Untamed Nature Research Articles

Yvonne Leffler, Swedish Gothic: Landscapes of Untamed Nature

Yvonne Leffler, Swedish Gothic: Landscapes of Untamed Nature

Co‐temporality and Sovremennost': Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs

Co‐temporality and <i>Sovremennost'</i>: Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs

‘Perhaps the Highlanders May Imitate Them’. Highland Identity and the British Empire, from the Forty‐Five to the Seven Years War

AbstractParticipation in imperial service has been seen as a means through which Highlanders, once regarded as a threat to the British state, were assimilated, allowing Highland and British identities to coexist. This was not an uncomplicated process. Reports of Highland soldiers' conduct in the Seven Years War echo earlier accounts of the Jacobite rising and compare Highlanders to Native Americans. Such accounts reflect Enlightenment concerns about the nature of social development. They demonstrate that Highland soldiers in the British Army continued to be regarded as ‘others’ whose supposedly untamed nature remained but was now regarded as useful to the Empire.

The Experience of Place in the Annual Festival Held in an Amazigh Village in Southern Tunisia

The phenomenological meaning of place argued by Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph involves multiple disciplines, including religious studies. Based on the idea of experience of place, the study examines the structural contrast between the inner village and the outside suburbs. Focusing on the representation of the contrast of places in the festival of southern Tunisia, it also discusses the inner and the outer experience of the human existence that such contrast implies. In this regard, interviews with the local people in the village and observation of rituals and festivals were implemented. The traditional rituals designate the contrast of the human realm and the untamed nature, which has been shaped by environmental and historical factors. Their ambivalent ontological orientations toward usefulness/controllability and toward sacredness/uncontrollability are reconciled by the experience of the festival. The dynamism of the inside and the outside in the form of olives, a bride, or a palanquin enables people to realize the source of new lives and experience the essential meaning of generation. In spite of recent political and exhibitionistic tendencies, the Mahrajān represents the universal structure of festivals in which arbitrariness is periodically broken down by introducing the external sacredness into the inner human realm.

Crushing Life in the Anthropocene? Destroying Simulated "Nature" in The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods (2011) is a highly self-reflexive movie that is aware of its generic roots. In particular, the film struggles with the meaning of “the woods” in the horror genre. Cabin’s central twist in this respect is that the titular “woods” are not untamed nature, but rather a place of artifice. Cabin’s woods are not uncanny because they are far removed from “civilization,” but rather exactly because they are part of it. The film’s emphasis on the artificiality of nature suggests that the concept of “nature” is exactly that—a concept, a cultural construct, loaded with meaning. The film’s ending envisions the end of that discursive construct—but for that to happen, humankind must vanish.

"Bara en fot och en känga"

&#x0D; ‘A foot and a boot’. Narratives about children killed by wolves in Finnish folk tradition and media material&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Sofie Strandén-Backa&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Keywords: wolf attacks in Finland 1880–1881, children, living tradition, mass and social media&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The article focuses on narratives about children and wolves, and the material consists of different texts that deal with children who have been killed by wolves in Finland in earlier times. The particular events in question are a series of well-known and documented wolf attacks on children in the Turku region during 1880 and 1881. Older newspaper articles, as well as contemporary texts, are analysed. One aim of the study is to investigate what is set in motion when the relationship between wolves and children is discussed and which underlying patterns emerge as part of that discussion. Another aim is to allow for narrative elements to create a base for discourse about the dangerous wolf. The analysis covers peoples’ comments on websites where the discourse is both defended and challenged and where negotiations about the prerogatives of the animal are made visible. Ever-returning narratives about the dangerous wolf are part of a legend process, where one goal is to convince the audience of the truth of the stories. One way of doing so, throughout the years, has been to present what could be called ‘the bloody list’, a list that consists of the name and age of the dead children, the circumstances under which they were killed and what was left of their bodies. In the stories, there was no way to protect the children, and there is nothing the parents could have done once the wolf got hold of their child. The message in these stories from the 1880s is that there is no rescue from the wolf. This message is passed down to parents and further to the children of today, creating a child-eating beast of (every) wolf. Another goal is to keep the stories alive for future generations, since the events are viewed as so important that they are not to be forgotten. The stories have a somewhat emblematic character, since they reflect an original myth about the genesis of modern Finland, freed from untamed nature and the chaos of wolves.

