2023/07/26

Avatar and Nature Spirituality : Taylor, Bron: Content

Avatar and Nature Spirituality (Environmental Humanities, 8): Taylor, Bron: 9781554588435: Amazon.com: Books






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Bron Raymond Taylor
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Avatar and Nature Spirituality (Environmental Humanities, 8) Paperback – August 15, 2013
by Bron Taylor (Editor)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron's film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time.

Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film's message of ecological interdependence and animistic spirituality. Some were moved to support the efforts of indigenous peoples, who were metaphorically and sympathetically depicted in the film, to protect their cultures and environments. To others, the film was politically, ethically, or spiritually dangerous. Indeed, the global reception to the film was intense, contested, and often confusing.

To illuminate the film and its reception, this book draws on an interdisciplinary team of scholars, experts in indigenous traditions, religious studies, anthropology, literature and film, and post-colonial studies. 

Readers will learn about the cultural and religious trends that gave rise to the film and the reasons these trends are feared, resisted, and criticized, enabling them to wrestle with their own views, not only about the film but about the controversy surrounding it. Like the film itself, Avatar and Nature Spirituality provides an opportunity for considering afresh the ongoing struggle to determine how we should live on our home planet, and what sorts of political, economic, and spiritual values and practices would best guide us.
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Print length

378 pages
August 15, 2013
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Contents

part  i  bringing  avatar  into  focus

  • Prologue: Avatar as Rorschach Bron Taylor
  • Introduction: The Religion and Politics of Avatar Bron Taylor
  • Avatar: Ecorealism and the Blockbuster Melodrama Stephen Rust
  • Outer Space Religion and the Ambiguous Nature of Avatar’s Pandora Thore Bjørnvig

part  ii popular  responses
  • Avatar Fandom, Environmentalism, and Nature Religion Britt Istoft 
  • Post-Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception  Matthew Holtmeier 
  • Transposing the Conversation into Popular Idiom: The Reaction to Avatar in Hawaii Rachelle K. Gould, Nicole M. Ardoin,  and Jennifer Kamakanipakolonaheokekai Hashimoto 
  • Watching Avatar from “AvaTar Sands” Land Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Michael P. Ferber, and Tim Wiebe-Neufeld

part iii: critical , emotional & spiritual reflections
  • Becoming the “Noble Savage”: Nature Religion and the “Other” in Avatar Chris Klassen
  • The Na’vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration Pat Munday
  • Calling the Na’vi: Evolutionary Jungian Psychology and 
  • Nature Spirits Bruce MacLennan
  • Avatar and Artemis: Indigenous Narratives as Neo-Romantic Environmental Ethics 
  • Joy H. Greenberg
  • Spirituality and Resistance: Avatar and Ursula Le Guin’s  
  • The Word for World Is Forest  David Landis Barnhill 
  • I See You: Interspecies Empathy and Avatar Lisa H. Sideris 
  • Knowing Pandora in Sound: Acoustemology and Ecomusicological Imagination in Cameron’s Avatar Michael B. MacDonald 
  • Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sörlin

Epilogue: Truth and Fiction in Avatar’s Cosmogony and Nature Religion 
Bron Taylor 
Afterword: Considering the Legacies of Avatar  Daniel Heath Justice 
353 Contributors  
361 Index  
 


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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Taylor's collection is first-rate.... The contributors assembled in Avatar and Nature Spirituality are knowledgeable, well-researched, and carefully reasoned. Each furthers the stated editorial goal of cross-disciplinary appraisal. The scholarship includes work in religious and mythological studies, philology, and musicology, geography and environmental studies, and sociology and film studies. On the path of civil evolution towards a stable climate and a recovered planet, Avatar is a cultural, spiritual, and artistic milestone, and Avatar and Nature Spirituality is a highly recommended scholarly companion." 
-- Martin Schönfeld, University of South Florida ― ID: International Dialogue

"Taylor's new exciting volume gets at the heart of where most Westerners are engaging religious and spiritual life today: the realm of popular culture. The book's contributors lead us on a compelling journey through a complex cultural ecology of religion, politics, fan forums, ethics, ecotopian promise, corporate violence, and troubling notions of the 'native.'At the end, we emerge with an altered eye, appreciating the power of narrative brought alive through the transformative semiotics of visual culture. Accessible for the uninitiated and yet interesting to the specialist, Avatar and Nature Spirituality is just one of a new generation of books that are shifting the very way we conceive of religion. As traditional congregational studies gather dust, vanguard scholarship that attends to the global 'congregation' of mass culture will bring the study of religion into a new era, and this volume contributes to that important turn." 
-- Sarah McFarland Taylor, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture, Northwestern University

