The austere landscape of the Great Basin has inspired diverse responses from the people who have moved through or settled in it. Author Richard V. Francaviglia is interested in the connection between environment and spirituality in the Great Basin, for here, he says, "faith and landscape conspire to resurrect old myths and create new ones." As a geographer, Francaviglia knows that place means more than physical space. Human perceptions and interpretations are what give place its meaning. In Believing in Place, he examines the varying human perceptions of and relationships with the Great Basin landscape, from the region's Native American groups to contemporary tourists and politicians, to determine the spiritual issues that have shaped our connections with this place. In doing so, he considers the creation and flood myths of several cultures, the impact of the Judeo-Christian tradition and individualism, Native American animism and shamanist traditions, the Mormon landscape, the spiritual dimensions of gambling, the religious foundations of Cold War ideology, stories of UFOs and alien presence, and the convergence of science and spirituality.
Believing in Place is a profound and totally engaging reflection on the ways that human needs and spiritual traditions can shape our perceptions of the land. That the Great Basin has inspired such a complex variety of responses is partly due to its enigmatic vastness and isolation, partly to the remarkable range of peoples who have found themselves in the region. Using not only the materials of traditional geography but folklore, anthropology, Native American and Euro-American religion, contemporary politics, and New Age philosophies, Francaviglia has produced a fascinating and timely investigation of the role of human conceptions of place in that space we call the Great Basin.
First published in 1980, Beyond Geography continues to influence and impress its readers. This new edition, prepared for the Columbus quincentennial, includes a new introduction by T. H. Watkins and a new preface by the author. As the public debates Columbus's legacy, it is important for us to learn of the spiritual background of European domination of the Americas, for the Europeans who conquered the Americas substituted history for myth as a way of understanding life.
As explorers and scientists have known for decades, the Neotropics harbor a fantastic array of our planet’s mammalian diversity, from capybaras and capuchins to maned wolves and mouse opossums to sloths and sakis. This biological bounty can be attributed partly to the striking diversity of Neotropical landscapes and climates and partly to a series of continental connections that permitted intermittent faunal exchanges with Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and North America. Thus, to comprehend the development of modern Neotropical mammal faunas requires not only mastery of the Neotropics’ substantial diversity, but also knowledge of mammalian lineages and landscapes dating back to the Mesozoic.
Bones, Clones, and Biomes offers just that—an exploration of the development and relationships of the modern mammal fauna through a series of studies that encompass the last 100 million years and both Central and South America. This work serves as a complement to more taxonomically driven works, providing for readers the long geologic and biogeographic contexts that undergird the abundance and diversity of Neotropical mammals. Rather than documenting diversity or distribution, this collection traverses the patterns that the distributions and relationships across mammal species convey, bringing together for the first time geology, paleobiology, systematics, mammalogy, and biogeography. Of critical importance is the book’s utility for current conservation and management programs, part of a rapidly rising conservation paleobiology initiative.
Connecting critical issues of state sovereignty with empirical concerns, Borderscapes interrogates the limits of political space. The essays in this volume analyze everyday procedures, such as the classifying of migrants and refugees, security in European and American detention centers, and the DNA sampling of migrants in Thailand, showing the border as a moral construct rich with panic, danger, and patriotism.
Conceptualizing such places as immigration detention camps and refugee camps as areas of political contestation, this work forcefully argues that borders and migration are, ultimately, inextricable from questions of justice and its limits.
Contributors: Didier Bigo, Institut d’Études Politiques, Paris; Karin Dean; Elspeth Guild, U of Nijmegen; Emma Haddad; Alexander Horstmann, U of Münster; Alice M. Nah, National U of Singapore; Suvendrini Perera, Curtin U of Technology, Australia; James D. Sidaway, U of Plymouth, UK; Nevzat Soguk, U of Hawai‘i; Decha Tangseefa, Thammasat U, Bangkok; Mika Toyota, National U of Singapore.
Prem Kumar Rajaram is assistant professor of sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Carl Grundy-Warr is senior lecturer of geography at the National University of Singapore.
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