Kuma Matsuri

Abstract The matagi are traditional hunters in the mountainous beech forests of northeastern Japan. They are distinguishable from recreational hunters in their veneration of the yama no kami, a female spirit or god who dwells in the mountains. This article will focus on their kuma matsuri, a set of rituals associated with bear hunting. It will argue that the rituals reinforce a sense of connectedness and interdependence with the forested mountains, as personified by the yama no kami, and that the bear epitomizes the gifts they bestow. From this perspective, the mountains are central to people’s lives and livelihoods, a recognition that is somewhat at odds with the “mainstream” culture of the lowland plains and urban areas. For their part, the matagi routinely move back and forth across boundaries, both physical and conceptual. They therefore play a vital role as intermediaries between the cultivated human realm and that of untamed nature.

El Dorado (1988), de Carlos Saura: fusión de mito utópico y de realidad

The discovery of the novus orbis brought with it the clash of two cultures, one of them subaltern –the indigenous or American– and another dominant –the Spanish and, by extension, the European–. The latter projected on the new continent, characterized by an untamed nature, human beings uncivilized according to the eurocentric version and fertile resources, their cravings for power and wealth. The image of America as a land of abundance caused many conquerors and expeditionaries to launch themselves in search of mythical places to prosper socially and economically, among the city of El Dorado. Their adventures have been recreated in some cases in the cinema from different proposals, such as the one of Carlos Saura, which focuses on the failed business of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre, because they did not find the desired place.

God’s Garden: Nature, Order, and the Presbyterian Conception of the British North American “Wilderness”

Evocations of the natural world featured prominently within British North American Presbyterianism between the late eighteenth century, which witnessed an influx of Presbyterians into what became the Dominion of Canada, and the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and technological sophistication through which human beings attained unprecedented control over vast swathes of territory. Influenced by an ancient tradition deeply ingrained in Western culture, Presbyterians saw the undomesticated environment, or wilderness, as a formidable physical reality that needed to be wrestled into submission. They also saw it, however, as a metaphorical wasteland whose abject sinfulness mirrored humanity’s fallen state. For all their concerns about the iniquity that purportedly pervaded untamed nature, Presbyterians felt that the forbidding wilderness could be transformed into a benign garden through the vigorous promotion of Christianity among both settlers and Indigenous peoples alike. Their fondness for natural environments that had supposedly been imbued with holiness demonstrates that the Presbyterians’ hostility toward what they perceived as the wilderness did not render them averse to nature, per se. Members of the denomination used stereotypically feminine language in referring to natural environments that had seemingly been redeemed and were no longer regarded as ominous. Moreover, they interpreted patterns of material improvement—as exhibited, for instance, in the emergence of fruitful farms and bustling towns—as the inevitable corollary to the propagation of unalloyed piety in backwoods settings. Presbyterian efforts to Christianize undomesticated environments found expression in a thoroughgoing Calvinism and an emphasis on distinctive ecclesiastical traditions known as communion festivals, which served to differentiate the denomination from other Protestant groups. Ultimately, an investigation of Presbyterian attitudes toward the wilderness reveals that religious impulses contributed to human efforts to subjugate nature while environmental phenomena galvanized Christian evangelism.

Renegotiating Nature: Writing the Post-Romantic Australian City

Nature writers of the Romantic movement responded to the exploitation of natural resources and loss of untamed nature in an age of technological innovation. This legacy of Romanticism pervades contemporary writings about nature and place. However, ideas advanced through Romantic writings of ‘nature as a redemptive force’ and the ideological separation of nature and culture remain problematic (Adam 1998). If one does not consider this legacy and question inherited conventions, myths about nature are likely to be reinforced. In this paper, I explore some of Romanticism’s legacies for nature writing and how contemporary writers draw on and resist the established conventions. I argue that Australian cities provide sites of resistance, where assumptions of Romanticism might be addressed by writers. Cities are places not traditionally associated with nature writing and places where nature/culture relationships might be re-imagined, complicating notions of place, nature and the urban to arrive at new post-Romantic ways of writing nature.

Aestheticising the Blackfoot Valley (Montana, USA), or How to Reconcile the Mining Frontier and the Eco-Frontier

This article presents a Rocky Mountain valley in the state of Montana (USA), a central symbolic space of the American West that is heavily marked by the identity-charged notions of “wilderness” and “frontier”. With a rich history in mining, logging and ranching benefitting pioneers, the Blackfoot Valley today is an excellent example of the frontline between this extractive history (which is not entirely past) and nature conservation, a genuinely active eco-frontier initiated at the federal, state, local and individual levels. Varying representations and appropriations of mountain areas tend to create socio-economic divisions in the valley’s population. An entirely private, site-specific art project (Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild) creates the possibility of offering an alternative resource to be shared by eco-gentrifiers and a local population adjusting to a post-extractive order, and indeed its site-specific works resonate with both the valley’s mining past and its untamed nature. Does this project mean that there are shared values in this rural space undergoing strong social change? And although it does make it possible to spatially reconcile a mining frontier on its way to heritagisation with a vibrant eco-frontier, will it really help reconcile mountain-dwelling populations with very different socio-economic trajectories over the long term?

