Vision Quest Research Articles

Vision Quest in Posthumanist Education: Focuses, Praxes and Experiences

ABSTRACT In the context of Posthuman Studies, attention towards education is gaining increasing significance to address the anthropocentric axioms embedded in contemporary worldviews. What is posthumanist education? This paper addresses this question affirming the importance of embodying posthumanist theory in practice. Attention will be dedicated to three original keywords: selves-care; flex(st)ability; commUnity. They will be investigated as possible posthumanist focuses to respond to current educational needs. This paper is not purely theoretical; it is anchored in material experiences that are being explored by posthuman communities worldwide. We will reflect, more specifically, on the Posthuman Summer Camp, a collaborative event organized by the Italian Posthuman Network (Italy, August 10–13 2023). In this essay, the realities and possibilities that emerged during the first edition of the Camp are embraced as embodied and embedded, experiential and experimental – clearly, existential – praxes, enlightening our vision quest on posthumanist education.

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Going on a vision quest in the pandemic context: the linkage between a learning organization, internal marketing and burnout in Ophthalmology physicians.

The Romanian health care system faced a long line of chaotic reformations that proved to be less patient oriented and more expensive, leading to an increased level of burnout in physicians. The phenomenon of burnout occurs more and more often in the pandemic context, even in ophthalmology services. Among psychological and occupational factors that may cause burnout, there are also organizational factors that may decrease the burnout levels. The aim of this paper was to bring more insight into the prevention of burnout in ophthalmology physicians by applying strategies related to the organizational factors, namely, learning organization and internal marketing, in sustainable manner. We elaborated the conceptual framework on a thorough literature review and concluded that a learning organization has a positive impact on the implementation of internal marketing practices, internal marketing practices decrease the level of burnout, if appropriately applied, as well as, a learning organization has the power to decrease the level of burnout in ophthalmology physicians.

Richard WagameseFor Joshua: An Ojibwe Father Teaches His Son

grandmother and aunts. His was an obsessive love for his invalid mother, Marine, whom he cares for until she dies. Left to his own devices, he works as a gardener for the rich fifty-year-old Creole, Loraine, and alternately nurses her through her alcoholinduced comas and her need for sexual gratification. The setting is turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury Guadeloupe, amidst municipal strikes, power outages, 35 percent unemployment , and violence. The country is split into two factions: “The fortunate, who possessed generators, and the unfortunate, who did not.” Dieudonné has no interest in politics, history, or religion, yet he maintains a curious friendship with a homeless poet, Boris, and Rodrigue, a young criminal friend who introduces him to crack. He finds solace aboard the decaying thirtyfive -foot sailboat The Belle Créole, owned by the Cohen family, who left the country for better opportunities. Dieudonné invites comparison with Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Condé’s descriptions of the country also bring to mind Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. The narrator is vintage Condé, both philosophically engaging and derisive. Of Dieudonné’s friend Boris, the narrator queries: “Did Boris have talent? This sort of question shouldn’t be asked, because it has no answer. For some, he was an unsung national bard, the only true champion of popular culture. For others, a weak rhymester and a first-class bore.” The genius of the novel rests with its characterizations. There is no one character type, and characters’ actions escape predictability. From Arabella (described as “no doting grandma”) to Matthias Serbulon , Esq. (Dieudonné’s defense attorney), to Luc (a charming mixed-blood painter and also Loraine’s lover), there are no stock characters or easy pronouncements to be made about their actions. The novel is a satisfying adventure. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Richard Wagamese For Joshua: An Ojibwe Father Teaches His Son Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milkweeed Editions. 2020. 205 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED by Doubleday Canada in 2002, For Joshua’s posthumous release as the first US edition of the late, renowned Ojibwe author Richard Wagamese’s (1955–2017) memoir is timely. Winner of numerous awards and best known for his novel Indian Horse, which won the 2013 People’s Choice award for Canada Reads, Wagamese wrote this text as a letter to his then-estranged six-year-old son. For Joshua not only powerfully describes Wagamese’s individual journey in life as an Ojibwe man, it also conveys universal truths about First Nations/American Indian traditional ways to which most readers have no access. What Wagamese says of traditional stories is also true of his own, which “act as guides to our selves.” While some traditional Native readers might take exception to Wagamese using his vision quest, a traditional four-day fasting Books in Review Fatima Bhutto The Runaways New York. Verso. 2020. 432 pages. OSAMA, THE BROKEN BUT learned Marxist in Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, delineates a way of looking at societies that provides a much-needed critical approach to race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality: “The only way to look at powerful societies was through the people they excluded. The blacks encapsulated all the sorrow of their history in art—in music, in literature, in dance. The way the Sindhis or Baloch did here. Even as they suffered, the blacks sang to the world of beauty and terror.” Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, with its complex fusion of ideas—personal, national, and transnational identity; the relationship between fervor and selfdestruction ; and the nature of the matrix within which we live—generates a complex fictional topography. The sensibilities of the novel’s protagonists suggest a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology prove to be profoundly interrelated . Migration, in the form of new social formations that transgress national borders , provides a key context to exploring this work of fiction. It is no secret that in this day and age, several new and transnational social formations have reverted to fundamentalist, exclusionary, and antiinternationalist interests. Also, transnational politics in the twenty-first century often lead to cultural and religious fanaticism by emphasizing a conception of identity between the “authentic” and the “demonic.” I would...

