Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Front Cover
Anne Buttimer, L. Wallin
Springer Science & Business Media, 1999 M07 31 - 360 pages
Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective presents 20 essays which explore diverse cultural interpretations of the earth's surface. Contrasted with each other and with the potentially cosmopolitan culture of science, these detailed studies of ways in which different cultures conceptualise nature appear in the context of global environmental change.
Understanding across cultural lines has never been more important. This book shows how individual cultures see their own histories as offering protection for nature, while often viewing others as lacking such ethical restraints. Through such writing a discourse of understanding and common action becomes possible. The authors come from the places they discuss, and offer passionate as well as scholarly visions of nature within their cultural homes.
Audience: This volume is of interest to academics and professionals working in the fields of cultural geography, environmental history, environmental studies, history of environmental ideas, environmental education, landscape and literature, nature and culture. It can be used for courses in the above-mentioned areas and seminars in comparative literature. It can also be used as a complimentary text to provide cultural context to literary readings, and for seminars on cultural aspects of the environment.
 

Contents

Reflections on the History of Western Attitudes to Nature
1
Ideas of Nature in East Asian Lands 19 1
19
Japans Traditional View of Nature and Interpretation
51
Indian Attitudes Toward Nature
63
A Search in Hindu
69
World Views of Arab Geographers 87 48
87
Perspectives on the Contributions of Arabs and Muslims to Geography 55
95
Cosmos and Hearth in China
117
Spanish Ideals
151
Nature Attitudes and the Latvian
175
Arctic Worlds and the Geography of Imagination
189
Invented Tradition and Academic Convention
235
John Muir in the Mountains
251
Nature Culture and the Morality of Landscape
271
Yeats and WestofIreland
287
Copyright

Hydraulics and Forestry in Spain 18551936
137

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