Bitter Shade
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Yale University Press (US) |
| ISBN-13 | 9780300251746 |
| Open Library | OL25789024W |
| Total publications | 4 |
| Coverage period | 2021 - 2021 |
| Language | EN |
This book asks an age-old question about the relationship between human consciousness and the environment: How do we think about our own thoughts and actions? How can we transcend the exigencies of daily life? How can we achieve sufficient distance from our own everyday realities to think and act more sustainably? To address these questions, the book draws on the results of decades of research in South and Southeast Asia on how local cultures have circumvented the “curse of consciousness” — the paradox that we cannot completely comprehend the ecosystem of which we are part. The book is focussed on three principles: perspectivism (seeing oneself from outside oneself), metamorphosis (becoming something that one is not), and mimesis (copying something that one is not), which help a society to transcend the hubris and myopia of everyday existence and achieve greater insight into its ecosystem.
“Bitter Shade”
This chapter assesses a mimetic relationship between objects and their shadows, between things and their signs. It focuses on Pakistani farmers' concept of sayah , which loosely translates as “shade.” The roots of the concept of shade in Western intellectual traditions extends back to Plato's parable of the cave, the lesson of which pivots on the difference between shadows and reality. The difference between object and shadow has figured prominen…
Epilogue
This epilogue presents some conclusions, beginning with a comparison between Claude Lévi-Strauss's story of Amazonian natives who drown captives to see if they are human, and the story of hunters who journey to the pig village to probe their own humanity. The latter story is self-reflexive and thus perspectivist in a way the former one is not. Key to this perspectivism is the relationship between sign and thing. These are mimetic relations, in wh…
Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan
This chapter explores a dualistic system of environmental relations, one so ancient that it has evolved over time. The modern Hindi and Urdu term jangal means “dense forest,” but the ancient Sanskrit term from which it derives, jangala , referred to the arid, open savanna landscape of western India, which was culturally differentiated from the anupa wet forests of eastern India. There are other differences beyond the vegetative: whereas the janga…
Bitter Shade
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“Bitter Shade”
This chapter assesses a mimetic relationship between objects and their shadows, between things and their signs. It focuses on Pakistani farmers' concept of sayah , which loosely translates as “shade.” The roots of the concept of shade in Western intellectual traditions extends back to Plato's parable of the cave, the lesson of which pivots on the difference between shadows and reality. The difference between object and shadow has figured prominen…
Epilogue
This epilogue presents some conclusions, beginning with a comparison between Claude Lévi-Strauss's story of Amazonian natives who drown captives to see if they are human, and the story of hunters who journey to the pig village to probe their own humanity. The latter story is self-reflexive and thus perspectivist in a way the former one is not. Key to this perspectivism is the relationship between sign and thing. These are mimetic relations, in wh…
Historic Parting of the Wild from the Civilized in Pakistan
This chapter explores a dualistic system of environmental relations, one so ancient that it has evolved over time. The modern Hindi and Urdu term jangal means “dense forest,” but the ancient Sanskrit term from which it derives, jangala , referred to the arid, open savanna landscape of western India, which was culturally differentiated from the anupa wet forests of eastern India. There are other differences beyond the vegetative: whereas the janga…
Bitter Shade