Lecture 8. 17/3 Article: “Wild Earth” critique of Cronon’s approach
A. SUMMARY:
The article is a critique of Cronon’s approach to wilderness and the division of nature and culture. The argument that is being challenged is Cronon, and explains how the wildness has declared the nature as being something foreign, that people have excluded. He gives an example of a tree in the garden, and compares it to a tree in an ancient forest. People in modern time have stamped the tree in the forest as being wild, due to the great distance there is between their personal daily lives and the tree. It’s only when the tree is removed from its ancestral ecological context that it’s no longer wild. That is supported by the phrase of the poet Goethe: ‘’Ein Mensch…show more content… The purpose of the hyphen between the two branches has the task to unite them, as the text claims that they have been divided by modern knowledge, and turned into ‘nature/culture’ with a slash in between to separate them. The division of the nature/culture has brought many implications of how we understand the world. There is being given an example by Mary Midgley, to draw and imagine if there is a problem occurring in the society, we shall look beneath it and see which factors of ‘practices for old conceptual infrastructures’ are being the consequence of the implications, in order to solve them. The text consider two dualism concepts, one which makes everything culture or everything nature, and the other combining nature-culture. In order to combine them, there are seven ‘two-way’ approaches explained in the text. In the encyclopedia the geographer Noel Castree’s theory about nature-culture is being explained. Castree says that the nature has in fact never been natural for people, as it is just a collection of powerful cultural ideas by people. The point is that nature is created by culture. This is kind of the same idea as Cronon’s approach to wilderness, claiming that pure nature is just a fantasy of the human, and that nature is interconnected. The idea of wilderness is according to Cronon just a construction of modern…show more content… Their voices within their families become stronger, more meaningful and more powerful than their husbands. Also more female migrants are being independent and are responsible with their own income. That is also a part of what changes their social status in their families and communities. The authors analyse how the perception of values within families are impacted by the migration of wives and their more active participation in labour market. While being aware of the fact that traditionally the head and the main breadwinner in Vietnamese families was the man (patriarchal family model). The shift of gender roles in family impacts the participation of man in the domestic household from passive to more