January 21, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This course (an Honors College course I’m happy to be to teaching this year) is already in progress, but I’d be curious to hear any comments on it. What would you include in a comparative overview of spiritual practices? What’s missing?
Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice: Comparative Perspectives
This course introduces students to the comparative study of religious, spiritual, and psycho-physical practices — exercises by which individuals and groups deepen, develop, challenge, and transform their perceptions and capacities for action in harmony with religious, moral-ethical, or philosophical ideals. The course covers a range that spans from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers (such as Stoics, Epicurians, and Neoplatonists), yogis and monks of South and East Asia, Christian and Muslim ascetics and Renaissance mages, to practitioners of modern forms of westernized yoga, martial arts, ritual magic, and other forms of physical and psycho-spiritual practice. Readings of ancient texts and contemporary philosophical and sociological writings are complemented by practical exercises, writing and presentation assignments, and a practice project.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged Foucault, Hadot, philosophy, practices of the self, practicology, self-cultivation, spiritual practice, spirituality | 21 Comments »
December 14, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Let’s face facts: Life in such cold climates as the one I live in (it was 8°F/-14°C here this morning) would hardly be possible, for us in such numbers as we are, without fossil fuels.
The harnessing of fossil fuel energy has enabled tremendous innovation — innovation that, if managed well, could help us get to the kind of new socio-ecological era that some have (contentiously) called a “good Anthropocene.”*
Proponents of that “good Anthropocene” tend to make it sound far easier to get there than it would be. Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change | Tagged agency, Anthropocene, climate solutions, ClimateJustice, Ecozoic, fossil fuel era, global justice, good Anthropocene, sustainability transition | 6 Comments »
December 1, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It’s become a cliché for people in environmental, policy, and even corporate circles to talk about the “triple bottom-line,” or the “three pillars” or “three-legged stool,” of sustainability. Those “pillars” are almost universally understood to be the economic, the environmental, and the social (sometimes rendered, more trenchantly, as social justice). Some have argued that a fourth, the cultural, should be added (incorporating heritage, identity, well-being, and related indicators); occasionally, another fourth is proposed (such as “governance”). The point with most of these models is that society, economy, and environment (and sometimes something else) are seen as interconnected and interdependent, and that measuring the success of any one of them independent of the others may be a futile exercise. So far, so good.
But given the divergent uses to which this language has been put — many of them coupled with terms like “growth,” “development,” “capitalism,” and the like — critics have found sustainability talk to be vague and unsatisfying. (I won’t even get started here on “natural capital,” “ecosystem services,” and the other terminological sleight-of-hand intended to convince the powers-that-be that nature is good for capitalism.)
Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture | Tagged Anthropocene, decoloniality, ecology, environment, environmental sociology, environmental thought, four pillars of sustainability, governance, governmentality, land, markets, Marshall Sahlins, Ontology, epistemology, people, political sociology, state, sustainability, sustainability science | 9 Comments »
November 12, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The Washington Post reports that “Ruthenium-106, named after Russia” has been wafting all across Europe.
Two quick observations here.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Carpathians, Eastern Europe, fugitives, Nosferatu, radioactivity, Russia, Rusyns, Ruthenia | 18 Comments »
November 10, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Spin the dial and see where it lands. Take several steps in that direction. Look around. Spin again.
1. Struggle, or The World at War Frame: We are at war. The war is between the good guys and the bad guys. We must triumph. (Variations: The war is between those who are plundering the planet for their own benefit and those who are trying to rein in the plunder and set us onto a better, more viable and sustainable track. The war is between the capitalists and the people, between patriarchy and women, between the state/authoritarianism and freedom, between the racists/colonizers and the rest of us, between the North and the South, between the godly and the godless, et al. Make your own variations.)
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged creative thinking, Edward De Bono, framing, lateral thinking, pluralism, Po | 4 Comments »
November 5, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Here’s something I’ve written to accompany a reading and discussion of Arturo Escobar’s piece “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimensions of the Epistemologies of the South,” which I proposed as my suggested reading contribution for an intro graduate class in Environment and Society. I’m sharing it here as a brief think-piece.
1. If we could somehow momentarily shed our western cultural lenses and see the world both trans-culturally and trans-historically, we would see that the relationship between people and land is perhaps the central issue for any study of either people or land.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged Abenaki, Arturo Escobar, cosmopolitics, decoloniality, Decolonization, epistemology, indigeneity, indigenous peoples, land, metaphysics, multispecies studies, ontological politics, ontological turn, Ontology, Rubenstein School, Vermont | 7 Comments »
October 16, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
There is an irony in The Nature Conservancy’s headline heralding a “new study” that “finds nature is vital to beating climate change.” The sub-title adds that “Nature could cost-effectively deliver over a third of greenhouse gas emissions reductions required to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.”