Film Review | Watching “Us” in the Middle East

“Us,” Jordan Peele’s newly released horror film, raises questions about American identity that will appear very different to viewers outside the United States. Peele has claimed that “Us” aims to hold up a mirror to American society, showing “us” how “we are our worst enemies.” But for international viewers, especially those who have experienced overseas oppression from the United States, the questions of violence and otherness that this film raises will have a special resonance. The film begins in 1986, when a young Adelaide (Madison Currie) wanders off into a haunted house called “Vision Quest” while on a beach vacation with her parents. The sign at the entrance of the attraction invites the visitor to “find yourself.” Wandering in a hall of magic mirrors, Adelaide finds a living reflection of herself, and is traumatized.

Camino Rojo from Mexico to Uruguay. Spiritual leaderships, trajectories and memory

The article describes and analyzes the process of discovery, arrival and transformation of neoshamanic group Camino Rojo in Uruguay. Following the trajectories of the organization’s leaders, psychologist Alejandro Spangenberg and his son-in-law Alejandro Corchs, whose parents disappeared during the civic-military dictatorship (1973-1985), Camino Rojo's practices, discourses and aesthetics are contextualized as part of the new forms of indigenous spirituality which have been strongly consolidated in the continent as from the 1990s. Camino Rojo is analyzed based on studies on the New Age and neoshamanism, although these limited categories are deliberately used with functional purposes in order to delimitate the case study. One of the text's main objectives is to show the specificities of the articulations that take place once Camino Rojo is unfolded in Uruguay, away from its Mexican origins. Even though the use of sacred plants such as ayahuasca, as well as other practices like sweat lodges, Vision Quest, and Sun Dance, are highly significant for Camino Rojo, the article specifically targets the articulations generated by the life trajectories of the mentioned leaders. Thus, it follows the links between Uruguay's Camino Rojo and Gestalt psychology, which adds to Corchs' strong discourse of love and forgiveness. As a result, Corchs' life trajectory, which is determined by his links to the Uruguayan dictatorship, are reconstructed, allowing him to rise as a charismatic leader with much public exposition in the media. Finally, in the last twenty years, a process of legitimation of the Camino Rojo organization is observed in Uruguay

Xerox and the Vision Quest

Xerox Production Manager Jim Deese has an employee who is uncomfortable with the company's “vision quests” (creative and spiritual retreats). Xerox began conducting these vision quests as a means of invigorating production and innovation at the company, which had struggled over the years with product development and increasing competition. Some studies have shown that incorporating some element of spirituality helps to generate a happier and more creative workplace. Nonetheless, the employee questions the vision quests and the company's other mildly spiritual practices, and Deese must decide how to respond. Excerpt UVA-E-0367 Rev. Oct. 4, 2013 Xerox and the Vision Quest At the close of a busy workday, Xerox Production Manager Jim Deese found himself thinking about a conversation he had had earlier in the day with Assistant Manager Mike Biggs, who had recently been hired right out of business school. Biggs had confessed to Deese that several aspects of the Xerox culture troubled him. Primarily, Biggs had been surprised to learn that all Xerox employees were strongly encouraged to participate in the company's creative and spiritual retreats, also known as “vision quests,” a Native American term indicating the journey one took to achieve higher spirituality. Biggs admitted to Deese that he was an atheist, a fact that he kept to himself, and that he was not comfortable with anything involving spirituality in the workplace. Deese had explained the origin and nature of these quests, emphasizing that religion was not involved, but Biggs was troubled that they even existed. As Deese thought about the conversation, he reflected back on his 20 years with Xerox and the company's culture of creativity, which often seemed to border on spirituality. Starting in the early 1990s, Xerox began conducting these vision quests as a means of invigorating production and innovation at the company, which had struggled over the years with product development and increasing competition. In these vision quests, sometimes over 300 employees would spend 24 hours in remote locations such as New York's Catskill Mountains or New Mexico's deserts, equipped with only sleeping bags and water. Employees were encouraged to use this time to think about infusing greater creativity into the design and redesign of Xerox products. One legendary story was that, after seeing a Xerox paper carton floating in an oil puddle in the middle of a swamp, company engineers vowed to design and build more recyclable products. Deese had heard that this event was behind the creation of the 97% recyclable and highly successful Xerox 265 Digital Copier. As a follow-up to these vision quests, Xerox incorporated other Native American customs, such as talking circles in which a stone was passed around and only the person holding the stone could talk, thus emphasizing the power and importance of listening and being receptive to others' thoughts. So successful had Xerox been in utilizing these Native American customs to foster creativity that several other companies had visited the company's Rochester, New York, headquarters to learn more. . . .

Shamanic Vision Quest: Native American Ritual, Depth Psychology, and Renaissance Natural Magic

This paper portrays the shamanic vision quest through dreamtime cosmologies, common to the disciplines of Native American ritual, depth psychology, and Renaissance natural magic. The subject matter of Native American ritual is my practice, of depth psychology is C.G. Jung’s The Red Book, and of Renaissance natural magic is Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples’ De magia naturali. Whether through Native American medicine wheel or medieval geocentric cosmology, these disciplines are grounded in the physics of gravity: the most mundane law governing life on earth, yet perhaps also the most obscure law at play in quantum physics. Physics has recently observed what may be a graviton, a particle that incriminates the weak and lowly law of gravity as the kingpin of all the laws of physics. Gravitational waves also have been measured during the writing of this paper. Graviton: the immovable mover; the non-localized singularity or center of everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere. Shamanic archetypes, like these medicine wheels or black hole ouroboros, may be experienced via neurologic spindle cells. Images of original nature photography and paintings embody ideas intended to draw the reader into their own shamanic vision of the dreamtime medicine wheel, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The shaman’s solitary journey, back into the dreamtime of the dark mother, anima mundi or world soul—whether under the hypnagogic spell of an animal spirit guide, Philemon, or Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus—leads from the fiery event horizon of a black hole, to its central graviton singularity, to the dark matter that creates and consumes them. That is the paradox of human existence: only when we become conscious of the unconscious abyss can we live rooted to our singular nature, and from that individuation begin to experience divine love for our shared cosmos. This paper elicits that existential Unity.

The Preference Analysis of Adults on the Forest Therapy Program with regard to Demographic Characteristics

본 연구에서는 성인 대상별 산림치유 프로그램의 선호도를 분석함으로써 산림치유 프로그램의 효율적인 개발 및 운영을 위한 기초 자료를 얻고자 한다. 일반 성인 남·여 516명을 대상으로 산림치유 프로그램 37개에 관한선호도 설문조사를 실시하였다. 자료분석은 SPSS 21.0 프로그램을 사용하여 각 프로그램의 기술통계분석 및 상관관계를 살펴본 결과 많은 공변량이 확인되어, 자료를 의미있게 축약하기 위해 요인분석을 실시하였으며, 신뢰도 분석,빈도분석, T-검정, 분산분석을 통해 인구통계학적 특성(성별, 연령, 지역, 직업)에 따른 산림치유 프로그램 선호도의 차이를 살펴보았다. 37개의 산림치유 프로그램을 축약하기 위하여 베리멕스 직각회전법을 이용한 요인분석을 실시하였다. 이를 통해, 프로그램은 7개의 프로그램군(1: 심리치료중심 프로그램, 2: 강의·상담중심 프로그램, 3: 캠핑·산림욕중심 프로그램, 4군: 식이중심 프로그램, 5: 자연·식물중심 프로그램, 6: 명상중심 프로그램, 7: 호흡·요가중심 프로그램)과 7개의 독립프로그램(1: 숲속 잠자기, 2: 비전 퀘스트, 3: 물속에 손과 발 담그기 4: 신발 신고 숲속 걷기,5: 숲 경관 보기, 6: 등산, 7: 숲속 운동회)으로 축약되었다. 이를 중심으로 성별, 연령, 지역, 직업에 따라 산림치유프로그램 선호도의 차이를 검증하였다. 첫째, 성별에 따라서 심리치료중심 프로그램군, 식이중심 프로그램군, 명상중심 프로그램군, 호흡·요가중심 프로그램군, 등산 프로그램에 대해서 남·여 간에 유의한 차이가 있는 것으로 검증되었다. 둘째, 연령에 따라서 강의·상담중심 프로그램군, 캠핑·산림욕 중심 프로그램군, 자연·식물중심 프로그램군, 명상중심 프로그램군, 호흡·요가중심 프로그램군, 숲속 운동회 프로그램에 대하여 유의한 차이가 있는 것으로 나타났다. 셋째, 지역에 따라서 심리치료 중심 프로그램군, 강의·상담중심 프로그램군, 식이중심 프로그램군, 자연·식물중심 프로그램군, 명상중심 프로그램군, 비전 퀘스트, 등산, 숲속 운동회에 있어서 유의한 차이가 있는 것으로 나타났다. 넷째, 직업에 따라서 자연·식물중심 프로그램군, 명상중심 프로그램군, 비전 퀘스트, 신발 신고 숲속 걷기, 숲 경관 보기, 등산에 대하여 유의한 차이가 있는 것으로 나타났다. 이상에서 살펴본 바와 같이, 인구통계학적특성에 따른 산림치유 프로그램의 선호도에 대한 다양성을 고려하여 산림치유 프로그램을 개발하여야 할 것으로 사료된다. 본 연구의 분석 결과가 성인을 대상으로 하는 산림치유 프로그램 개발을 위한 기초자료로 활용되기를 기대한다.