"If, as ecocinema scholar Adrian Ivakhiv suggests, a film is not only what happens between the dimming and brightening of theatre lights, if it is also what happens in our discussions about it, then this collection brilliantly takes the measure of the conversations surrounding the highest-grossing blockbuster of all time. Better still, the book draws you back into the dialogue, and asks you to reconsider what you think you know about a film so provocative that it has taken centre-stage in the global imagination." 
- Joni Adamson, Arizona State University, co-editor of American Studies, Ecocriticism and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons


About the Author
Bron Taylor is a professor at the University of Florida and a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. His books include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010), and he is the editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005) and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. His website is www.brontaylor.com.
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Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wilfrid Laurier University Press; First Edition (August 15, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 378 pages
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
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Bron Raymond Taylor



Overview

Trained in ethics, religious studies, and social scientific approaches to understanding human culture, Bron Taylor's scholarly work engages the quest for environmentally sustainable societies. Appearing in articles, books, and a multi-volume encyclopedia, he examines a wide range of phenomena, especially grassroots environmental movements and organizations, and international institutions, with special attention to their moral and religious dimensions. An academic entrepreneur and program builder, he led the initiative to create an academic major in the Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, later initiated and was elected the first president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, while also founding its affiliated journal. Recruited to fill the Samuel S. Hill Ethics Chair at the University of Florida and appointed in 2002, he played a leading role in constructing the world's first Ph.D. program with an emphasis in Religion and Nature. Most recently, he has been involved in an international think tank exploring ways to more effectively promote an environmentally sustainable future, and has published articles on surfing (oceanic not websites) as "aquatic nature religion." His most recent book is mysteriously titled Dark Green Religion: Nature Religion and the Planetary Future.
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Personal Biographical Statement

Because our values are embedded in our own stories and these in turn grow from the broader narratives of our cultures, here is a brief personal biography, offered in the hopes that it will help those reading my published work to better understand and evaluate it.

Born and raised in Southern California, my earliest memories include being unable to bicycle home from a swimming pool because of air pollution-induced "lung burn," and the outrage I felt at the bulldozing for new homes of my childhood woodland playground near Los Angeles. Moving to the coast on my 13th birthday, I found cleaner air and discovered a love for the ocean. I studied at Ventura High School and Community College, and finished an undergraduate education at California State University, Chico, earning degrees in Religious Studies and Psychology.

My enduring interest in radical religions, as well as in environmental ethics, politics, and related policy issues (such as those related to biological and cultural diversity) was spawned during an undergraduate course on Latin American Liberation Theology. This course examined the religious ideas, social analyses, and political impacts of such movements. Through this course I began to understand the many connections between the violation of human rights and environmental degradation.

To pursue these issues I entered Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, focusing my studies on Liberation Theology and religious ethics, while serving as the Chair of its student-led Human Concerns Committee. Fueled by youthful idealism we campaigned for social justice, promoted divestment in South Africa, fought U.S. military involvement in Latin America, and sought to eradicate nuclear weapons. A prominent Rector and Rabbi, consequently, asked me to serve as the initial director of the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race. I agreed, and afterward, enrolled at the University of Southern California, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Religion and Social Ethics.

Throughout my undergraduate and graduate years, I served as an Ocean Lifeguard (and eventually also as a Peace Officer), with the California State Department of Parks and Recreation. Working summers and most weekends along the Southern California Coast throughout the year, I learned a lot about about urban violence, human stupidity and courage, as well as public lands resource conflicts. I saw the California Brown Pelican disappear from the coast due to DDT poisoning, but then return a number of years later, when their numbers boomeranged after the pesticide was banned. All these experiences intensified my desire to bring ethical reflection down from the ivory tower into the morally muddy landscape of everyday life.

About the time I was finishing my dissertation exploring empirically the impacts of affirmative action policies on ordinary people, and using my own empirical data as grist for ethical reflection on these policies, I noticed that environmentalists had begun to deploy sabotage in their efforts to arrest environmental decline. I soon surmised that, like the liberation movements I had studied, the emerging, 'radical environmental' groups were animated by religious perceptions and ideals. Intrigued, I left for the woods to learn more. This turned into a long-term research trajectory exploring the many dimensions of and forms of contemporary grassroots environmentalism, especially the most radical ones.

