Dialogue with Place

Toward an Ecological Body

Bibliographic Data

ID12794151
AuthorsDeborah Bird Rose (corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume32
Issue3
Pages311-325
Publication date2002-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Narrative Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1548-9248 • E-ISSN: 1549-0815
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jnt.2011.0054
OpenAlexW2133003960
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited9

Dialogue with Place: Toward an Ecological Body Deborah Bird Rose The grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created. . . . The logic of grotesque ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body ... —Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 317 Bakhtin's study of Rabelais and the grotesque body is my starting point. The inspiration is to explore a part of the cultural past of the west in search of subversions that may also be affirmations of alternatives. This is a restorative project that seeks to elaborate a possible dialogue between different moments in the marginal realm inhabited by spectres of language, metaphor, and possibility. My search takes me into the analysis of ProtoIndo -European language and culture, and my purpose is in the present. The dialogical aim of my paper is set within a decolonising endeavor: to explore some of the implications of considering place as a partner in dialogue . I will be looking toward a concept of dialogical interpénétration between person and place. In considering place, I specifically intend to speak to settler societies, and to the urgent imperative for us settler-descended peoples of learning to make peace with place. I see this as part of the broader issue of developing an ethics of care toward place. How may settlers both acknowledge indigenous people's prior and continuing relaJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 311-325. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 312 JNT tionships to the places that sustain all of us, and at the same time refrain from appropriating indigenous relationships to place? The philosopher Freya Mathews, in her book The Ecological Self, sets out some parameters of an emerging cosmology in which the self would be understood fundamentally to be part of the substance and function of the cosmos. In building on her work, I explore the idea that an ecological self is materially embedded in specific places, as well as being consubstantive with the universe. The emplaced ecological self is permeable: place penetrates the body, and the body slips into place. Following Bakhtin's analysis of the grotesque body of Rabelais' imagination, I will examine some ancient indigenous European traditions of consubstantiality . My reading of European traditions draws on my long-term learning with Aboriginal people. That is, I take Aboriginal ethnography as a site from which to generate some non-traditional readings of Proto-Indo-European cultural remnants. An Ecologically Emplaced Self Mathews shows that Newtonian atomism is both a theory of particles and a cosmology. The Newtonian theory of matter was worked into a theory of society by philosophers such as Hobbes who posited the individual as the metaphoric atom of society. In Hobbes's concept of the war of all against all, individuals, like atoms, were logically independent; they compete for each other's space, and the strong displace the weak (Mathews 25, 39). A similar atomistic theory underpins modern concepts of the body. The Newtonian body is bounded, logically independent, and self-contained. According to mind-body dualism, the body is part of nature, and should be dominated by mind or will. Feminist studies of gendered bodies in the western world analyse this isolated, bounded bodily singularity controlled by mind. They show that western liberal democracies rest on a concept of embodied subjectivity that is implicitly male and individuated. The individual subject is situated within a body that has clearly and cleanly demarcated boundaries. ' Grosz makes the further point that the good subject is in control of the body—that is, the fully enclosed body is under the will of the person. In contrast to these idealised images of the atomistic embodied subject, women appear to be excruciatingly transgressive. The wetness, Dialogue with Place-. Toward an Ecological Body 313 fluidity and "leakiness" of menstrual blood escape the requirements of a clean and proper body.2 The permeability signalled by menstrual blood suggests a lack, so that for women to achieve subject parity in western societies , menstrual blood must be hidden, and the fact of individual menstruation concealed from public knowledge.3 Bakhtin, too, noted the impermeability in the modern concept

Aesthetics · Art · Dialogical self · Epistemology · Indigenous · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Political science · Realm · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Law · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Themes in Literature Analysis · Ecology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub