Adrian Ivakhiv
My teaching and research has focused at the intersections of environmental thought (environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics; Continental philosophy, poststructuralism, and process-relational thought) and cultural studies (film and visual studies; cultural geography, space/place/landscape, pilgrimage, and identity; (eco)regionalism, nationalism/transnationalism, and globalization; religion and ecology). See my homepage for more information, publications, etc. I publish the ecocultural theory blog Immanence (see under "Websites" on the left).
Phone: 16724725443
Address: Department of Global Humanities Simon Fraser University
AQ 6210 - 8888 University Drive
Phone: 16724725443
Address: Department of Global Humanities Simon Fraser University
AQ 6210 - 8888 University Drive
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Books by Adrian Ivakhiv
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
(Complete e-book is available for free download at Punctum Books web site, as is a Reader's Guide.)
This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media."
(If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at [email protected].)
Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.
A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.
April 2001 384 pages, 24 b& w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / 28.50
Contents
I DEPARTURES
1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web
2 Reimagining Earth
3 Orchestrating Sacred Space
II GLASTONBURY
4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon
5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces
III SEDONA
6 Red Rocks to Real Estate
7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape
IV ARRIVALS
8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
Contents
1. Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction
Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv
2. Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest
Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons
3. On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea
Joel Robbins
4. Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests
Andrew S. Mathews
5. Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico
Kristin Norget
6. Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras
Catherine M. Tucker
7. Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities
Anne Motley Hallum
8. Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps
Scott Schnell
9. The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
Andrea Ballestero
10. Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows
Marthinus L. Daneel
11. Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics
Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Papers by Adrian Ivakhiv
This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it?
The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?
The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz.
Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
(Complete e-book is available for free download at Punctum Books web site, as is a Reader's Guide.)
This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media."
(If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at [email protected].)
Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.
A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.
April 2001 384 pages, 24 b& w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / 28.50
Contents
I DEPARTURES
1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web
2 Reimagining Earth
3 Orchestrating Sacred Space
II GLASTONBURY
4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon
5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces
III SEDONA
6 Red Rocks to Real Estate
7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape
IV ARRIVALS
8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age
Contents
1. Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction
Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv
2. Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest
Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons
3. On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea
Joel Robbins
4. Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests
Andrew S. Mathews
5. Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico
Kristin Norget
6. Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras
Catherine M. Tucker
7. Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities
Anne Motley Hallum
8. Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps
Scott Schnell
9. The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
Andrea Ballestero
10. Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows
Marthinus L. Daneel
11. Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics
Adrian J. Ivakhiv
This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. The first asks what the future of such a “morphogenetic cinema” might be in light of cinema’s dependence on two forms of light: the sunlight that once served as the prima materia for the cinematographically reproduced world—and that could serve as a more direct powering of cinematic technology; and the stored and compounded reserves of sunlight that constitute fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Is there a cinematic art that acknowledges this relationship between light, image, matter, and form, and that might point toward a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals, or what some have called the Capitalocene? If so, where among the slippery, morphing images of digital media can such an art be found? If, as Steven Shaviro and others have suggested, slippery, morphing images are the norm for a hyper-capitalist global condition, what are the options for a cinema that both participates in and critiques this condition—that is immanent to it, yet transcendent of it?
The second line of inquiry concerns itself with digital production more generally. If digitality is about the generation of new forms from old, what happens with the old, and what are the material implications of the proliferation of new forms? As digital cinema adds to the growing archive of images and sounds, it contributes to the shift toward cloud technologies, with their reorganization—and mystification—of the materiality of information. What are the implications, for cinema, society, and ecology, of the digitality of the cloud? How might a new attentiveness to cinematic materiality contribute to the reclaiming of a digital commons?
Published as a chapter in Orpheus' Glance: Selected Papers on Process Psychology. The Fontareches Meetings, 2002-2017, ed. by Paul Stenner and Michel Weber. Les Editions Chromatika, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 2018.
Ecologies of the Moving Image was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press as part of it's Environmental Humanities Series in 2013. For further details, visit the publisher's website at https://wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog...
Anna Åberg defended her PhD in 2013 at the Division for the History of Science, Technology and Environment of the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. Her thesis, "A Gap in the Grid," explores the role of natural gas in late 20th century Sweden. She recently received the Fernand Braudel post-doctoral fellowship for a project on fusion energy research in France and the Soviet Union in which she will examine the narrative and imaginative strategies used by different actors to promote, criticize and interpret technological development. In April 2014, she organized a combined film festival and conference, "Tales from Planet Earth," as a cooperation between KTH’s newly-formed Environmental Humanities Laboratory and the Center for Culture, History and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin.
Seth Peabody is a graduate student at Harvard University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, where he is working on a Ph.D. thesis on German "Mountain Films" of the Weimar Period. He has been affiliated with the Berkeley-Tübingen-Wien-Harvard, BTWH, research network on modernity in German culture since 2009, and spent the past year as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His research focuses on German cinema.
Hannes Bergthaller is associate professor at National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, and currently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the University of Würzburg. He is the author of Populäre Ökologie: Zu Literatur und Geschichte der modernen Umweltbewegung in den USA, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2007, and co-editor of Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and US Cultures, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011; with Carsten Schinko. He is immediate past president of EASLCE and book review editor of the journal Ecozon@.
In marshaling a sophisticated framework that draws heavily on the process-relational philosophies of Peirce and Whitehead – in addition to geographical, anthropological, and animal studies scholarships – Ecologies of the Moving Image draws our attention not only to the world-making capacities of film, but also to the intricate relations amongst humans, the earth, and the universe. Its scale and scope exceeds the purview of the humanities and offers far-reaching conceptual and methodological insights of interest to anyone attempting to make sense of our contemporary environmental condition. In early October, I sat down with Adrian to talk about Ecologies of the Moving Image, philosophy, and, of course, film.
To read, click on the link: http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/ivakhiv_ecologies_morehouse/
Established in 2007, the Environmental Humanities series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad: film, literature, television, web-based media, visual arts, and physical landscapes are all crucial sites for exploring how ecological relationships and identities are lived and imagined. The Environmental Humanities series publishes scholarly monographs and essay collections in environmental cultural studies, including popular culture, film, media, and visual cultures; environmental literary criticism; cultural geography; environmental philosophy, ethics, and religious studies; and other cross-disciplinary research that probes what it means to be human, animal, and technological in an ecological world.
Bringing research and writing in environmental philosophy, ethics, cultural studies, and literature under a single umbrella, the series aims to make visible the contributions of humanities research to environmental studies, and to foster discussion that challenges and re-conceptualizes the humanities.
Series Editor:
Cheryl Lousley, English and Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University
Editorial Committee:
Brett Buchanan, Philosophy, Laurentian University
Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Environmental Studies, University of Vermont
Cate Sandilands, Environmental Studies, York University
Susie O’Brien, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Laurie Ricou, English, University of British Columbia
Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
For more information, please contact the WLU Press Acquisitions Editor:
Lisa Quinn
Acquisitions Editor
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON
Canada N2L 3C5
Phone: 519-884-0710 ext. 2843
Fax: 519-725-1399
Email: [email protected]