Understanding machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds

Acknowledgements Preface Henry Lowood Introduction Jenna Ng I. Thinking Machinima 1. Machinima: Cinema in a minor or multitudinous key? William Brown and Matthew Holtmeier 2. Beyond Bullet Time: Media in the knowable space Chris Burke 3. Be(ing)Dazzled: Living in machinima Sheldon Brown 4. Moving Digital Puppets Michael Nitsche, Ali Mazalek and Paul Clifton 5. Facing the Audience: A dialogic perspective on the hybrid animated film Lisbeth Fr lunde 6. Dangerous Sim Crossings: Framing the Second Life art machinima Sarah Higley II. Using Machinima 7. The Art of Games: Machinima and the limits of art games Larissa Hjorth 8. Playing Politics: Machinima as live performance and document Joseph DeLappe 9. Virtual Lens of Exposure: Aesthetics, theory, and ethics of documentary filmmaking in Second Life Sandra Danilovic 10. Call It a Vision Quest: Machinima in a First Nations context Beth Aileen Dillon and Jason Edward Lewis 11. World of Chaucer: Adaptation, pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity Chris Moore and Graham Barwell 12. A Pedagogy of Craft: Teaching Culture Analysis with machinima Jenna Ng and James Barrett Agency, Simulation, Gamification, Machinima: An interview with Isabelle Arvers Isabelle Arvers and Jenna Ng Notes on Contributors Glossary Index

Soul encounter at the Edge of World: Ecopsychology, Adolescents and Education

SYNOPSISThis article describes the practice of reconnecting adolescents with nature using wilderness experience, woodland management and vision quest. it explores the limitations of ecological and biological descriptions of the world and how we might find an ecopsychological language that can inform ecotherapy practice. Drawing on the work of Rudolf Steiner, Gregory Bateson and Henry Corbin it suggests how recognition of the imaginal world might be useful in creating a therapeutic education curriculum for adolescents.

Walcott's sea and Caribbean geomythography

There is an imaginative unity to Derek Walcott's treatment of the sea as matter and metaphor that exemplifies how Walcott's poetic vision and voice have been shaped by his immersion in Caribbean seascapes. This essay focuses on Walcott's epic-minded poems that indicate his impulse towards the poetic vision quest as a transcendental return to an originary site of collective experience. These journeys into deep water confront primordial chaos in order to create a Caribbean place-based mythopoetics that makes meaning from the transculturation of oceanic crossings and gives form to artistic renderings of life in an archipelago.

Louise Erdrich's 20th Century Novels in the Context of Native American Literary and Cultural Traditions (Problems, Symbolism, Main Images)

This thesis is for the Candidate of Philology degree in specialization 10.01.04. – Literature of Foreign Countries. – Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University. – Kyiv, 2010. The dissertation is a first in home literary studies attempt to complexly analyse the 20th century novels of an outstanding Native American writer Louise Erdrich. The basic research goals are the novelist’s work objective evaluation, its problems, symbolism, main images analysis in the context of Indian literary and cultural traditions, determining L. Erdrich’s personal contribution into the multi-cultural US literature. The research methods used by Native, Non-Native and post-Soviet literary critics to interpret the complicated phenomenon of L. Erdrich’s prose are considered in the paper. In addition, the writer’s search of style in the context of Native American and American literatures of the second half of the 20th century is shown in the thesis.As there are no overall techniques to interpret indigenous prose in Ukrainian literary criticism, the study of Louise Erdrich’s fiction with taking into account Indian literary principles is offered in the research. The writer’s work is a product of a great personal creativity influenced by oral tradition and postmodern literature. It also offers a rich canvas of Anishinaabe mythology and world perspective, the same as Catholic religious beliefs. Her prose also offers the following Anishinaabe and pan-Indian cultural insights and ceremonies as pipe ceremony, naming, purification, healing, vision quest, first hunting, traditional marriage, pow-wow, etc. Her exquisite psycho-analytical novels, offering a profound immersion into “female space”, are unique literary accomplishments fictional reality of which has often been confused with magical realism literary reality.Cultural, historical and literary contexts of the novelist’s prose are studied in the dissertation. The impact of Ojibwe folklore images, basic Indian and universal archetypes on L. Erdirch’s work are considered. Moreover, main motifs, plot schemes, semantics of colors, protagonists’ names and numbers used in the writer’s novels are discussed. This helps understand L. Erdrich’s fictional intentions, reflects the influence of important social, cultural and historical peculiarities of a Native person’s integration into a contemporary multi-cultural American society. Her prose is of a strong political influence in which the writer shows the dramatic consequences of social and cultural assimilation of Native peoples. On the examples of her characters’ lives she demonstrates the ruining impact of boarding school system on indigenous children. As a result of Indian “holocaust”, prohibition to speak Anishinaabe language and to practice native beliefs and ceremonies on their land many Ojibwe people became the victims of inferiority complexes and self-hatred. L. Erdrich shows the psychological drama of a contemporary Indian: complete return to the former way of life is as impossible as full acceptance of the new life style imposed by colonizers. The analyses of L. Erdrich’s fictional characters’ names, natural elements, main archetypes and images semantics, color and number symbolism are pioneer attempts in home American literary readings.Trickster-like multiple-voice narration, numerous versions of fictional truth, collective “we” and multiple allusions to Ojibwe myths make L. Erdrich’s novels often built in the form of short interconnected stories unique examples of clustering, which is discussed for the first time in home literary studies. The unique chronotope of Louise Erdrich’s prose is firstly considered in Ukrainian literary criticism. Her fictional chronotope – oneness of spherical space, vector, cyclical and generational time models – is a significant accomplishment not only of modern Indian, but also of American prose.The study of man-land relationship and its breaking after-effects in Erdrich’s prose is a substantial thesis accomplishment. The research expands the former boundaries of “mythical twins” category, offering protagonists’ and antagonists’ images discussion. Double names of novel chapters – in English and in Ojibwe – are considered to be a sign of indigenous languages revitalization. Special attention is given in the research to writer’s interpretation of the pan-Indian plot scheme and motif of road as its inseparable constituent. Detailed description of fictional characters’ initiation offers an alternative vision of urgent issues solution.The writer unites the following: various interpretations of Ojibwe folklore stories told by numerous narrators; storytelling from the perspective of collective “we”; L. Erdrich’s personal stories characteristic for communal narration, a new fictional form in Native literature. This broadens the horizons of Ukrainian literary criticism, enriching it with the knowledge of new types of narratives and compositional structure of a literary piece. The author’s unique style enriches both Native and American literary traditions. Further research in this direction is of critical importance for Ukrainian literary criticism because of the rich variety of important topics, teachings, symbols, literary techniques and genres of L. Erdrich’s sophisticated prose.

Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat (review)

Reviewed by: Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat William I. Woods Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi Timothy R. Pauketat. Penguin Books, New York. 2009. 194 pp. (ISBN 978-0-670-02090-4) One thousand years ago a city existed on the Mississippi River floodplain directly to the east of the present St. Louis. Called Cahokia after the historic aboriginal group who inhabited the site in the 18th century, this was the most extensive expression of population nucleation to have been produced prehistorically in America to the north of Mexico. The structure of the community was planned with clearly defined administrative/ceremonial zones, elite compounds, discrete residential neighborhoods, and even suburbs. An enormous central plaza and numerous immense [End Page 235] earthworks provide evidence of high organizational skills and great expenditures of labor. With a population peak of perhaps 15,000 or more individuals, Cahokia existed for approximately three centuries. Book reviews are difficult pieces to write. This is particularly true when you are well acquainted with the author and the subject. Consequently, I accepted this assignment with a sense of foreboding. Unfortunately, my instincts proved to be correct. The book has been described as “Mesmerizing” and indeed it is, but for the wrong reasons. We have all experienced phone calls around dinnertime from a stranger who asks “Do you love puppies?” and a series of other questions that elicit a similar affirmative answer. Once you are firmly in the routine the stranger asks you if you would like to have subscriptions to a number of magazines. By that time “yes” is the ingrained response and your dinner is getting cold, so you end up with a lifetime of paper that you never would have ordered on your own. Cahokia provides a similar scenario. The author of this volume, Timothy Pauketat, a professor at the University of Illinois, will start a story that everyone would agree with and spin it into the most implausible and merely fanciful or patently false conclusions. I found this unbelievable for a scholar who has spent his entire career working in the American Bottom region (this too is a problem) and surely should know better. When going through the specifics of the discussion in this book one has to keep in mind that no one ever saw and wrote about the contemporary Cahokia. It was abandoned hundreds of years before the first Europeans ventured into the Central Mississippi Valley. So, belief systems, methods of rule, and other lifeways that do not leave a tangible footprint are unknown and always will be. Pauketat clearly understands the problem of dealing with the prehistoric (i.e., societies for which written records do not exist). He states on page 6 “. . . archaeologists must take great care interpreting the clues left behind by ancient societies, or they may end up being fooled by misleading evidence of a great or noble history.” Somehow during the writing of this volume, he forgot his own admonition. Almost immediately the reader is beset with the unprovable and implausible. On page 2 it is suggested that Cahokians worshipped the Morning and Evening stars and that this idea came from Mesoamerica through priests’ vision quest travels to Mexico. This idea was part of the longstanding ravings by the retired Marquette University anthropology professor, Alice Kehoe, and is repeated over and over again. No one of any standing has ever accepted it and there is no evidence to prove any part of this notion. Mesoamerican belief systems are somewhat known due to the preservation of some written documents, fresco texts, engravings, and, of course, accounts by European observers and by the participants themselves. Fine, Mesoamericans had an elaborate cosmography; all cultures do. Mesoamericans also had pyramids, as did the Peruvians, Egyptians, and Chinese. They also had priests; any clear evidence for these specialists at Cahokia? No less an authority that James B. Griffin, the dean of Eastern North American archaeology, stated and provided in print on numerous occasions his view of Mesoamerican contact with the peoples of the Eastern United States. His conclusion was clear; there was absolutely no evidence for direct contact between Mesoamerica and Cahokia. The...

