,” documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has particularly focused on the twin themes of democracy and improvisation. The National Parks: Americas Best Idea links the national park ideal with Americas “democratic spirit.” Through an examination of its visual methods, I argue that the “Ken Burns gaze” is more consistent with the contemplative and magisterial visuality that shaped the origins of the national park movement—a visuality that sees nature as “out there” and a “finished product”—than it is with the improvisational spirit that both democracy and ecology demand in our time.

From Frames to Resonance Machines: The Neuropolitics of Environmental Communication

George Lakoff s work in cognitive linguistics has prompted a surge in social scientists’ interest in the cognitive and neuropsychological dimensions of political discourse. Bringing cognitive neuroscience into the study of social movements and of environmental communication, however, is not as straightforward as Lakoff s followers suggest. Examining and comparing Lakoffs “neuropolitics” with those of political theorist William E. Connolly, this article argues that Connollys writings on evangelical-capitalist and eco-egalitarian “resonance machines” provide a broader model for thinking about the relations between body, brain, and culture. Environmentalists, it concludes, should pluralize their “frames” and pay greater attention to the micropolitical and affective effects of their language and practices on the communities within which they act, communicate, and dwell.

Will the real objects of politics please stand up?: Bruno Latour: reassembling the political, by Graham Harman, London, Pluto Press, 2014, 216 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0745333991

Adrian IvakhivBruno Latour: Reassembling the Political continues Graham Harman’s project, begun with Prince of Networks (2009), to present anthropologist of science Latour as an important philosoph...

The Age of the World Motion Picture: Cosmic Visions in the Post-Earthrise Era

Martin Heidegger characterized the modern world as the “age of the world picture,” an era when the world became conquered as a picture or representation set fully and clearly before our gaze. In the 1960s, the first images of the Earth from space delivered a glimpse of a world picture that was global and ecological, but also suggested humanity’s domination both of the earth (today) and of outer space (tomorrow). Fifty years later, we have not colonized other planets, but we might speak instead of an age of the world motion picture, an era when our colonization extends to imaginary planets, like the Pandora of the blockbuster film Avatar (2009) and where we see our world and ourselves in turbulent and uncontrollable motion on screens around the globe. The moving image has been with us a little over a century and in that time the world has arguably come to move faster and faster all around us. For Gilles Deleuze it was cinema that provided the greatest resource for reviving our lost “belief in this world.” This chapter asks how cinema is faring today, on the cusp of the digital era, in supporting “belief in this world” and in the universe that sustains it. I examine five films made since 1968. The year in which we received the first images of the Earth from space: 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1973), Contact (1997), The Tree of Life (2011) and Melancholia (2011). Drawing on the semiotics of C. S. Pierce, I examine how images of the Earth in space have “moved” their viewers and how their use in these films facilitates new forms of global identity built on new emotional and spiritual geographies.

Bruno Latour: reassembling the political, by Graham Harman, London, Pluto Press, 2014, 216 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0745333991

Adrian IvakhivBruno Latour: Reassembling the Political continues Graham Harman’s project, begun with Prince of Networks (2009), to present anthropologist of science Latour as an important philosoph...

Will the real objects of politics please stand up

Adrian IvakhivBruno Latour: Reassembling the Political continues Graham Harman’s project, begun with Prince of Networks (2009), to present anthropologist of science Latour as an important philosoph...