For one thing, what is the “nature” that would be “cost-effectively” corralled into doing this work? And for whom? (For us, of course.)
What is climate change if not “nature’s” response to the carbon emissions and other things that industrial systems have been spewing into the atmosphere for two centuries. Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged California wildfires, carbon sequestration, ecology, fire ecology, nature, Nature Conservancy, nature's agency, social construction of nature | 21 Comments »
October 5, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I think it’s fair to say that the United States is in a state of cultural civil war.
It is cultural war in the sense that it is a war fought with signs and symbols rather than with guns — signs and symbols intended to elicit affiliation, allegiance, and identification with one or another party to the war.
It is civil war not only because it concerns a rift within the civic order of the society, but also in the sense of its relative civility, in contrast to the incivility of physical or military conflict. The relationship of this kind of cultural civil conflict to real civil conflict is similar to the relationship between “civil religion” — or the assumed quasi-religion of a civil society, the glue that holds it together — to “real” religion: it is conducted in the same ways, but without the overt manifestations that make it “war” (or “religion”).
Cultural civil conflicts work on the affective and emotional registers much more than they work on the cognitive and rational registers. Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics | Tagged affect, affective contagion, civil religion, civil war, cultural civil war, cultural values, cultural war, culture, mass murder, politics of affect, red states-blue states, Trumpland, United States | 8 Comments »
October 3, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
For those following the debate over the article “The Case for Colonialism,” the following adds little new. It’s mostly a way of summarizing the issue and collecting some useful links in one place.
There’s a lesson for academia in the flare-up over the Third World Quarterly article “The Case for Colonialism” by Bruce Gilley. The article was published after undergoing peer review in which multiple reviewers recommended its rejection. One of these specifically rejected its publication as a “Viewpoints” article, which in the journal’s lexicon designates articles that are more in the vein of an opinion piece than a scholarly research piece. Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe | Tagged academic politics, academic publishing, Bruce Gilley, clickbait, colonialism, neoliberalism, scholarly publishing, Third World Quarterly | 8 Comments »
September 16, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
62 moons orbiting in and around the grooved rings of Saturn. Winter and spring, hurricanes, jet streams, and auroras. Rivers and deltas pelted by methane rains on Titan. Hydrothermal vented oceans, and geysers shooting plumes of water that fall back as snow on Enceladus. Moons forming spiral waves cresting in the mother planet’s B ring. Janus and Epimetheus relay racing in the same orbit. Pan and Daphnis leaving rippled wakes in their passing. Prometheus and Pandora, and the tiny pinprick of Earth visible through the rings.
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Continue Reading »
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Visual culture | Tagged Blade Runner, Cassini, images, moving image, seeing, visuality | 4 Comments »
August 29, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Based on its title and on the snippets I saw being quoted, I fully expected to dislike Lee Jones’ article “Charlottesville and the Politics of Left Hysteria,” posted a few days ago at The Current Moment.
Instead, I’ve found it nuanced, cogent, and well worth reading. I myself have tried to broach this topic of the two lefts — the economic (or economistic) left, and the cultural or identitarian left — before (see here). The argument I’ve made there applies to this article as well. I think Jones is more or less correct in arguing that identitarian politics have a down side, which is that they can easily degenerate into a politics of resentment. What he misses is that they can have an up side as well — which is that they can generate a politics of meaning, and that is exactly what the economistic left has lacked. Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics | Tagged Charlottesville, cultural left, democracy, fascism, hope, hysteria, left, left politics, political left, Trump era | 20 Comments »
August 18, 2017 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This post is a follow-up to my “case for a non-mammalian food ethic.” I’ve given that case some more thought and have decided that honesty requires more nuance than either continuing to call myself a (straight) vegetarian or calling myself a “non-mammalian.” The latter term is confusing in any case, since “mammalian” could either mean someone who eats mammals or someone who doesn’t (because they love and defend them). Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged diets, flexi-vegetarianism, flexitarianism, food ethics, freeganism, locavorism, mammalism, mammals, non-mammalian diet, post-vegetarianism, veganism, vegetarianism | 9 Comments »
« Newer Posts - Older Posts »