Peter Handke's Reception of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605) in Der Bildverlust: oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos ( The Loss of Image or Through the Sierra de Gredos ) (2002)

Peter Handke's Reception of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605) in Der Bildverlust: oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos (The Loss of Image or Through the Sierra de Gredos) (2002) Gabriele Eckart Peter Handke's novel Der Bildverlust: oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos—his "magnus opus, not just in terms of length, but equally in terms of spiritual scope and aesthetic innovation" (Skwara 77)—is to date the latest of literary texts by Austrian writers that creatively refer to Cervantes's Don Quixote of La Mancha.1 The third of the novel's three epigraphs is one of the many quotations from Miguel de Cervantes's work that are sprinkled throughout Handke's novel: "Aber vielleicht haben die Ritterschaft und die Verzauberungen heutzutage andere Wege zu nehmen als bei den alten" ["But perhaps knighthood and enchantments nowadays must take paths different from those of the ancients" (Winston, 5; all translations of Handke will be taken from this edition)]. The theme in Der Bildverlust is our contemporary cultural crisis caused by a flood of media images, which, according to the narrator, make false assumptions taken for facts. But, truth and veracity, the narrator claims, must also take into account the personal and emotive. Since Quixote also fights in defense of his personal view of the world, it is no surprise that Cervantes's novel attracts Handke. This study will examine both intertextual references to Cervantes's text and structural similarities between Handke's and Cervantes's novels. The epigraph quoted above indicates that Handke's novel probably will tell a modern version of the adventure-packed old tale of knight-errantry and enchantments. Indeed, the 750-page text recounts an adventure story. Spooky places are visited, travelers (some of them manifesting bizarre psychological traumas) narrate their personal stories over a meal, a mythic people is found whose ways are different, and, as it also happens in Don Quixote of La Mancha, possessions are lost, and things once lost are suddenly found. To make sure we don't misunderstand the literary genre, the female protagonist is called "die Aventurera" (750) ["the adventurera" (466)] and we find sentences such as the following: "Das aus so vielen Aben-teuergeschichten bekannte Zittern im nachhinein kam über sie. Aber war das nicht andererseits der Beweis für ein richtiges Abenteuer?" (742) ["The retroactive trembling familiar from so many adventure stories came over her. But wasn't this, on [End Page 262] the other hand, the unmistakable sign of a proper adventure?" (461)]. Most importantly, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, Handke's Der Bildverlust is an adventure novel about a quest, not the one for knight-errantry that is directed towards courtly love, but, as has been mentioned, a vision quest. Due to this quest for the right vision and the obsession with which it is pursued, Klaus Kastberger claims about Handke's novel: "Das Ganze der Neuzeit steckt in diesem Buch" (173) [The whole of modernity is contained in this book]. To give a short plot summary, the protagonist, an unnamed German woman, a banker, very successful in her profession, leaves her unspecified port city in Northwestern Europe to cross a part of Spain by car, bus, and on foot. There, she intends to accomplish a business deal with a writer who lives in the Castilian plains of Cervantes's La Mancha. In return for paying him a fee and taking care of his financial affairs, she wants him to write her biography. On the challenging journey through the mountains, there are "giants" she has to battle with; they are not windmill vanes as in Don Quixote, but rather media images which have the power to attack the protagonist from within. The story ends with a dialogue between the woman and the writer about the horrible clash between our subjective vision of the world and its media images. Besides being an adventure novel about a quest, the text is also a lengthy pamphlet about our contemporary cultural crisis. According to Handke, who has expressed his concern about this crisis for some time, especially since his outrage about the generalized media coverage on the Yugoslav wars (1991-1995),2 the flood...

NEOutopia: Architecture and the Politics of ‘the New’

NEOutopia: Architecture and the Politics of ‘the New’

Review of Indian from the inside: Native American philosophy and cultural renewal (second edition).