Feeling American in the Poetic Republic

Karen L. Kilcup, “Feeling American in the Poetic Republic” (pp. 299–335) Recent scholarship concerning nineteenth-century American poetry has challenged petrified attitudes that depict it as almost exclusively sentimental, unoriginal, and meritless. Yet, absent a historicized conceptual framework for assessing the considerable achievements of these poets, we still undervalue and oversimplify their work. Poetry reviews published between 1820 and 1840 show how properly calibrated emotion shaped readers’ tastes and identities, individual and national, in what I call the poetic republic: a country in which nearly everyone read, wrote, or heard verse. Critics’ appraisals intimate their anxious investment in creating authentic American poetry. Given British contentions that Americans were uncivilized, this anxiety coalesced around several related questions: How should writers approach the subject of Indians? What affective stances should poets assume? Was sentimental discourse, especially on Native Americans, inherently “savage”? This essay illuminates the period’s genre norms, concurrently questioning two current critical conventions. Demonstrating how poetry—including its producers and its publics—participated energetically in American nation-building, the essay complicates Benedict Anderson’s assumption that newspapers and novels singularly shaped national self-concepts. It also establishes how sentimentalism was attacked much earlier than today’s scholarship asserts. Simultaneously accommodating and disciplining wilderness (whether formulated as untamed nature and its wild inhabitants, or as uncontrolled, feminized sentimentality), reviewers collectively endorsed dispassionate, elevated nature poetry—often inhabited by Native Americans—as prototypically American, while they disparaged affective excess that they typically gendered as feminine. These verse norms strongly impacted the reception and reputations of the period’s two principal poets, William Cullen Bryant and Lydia Sigourney.

La revolución minera asturiana de 1934 en Melania Jacoby, de Susana Pérez Alonso: Un conflicto individual de proyecciones universales

Susana Pérez Alonso's novel Melania Jacoby proposes two levels of meaning: on the one hand, it deals with what it means to be Asturian and its social rebelliousness, and the visible traces left in the history of the region by the Asturian revolution of 1934 as well; on the other hand, the novel can be read as a universal metaphor of two forces in conflict: the untamed Nature (represented by the sea, the fields, and the coal mines) and the efforts by men to subjugate it and put it at the service of the Asturian bourgeoisie and the incipient power of the franquists. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the figure of Melania Jacoby, a woman who transgresses the hegemonic order in terms of class and gender, acts as a point of articulation and dialogue between those conflicting forces and constitutes an “interstitial space,” a border, and a place of resistance for the marginalized people (the women, the persecuted, and the poor).

Home : the celebratory opening of the Kelpies at Helix Park, Falkirk

At the heart of Falkirk’s new Helix park, a reinvented green space to the west of Grangemouth oil refinery, stand two thirty-metre high statues. They are horses’ (Kelpies’) heads, the first bowed in a submissive, calm gesture, the second with muzzle pointed to the sky. Sculptor Andy Scott created these majestic pieces of public art as a tribute to the working horses of Scotland’s industrial heritage. They opened in April 2014 with a spectacular event orchestrated by Uz Arts who commissioned pyrotechnic and lighting specialists Groupe F. The performance breathed a sense of dynamism into the sculptures leading to a series of questions about the complexion of the palimpsestic Scottish landscape, the intertwining of urban industrial and wild, untamed nature, and the relationship between Scotland’s past and future, a vital enquiry in this year of referendum. This review aims to address these questions.

Blondin conquers nature and invents the circus celebrity

Blondin walked across Niagara Falls on a rope in 1859 and created a sensation. His fame made him synonymous with the high rope act. Drawing on archival and secondary sources, this article explains that Blondin’s rapid rise to international prominence, the merchandizing industry surrounding him, his large earning capacity, global travel, his special shows for journalists, and at least one complicated story of female fandom, pre-empt a modern idea of celebrity. The public perceives celebrities as ‘superhuman’. Did Blondin contribute to the invention of celebrity? Blondin’s reputation and his feats slide from the conquering of geographical space into ideas of mastery over untamed nature and even control over wild animals. Blondin’s athletic skill was undeniable but the varied costumes that framed the act also reinforced cultural notions of predatory prowess. His seemingly impossible feats could be celebrated as triumphant displays of masculinity and, more broadly, of European dominance over geography, other peoples and even species. Underlying the nineteenth century idea of celebrity arising from Blondin’s physical agility were hierarchical relations between races and cultures. As his name became a brand, his act denoted extremes of spatial inversion and gravity defying action conflated with the conquest of nature’s force.

