Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set

Author: Gavin Van Horn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736862551
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 942

Book Description
We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans--and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin. For many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. These five Kinship volumes--Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice--offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors--including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie--invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin. From the recognition of nonhumans as persons to the care of our kinfolk through language and action, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a guide and companion into the ways we can deepen our care and respect for the family of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations.

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 1, Planet

Author: Gavin Van Horn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736862506
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Volume 1 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of planetary relations: What are the sources of our deepest evolutionary and planetary connections, and of our profound longing for kinship? We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans-and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin. For many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumes--Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice--offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors--including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie--invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. With every breath, every sip of water, every meal, we are reminded that our lives are inseparable from the life of the world--and the cosmos--in ways both material and spiritual. "Planet," Volume 1 of the Kinship series, focuses on our Earthen home and the cosmos within which our "pale blue dot" of a planet nestles. National poet laureate Joy Harjo opens up the volume asking us to "Remember the sky you were born under." The essayists and poets that follow-such as geologist Marcia Bjornerud who takes readers on a Deep Time journey, geophilosopher David Abram who imagines the Earth's breathing through animal migrations, and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser who contemplates the relations between mystery and science--offer perspectives from around the world and from various cultures about what it means to be an Earthling, and all that we share in common with our planetary kin. "Remember," Harjo implores, "all is in motion, is growing, is you."

Kinship

Author: Gavin Van Horn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736862544
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Belonging in the Two Berlins

Author: John Borneman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521427159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description
This is an ethnographic investigation into the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War. Borneman shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror imaging and misrecognition. Using linguistics and narrative analysis he compares the autobiographies of two generations of Berlin's residents with the official versions prescribed by the two German states.

The Book of Unconformities

Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
ISBN: 1891241745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Living into Community

Author: Christine D. Pohl
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467431869
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Every church, every organization, has experienced them: betrayal, deception, grumbling, envy, exclusion. They make life together difficult and prevent congregations from developing the skills, virtues, and practices they need to nurture sturdy, life-giving communities. In Living into Community Christine Pohl explores four specific Christian practices -- gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality -- that can counteract those destructive forces and help churches and individuals build and sustain vibrant communities. Drawing on a wealth of personal and professional experience and interacting with the biblical, historical, and moral traditions, Pohl thoughtfully discusses each practice, including its possible complications and deformations, and points to how these essential practices can be better cultivated within communities and families.

Sand Talk

Author: Tyson Yunkaporta
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062975633
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability—and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.

Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated

Author: Robert D. Putnam
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1982130849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Book Description
Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.

Landscapes of Relations and Belonging

Author: Astrid Anderson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857450344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Wogeo Island is well-known to anthropologists of Papua New Guinea through the work of Ian Hogbin. Based on substantial fieldwork, the author builds on and expands previous research by showing how Wogeos establish and maintain social relationships and identities connected to place and movement in the physical landscape. This innovative study demonstrates how Wogeo worldviews and social organization can be described in relation to terms of movements, flows and placements in the landscape while, in turn, the landscape is constituted and made meaningful through people’s activities and buildings. The author not only addresses some of the key issues in contemporary anthropology concerning place, gender, kinship, knowledge and power but also fills an important gap in Melanesian ethnography.

Sophie's World

Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 735

Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.