Indian From the Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (Second Edition), by D. H. McPherson & J. D. Rabb. McFarland and Company, Inc., 2011. 225 pages (ISBN 978-0-7864-4348-2, $35.00) Reviewed by Marie Kuriychuk DOI: 10.1037/a0026764 Canadian society today contains a wide variety of ethnic and cultural groups including the First Nations people who predated the arrival of the mainstream European settlers. The federal prison system reflects this diversity and requires forensic psychologists to span the different perspectives to effectively assess and treat offenders in their care. As a clinician trained in the white, mainstream perspective offered by academic programs of the past, I am continually looking for resources that would broaden my viewpoint and adapt clinical techniques to offenders with varied cultural backgrounds. Indian from the Inside is a rare find that gives both theoretical and practical insight into the worldview of the Native people. The second edition of this book comes out 18 years after the original text, offering an expanded view that now includes a broader perspective of Native philosophy that spans American as well as Canadian narratives. As noted by Jace Weaver in the forward, this edition is almost a completely new book that incorporates recent research and no longer suffers from the lack of coherence that Weaver found to be evident in the first edition. The audiors have spent more than 30 years researching Native American philosophy, pioneering in 1990 a Native Canadian philosophy course at Lakehead University. The goal of their efforts is to avoid the outside view of the Native by focusing on perspectives from inside the Native way. In the opening chapter the authors set out the foundations for Native American philosophy stating that narratives can function as philosophical arguments. The second chapter asks wheuier Indians really know who they are. The answer is provided via a review of western philosophies, with an emphasis on the outside view predicate, and historical events that shaped the White/native interactions during the colonization of North America. Experiences in residential schools, for example, significandy shape the interactions of Native offenders in the criminal justice system. Giving testimony in court, answering a battery of questions, or taking paper-and-pencil tests during clinical interviews with psychologists, are foreign. The sUence and terse responses often presented to clinicians need to be seen and understood within the historical and cultural context rather than being interpreted as resistance or pathology. Chapters 3 through 5 are rich presentations of Native Pldlosophy exploring me phenomenology of the vision quest as well as native concepts of person, place and the significance of spoken and written language for the shaping of experience and world views. This telling of stories and experiential basis of the Native perspective lends itself well to a nondirective approach by the forensic clinician. Data sought by standardized testing or interviewing can still be obtained if a more circuitous approach, which allows the Native offender to tell his or her story his or her own way, is utilized. Chapter 6 takes a look at Native American philosophy gleaned from film and popular culture while the last chapter discusses the need for community based research and education. The authors state the two tenets of the book as follows: (1) The discipline of philosophy can help the Aboriginal people to understand themselves and (2) Aboriginal people have something to contribute to the discipline of philosophy (p. 1 1). The remainder of the text provides access to ancient wisdom from the Native perspective without first filtering it through western, biased optics. It repeatedly becomes clear that no one perspective can contain the whole, unerring truth. A most salient point is made by the authors in stating that Native Americans become alienated from themselves when they see themselves as others see them and when they let others dictate who they are. …

Women's Votes, Women's Voices: The Campaign for Equal Rights in Washington by Shanna Stevenson

 OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 The volume’s first paper, by Don Hann, James D. Keyser, and Phillip Cash Cash, summarizes known ethnographic material regarding the purpose and function of rock art within the Columbia Plateau.Information from more than twenty Plateau groups is used to show that most of the rock art is probably shamanistic, and associated with personal spirit quest activity , while some is shamanic, the product of a religious specialist. In the second paper, David Kaiser examines the imagery of Plateau rock art from the perspective of neuropsychology, arguing that specific motifs may represent entopic forms “seen” in the altered states of consciousness experienced during the vision quest. Kaiser’s research focuses on a specific design element, the rayed arc, common to Plateau rock art, where it appears often as a “halo” over the human head. Three other papers in this volume are sitespecific in their content and include Keyser’s study of the rock art at Fisher’s Landing, in Clark County, Washington; a paper by Kaiser and Keyser on Rood Canyon Rockshelter,in the Blue Mountain foothills, eastern Oregon; and a paper on two sites in the Fremont National Forest, southeast Oregon, written by Keyser, Poetschat,and Johannes Loubser.Keyser’s documentation of the Fisher’s Landing site,largest in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area, is detailed and thorough. Assessing the function of the carvings,which include hundreds of cupules and a remarkable bedrock bowl in the form of a beaver,he reviews ethnographic data relating to the forms represented,and suggests a shamanic use of the site related to weather control and salmon migration. The Rood Canyon paintings provide a marked contrast to the Fisher’s Landing rock art. Here are rare examples of historic-period “biographic” art, including horse and rider images more common to the Northwestern Plains and frequently associated with depictions of warfare.Different still is the rock art from the Fremont National Forest, with its ties to the geometric imagery of the Klamath Basin.The focus here,however, is not strictly documentation and analysis but also the methodology of rock art conservation and restoration, including lichen removal. The final contribution, by D. Russel Micnhimer and LeeAnn Johnston, is a brief summary of newly discovered rock art from throughout eastern Oregon. With this final piece, we are reminded that now, nearly fifty years after the Lorings launched their project, sites continue to be rediscovered and documented , adding to our knowledge of this most ancient indigenous art form. Although specialized in content, Rock Art of the Oregon Country: Honoring the Loring’s Legacy will appeal to armchair archaeologists and professionals alike, and particularly those with an interest in Pacific Northwest Native art traditions. Richard McClure Gifford Pinchot National Forest Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices: The Campaign for Equal Rights in Washington by Shanna Stevenson Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma, 2009. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 127 pages. $24.95 paper. Every state should have a book like this one, although Washington State has played an unusually dramatic and influential role in the history of women’s rights. Stevenson’s book is one product of a remarkable initiative, the Washington Women’s History Consortium, which was established by the state legislature in 2005. Working through the Washington State Historical Society, and partnering with many other historical institutions in the state, the Consortium has collected an extensive amount of primary source material related to Washington women’s history, made it available on the web, and developed an exhibit  Reviews to commemorate the centennial of woman suffrage in Washington in 2010. This book summarizes these results in an attractive and readable format, supplemented by numerous images,timelines,short biographies,footnotes, and a bibliography. In addition to its appeal for general readers, it will be a great resource for teachers who wish to incorporate women’s history into their curricula. The first three chapters focus on the woman suffrage movement in Washington. Chapter 1 discusses initial efforts to win suffrage from the territorial legislature, the speaking tour of Abigail Scott Duniway and Susan B. Anthony through the region, the foundation of the first suffrage organizations, and changes in the legal status of women, primarily relating to...