This research drew me increasingly to the environmental sciences, in part as a means to evaluate the often apocalyptic environmental claims the activists I had encountered were making. I became increasingly convinced about the importance of a truly interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, if Homo sapiens were to grapple toward environmentally sustainable lifeways. Consequently, I led a faculty initiative to create such a program at the University of Wisconsin, where I took a teaching position in 1989.

In the last several years my research into the religious dimensions of contemporary environmentalism broadened yet again into an interest in the role of religion in all nature-human relationships. Thus, it drew me to the emerging field known as Religion and Ecology and to my editorship of the (now award winning) Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature,(2005) which has helped provide me with the background needed to develop a graduate program to explore these themes.

I am now editing the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and was the founding President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, both of which endeavor to explore the religion/nature/culture nexus, and which can be found at www.religionandnature.com. See www.brontaylor.com for further information pertinent to my research, teaching, and activist interests.

4.4 out of 5 stars
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Holly Slaski

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, yet sometimes not worth reading.Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2015
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I got this book originally because I liked the path the free sample initially promised. But I quickly realized after the first couple of essays that what I thought would be interesting was, in actuality, rather boring. I was very tempted to skip those parts, although I didn't in the end. In fact I was almost tempted to not finish the book at all. I'm glad I didn't though because some of the later essays were really quite good. I especially found the essay about the ethnomusicology and the afterword by Mr. Heath Justice to be very elucidating as to what native peoples thought about the movie, Avatar. A far better read of this sort, in my mind, is a book entitled Avatar and Philosophy: Learning to See.

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W. Mackela

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting and thoughtful articles. If you have seen Avatar and had a connection to the film, then this book is for you.Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2013

Avatar was a magical movie for me. I saw it in 3D at a theatre soon after it was released. The 3D was so lifelike that I felt that it was real, not a movie . It pulled me into the film. I felt more a part of the action than I ever had. It was like I was spending a few hours of my life on Pandora. I walked out of the theater feeling that my life had changed. I just knew that Avatar would change the way people interacted with nature. When I saw that this book was being released and available for review, I jumped on it.
This book has 14 articles that were published around the world along with a Prologue, Introduction and Epilogue by the editor, Bron Taylor and a Afterword by Daniel Heath Justice. The book is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 is Bringing Avatar Into Focus. Part 2 is Popular Responses. Part 3 is Critical, Emotional & Spiritual Reflections.
Avatar has been many things to different people, and these articles discuss many of the reactions that people have had to the film. Two of the articles research responses to the film by visiting some of the web sites that have forums devoted to discussions of Avatar (avatar-forums.com, learnnavi.org, avatarprime.net, naviblue.com, tree-of-souls.com). In two other articles, the authors interviewed individuals or groups and based their articles on the feedback they received. Most of the rest of the articles draw their research from previously published articles, blogs, web sites or books. Most of the articles seem well researched and bring a thoughtful insight to this book. A couple of the articles were less valuable to me because they seemed to be pushing the author's preconceived agenda and fitting the facts to that preconception.
On the whole this book is a interesting, if somewhat dry, discussion of current ideas concerning the various reactions to the film Avatar, the ecological impacts, and the controversies surrounding the treatment of indigenous people on our own planet. The authors present many interesting and thoughtful ideas in their articles. They make you examine your own ideas and prejudices. The articles are also very good springboards for discussions. This would be a valuable textbook for a high school or college setting.
I give this book 4 1/2 stars out of 5 and a Big Thumbs Up. If you have seen Avatar and had a connection to the film, then this book is for you. If you think that there needs to be a reevaluation of current trends of allowing corporations unfettered access to natural resources, no matter the cost to the environment or the people who live in the area being developed, then you need to watch Avatar and then read this book.
I received this Digital Review Copy for free from Edelweiss.com.

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M.A.D.Giles & Rain Wolf

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the Entertainment FactorReviewed in the United States on June 9, 2014

4.5 Stars

Avatar and Spirituality is a thoughtful analysis about aspects of a culturally memorable movie. In this compilation of articles, we take a deeper look at the impact that the movie Avatar has had on our collective consciousness. Though dry at times, the articles will make you think about the greater impact our entertainment choices can have in our day-to-day lives and how a touching narrative can inspire someone to think beyond themselves to the world around them.

** This book was won as a Goodreads First Reads **

MadGiles
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Esteban
5.0 out of 5 stars Esteban MesónReviewed in Spain on September 22, 2016
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Todos los productos han llegado perfectamente a su destino el día 19 de septiembre. Algunos han llegado antes que otros unos días antes.
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