Grunender Wald, gebannter Ort und Palast der Fee: Zum Verhaltnis zwischen Mensch und Natur in Franz Grillparzers Melusina

This article examines the relationship between humans and nature in Franz Grillparzer’s Melusina (1823). In contrast to the hunting forest, the aristocracy’s playground, untamed nature appears as a largely inaccessible and frequently hostile ‘otherworld,’ populated by mythological animals, such as the White Stag and the nymph, and comprised of topical places, such as the locus amoenus . Grillparzer uses nature elements integral to medieval tales of the Mahrtenehe and to early modern and romantic tales of Melusina —such as the hunting forest, the medieval wilder walt , as well as the locus amoenus and locus terribilis —to present his audience with a new view of nature. Most importantly, the nymph Melusina herself becomes the symbol and voice of untamed nature. Although impossible to control, nature can still become a victim of civilization. In the successful relationship between Raimund and Melusina Grillparzer demonstrates that the dichotomy between civilization and untamed nature can be overcome if humans accept nature on its own terms, much as the lover Raimund comes to accept Melusina. Raimund’s changed view of Melusina is a reflection of the growing movement to value and protect the natural world and thus of the emerging Naturschutzbewegung in 19th century Germany and Austria.

O Lobo da Estepe: uma escritura selvagem

Ao reconhecer que O lobo da estepe, de Hermann Hesse, é uma obra que se propõe a deslegitimar o senso comum e, consequentemente, a ampliar a percepção usual do leitor, o presente artigo visa mostrar que a possibilidade de fazê-lo não reside no efeito de estranhamento provocado pela trama, mas no arranjo estrutural da obra, na sua escritura selvagem, capaz de percorrer caminhos inabituais ao potencializar o embate entre visões de mundo, desmistificando assim a noção usual do que se considera o indomesticado no homem. Para isso, parte-se de duas concepções explícitas no romance: uma de sujeito e a outra de representação, com o intuito de mostrar que é na esteira destas noções que a obra se constrói e pode, a partir da elaboração estética destas ao longo de todo o texto, desestabilizar a compreensão trivial na abertura proposta pelo diálogo.

Gender and images of nature and sport in British and German news magazines: the global and the national in images of advertising

The article has an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on research from gender, media, sport and cultural studies. It considers the discourses of nature and sport in advertising which targets mainly men, in the editorial context of two examples of British and German news magazines, namely The Economist and Der Spiegel, from a critical cultural and gender studies perspective. It aims to outline the relational nature and hierarchical structure of gender reflected in constructs of popular culture; to assess whether promotional discourses of nature and sport are conceived to assert a uniform, global hegemonic masculinity, or whether nationally distinctive target-groups are addressed in specifically national ways. It analyzes the particular gender ideologies contained in commodity advertising that use metaphors of untamed nature and competitive sports to address audiences who are considered to be opinion leaders in Britain and/or Germany. The aspiration towards global competitiveness or neo-colonial domination visualized by wild, virgin landscapes and global sports will be questioned in relation to the concept of global or national identity.

Loving Scripture and Nature

Against James Nash’s proposal that scripture has no regard for biodiversity or untamed nature I propose that on the contrary scripture contains a rich narrative of ecological respect and restoration. Nash fails to see this because he reads scripture along the lines of the now discredited form critical approach to the Bible. When scripture is read as canon it speaks clearly of human duties to care for otherkind, and to respect a cosmic covenant between Creator and all creatures.

Perspective: Simulation and Transformational Change: The Paradox of Expertise

Simulation is widely seen as a space where procedural skills can be practiced in safety, free from the pressures and complexities of clinical care. Central to this approach is the notion of simplification, a stripping down of skills into their component parts. Yet the definition of simplicity is contestable, often determined by experts without reference to those they teach.The author uses the ha-ha, a hidden ditch around a large country house used by 18th-century English landscape gardeners to create an illusion that the house is surrounded by untamed nature, as a metaphor for the differing perspectives of expert and novice. The author proposes that this difference of perspective lies at the heart of many current problems with simulation and simulators.This article challenges the philosophy of simplification, arguing that procedural skills should not be divorced from their clinical context and that oversimplification of a complex process can interfere with deep understanding. The author draws on Meyer and Land's notions of threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge and on his own experience with patient-focused simulation to propose an alternative view of simulation, framing it as a safe space which can reflect the uncertainties of clinical practice and recreate the conditions of real-world learning. By reintroducing complexity and human unpredictability, simulation can provide a safe environment for assisting the transformational change that is essential to becoming a competent clinician.