participants once they were recognized as being people with their own versions of history to tell, with lifestyles, problems, and specific cultural relations regarding their environments. This further manifested itself in the national literature, for example
Search Results
Landscapes and Races in Early Twentieth-Century Peru
The Travels of José Uriel García and Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa
Rupert J. M. Medd
Eyewitness Accounts during the Putumayo Rubber Boom
Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro—the Madman of the Marañon River, Cárlos Oyague y Calderón—the State Engineer, and Roger Casement—Not of the Real World Humanitarian
Rupert J. M. Medd and Hélène Guyot
Between 1870 and 1915 Peru experienced a rubber-boom, extending into the Putumayo River region in 1893. This huge region of Amazonian forests was controlled by the Peruvian Amazon Company (P. A. Co.). Although Peruvian, they had British company directors and a British-Barbadian workforce. Their methods of extraction generated unimaginable degrees of human and ecological violence. Roger Casement, a British diplomat, was sent on a harrowing mission to investigate these allegations made by travelers. His Amazon Journal takes precedence; however, Peruvians also responded to the situation, reporting to the Geographical Society of Lima. Included are two forgotten yet influential Peruvian explorers: the geographer Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro and the engineer Cárlos Oyague y Calderón. By highlighting some of the early debates that circulated between Europe and Latin America on the natural resources and people of the Amazon forests, the focus is to draw out textual examples of perceptions on race, environment, and early consumer responsibility. Supported by coloniality/modernity theories, it also asks whether this form of travel writing was functioning as a resistance literature to imperialism for the time. Thus, this study investigates alternative readings that might also inform twenty-first-century scholars and activists as they articulate environmentalist and even social and ecological positions.
The Ecology of Class
Revolution, Weaponized Nature, and the Making of Campesino Consciousness
Christopher R. Boyer
Mexican villagers endured three decades of dispossession during the late nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880, 1884–1911). The transfer of most lands held by communities known as pueblos led many rural people to join the Mexican revolution of 1910–1917, and it helped to structure the postrevolutionary politics. Using E. P. Thompson's concept of “community,” this article suggests that villagers' sense of solidarity formed by their shared lives within the pueblos, and leavened by collective experiences during the Díaz dictatorship and revolution, helped them to forge a new identity as campesinos with an inherent right to land reform during the postrevolutionary era. A core component of campesino identity was opposition to hacienda owners. This opposition set up a struggle over land during the 1920s and 1930s that led some landowners to “weaponize nature” by destroying natural resources such as forests rather than turning it over to villagers through the land reform.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 40–53 (14 total)
Leonidas Sotiropoulos and
regarding it from an enchanted viewpoint; such an approach may not be indifferent to attitudes Greeks have of their country and history. Thus, tracing this theme in Miller’s impressions may be enhanced by referencing the cultural environment that inspired it
Beyond the Glittering Golden Buddha Statues
Difference and Self-transformation through Buddhist Volunteer Tourism in Thailand
Brooke Schedneck
schedules, it is much easier to affiliate with these professional organizations to run background checks and take care of orientation to the temple environment. But this orientation, of course, cannot prepare the volunteers for all of the experiences and
Getting It on Its Feet
Exploring the Politics and Process of Shakespeare outside the Traditional Classroom
Karl Falconer
Shakespeare; it is not Shakespeare's work itself that is the problem, but wider issues of class confidence in an environment where ‘we are still educating different social classes for different functions in society’. 32 In effect, by labelling Shakespeare as
‘Sensuous Singularity’
Hamish Fulton’s Cairngorm Walk-Texts
Alan Macpherson
to the psychogeographical wanderings that succeeded these earlier attempts at a defamiliarisation of the environment and derangement of the senses through walking practices. Fulton’s practice likewise celebrates the walk in terms of the bodily and
The Non-Secular Pilgrimage
Walking and Looking in Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay’s The Road North
Alice Tarbuck and Simone Kotva
of nature’. 10 We return to this congruence between Zen and the poetics of field writing in the following section. Like Bashō, Cockburn and Finlay deploy haiku in order to cultivate habits of attending closely to environment, producing works that
Lost in Hanoi
Disorientation, Travel, and Urban Space
Shane Strange
Using a 2010 trip to Hanoi, Vietnam, this article looks at the ways that disorientation is used as a trope within the urban environment and to create the traveling subject. Suggesting that travel is a form of deliberate disorientation/ orientation, the article focuses on ideas of disorientation within the urban environment and the ways they have been portrayed in Western cultural forms (the flâneur; the dérive) while suggesting these forms are not sufficient to understand the dynamics of travel. Moreover, the article focuses on two forms of travel as disorientation derived from John Zilcosky—the trope of being "lost and found" and that of "the return." Finally, the article suggests that Marcus Auge's idea of non-place is not only a sufficient way of conceptualizing contemporary notions of travel, but is also an indicator of something beyond its scope—that of globalization.
Tropiques Nostalgiques
Fatal Homesickness in French Algeria
Thomas Dodman
People once died of nostalgia. This article traces the remarkable trajectory of “la nostalgie africaine” from its original understanding as a clinical form of homesickness to the wistful, but wholly benign, feeling we are familiar with today. It does so by looking at French attempts at colonizing Algeria in the nineteenth century against the backdrop of changing medico-scientific theories of human acclimatization to warm climates. I argue that the latter provoked a positive reevaluation of homesickness and led to the development of a “nostalgic simulacra”: a replica French environment capable of sustaining the sepia-tainted illusion of an “Algérie française.”
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 81–96 (16 total)