Rock Art of the Oregon Country: Honoring the Lorings' Legacy by James D. Keyser and George Poetschat

 Reviews resurrect or craft new geopolitical, personal, and interethnic understandings from scratch. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the lower Columbia River in October 1805, they were moving through a world already mapped by the British and dealing with Native peoples already connected to global trade networks. Lewis and Clark also feared (rightly) that they had not found the headwaters of the Columbia River, let alone the best route from eastern North America to the Pacific. Instead, their efforts seemed to confirm that Alexander MacKenzie, whose writings they carried and perused frequently, had already accomplished that feat more than a decade earlier. As Nicandri posits, such complications seem to have stilled Lewis’s pen through most of the expedition’s time west of the Continental Divide. Confounded by new landscapes and peoples,unable to make claims of “Discovery,” and beyond the bounds of American territorial claims,Lewis became disengaged from what he once claimed as his own “darling project.” In the final chapter of River of Promise, Nicandri builds a strong but speculative case that the expedition’s time in the Columbia Basin led to the “Dissolution of Meriwether Lewis” and ultimately contributed to his suicide a few years later. The effort to prove that connection is ultimately impossible, but it illustrates a larger strategy of the book. Nicandri rightly argues that fuller attention to the expedition’s time in the Columbia Basin can both enrich and even transform historical interpretation. On this score, the book is a great success. Some may quibble with speculations about Lewis’s suicide, and Nicandri’s proclamations about the significance of Native peoples and their various concerns are not sufficiently explored. The book also gets bogged down in a long discourse on the rather insignificant fact of the expedition’s official geographic endpoint. Yet Nicandri provides a number of clear and convincing arguments: about how much the actions, and journals, of expedition members were affected by concerns over British imperial interests; about just how poorly the expedition understood Native communities with whom they could barely communicate; and about how the time along the Columbia River presented the greatest physical and psychological challenges of the entire expedition. In short, Nicandri demonstrates that the Columbia River country brought out the worst and some of the best in Lewis and Clark, and it is there that many important new interpretations and understandings are still to be found. Mark David Spence HistoryCraft, Albany, Oregon Rock Art of the Oregon Country: Honoring the Lorings’ Legacy edited by James D. Keyser and George Poetschat The Oregon Archaeological Society Press, Portland, 2010. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, bibliography. 128 pages. $15.00 paper. Ancient images on stone — painted,scratched, and pecked — and collectively known as rock art, have long held the interest of avocational archaeology groups in this country and provide some of the best opportunities for collaboration with professional researchers.Recent publications of the Oregon Archaeological Society (OAS), including this newest volume, demonstrate the local success of such collaboration. As the title indicates, this book honors efforts by OAS members Malcolm and Louise Loring in the 1960s to document rock art throughout Oregon and Washington. This newest OAS publication features six well-illustrated papers onrockartpreparedbyOASmembersandprofessional colleagues. Editors James D. Keyser, a retired U.S. Forest Service archaeologist, and long-time OAS member George Poetschat have established high standards for rock art research, and with their many publications to date,have created a legacy of their own.  OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 The volume’s first paper, by Don Hann, James D. Keyser, and Phillip Cash Cash, summarizes known ethnographic material regarding the purpose and function of rock art within the Columbia Plateau.Information from more than twenty Plateau groups is used to show that most of the rock art is probably shamanistic, and associated with personal spirit quest activity , while some is shamanic, the product of a religious specialist. In the second paper, David Kaiser examines the imagery of Plateau rock art from the perspective of neuropsychology, arguing that specific motifs may represent entopic forms “seen” in the altered states of consciousness experienced during the vision quest. Kaiser’s research focuses on a specific design element, the rayed arc, common...