Tuğçe Bulut
Prof. Dr. Ufuk Özdağ
AKE 626
10 May 2016
Term Paper
From Silence to Voice
“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.” Linda Hogan
As it is stated in the quotation, everything on earth has its own story which may be hard by real listeners. In order to be an enthusiastic listener, one should give enough attention. What is called modern today is erasing the link between people and the nature day by day. People have exploited nature continuously thinking that it is a mere entity in order to serve them. In this respect, I will explain Linda Hogan’s book, People of the Whale, in the light of Christopher
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He points out that nature is inspirited in animistic cultures:
“…animals, plants and even “inert” entities such as stones and rivers are perceived as being articulate and at times intelligible subjects, able to communicate and interact with humans for good or ill. In addition to human language, there is also the language of birds, the wind, earthworms, wolves and waterfalls – a world of autonomous speakers whose intents (especially for hunter-gatherer peoples) one ignores at one’s peril” (Manes 15).
As a part of Southeast Western American, Chickasaw culture was based upon animism. In animistic cultures, it is believed that souls exist not only in humans but also in animals, plants, trees, rocks etc. In the novel, it can be clearly seen that nature which always finds a way to speak with people is silenced with the arrival of the Western mindset to the town. To give an example, when Thomas is born, an octopus comes to the cave, which symbolizes that Thomas will be a sea man like his grandfather. Similarly before killing a whale, townspeople used to get permission from the whale. However, Western mind created its own language, and silenced
Blackfish: The Documentary Entertainment is a word that invokes feelings of fun and pleasure. It is an exciting time with family and friends filled with joy and laughter, especially at amusement parks. However, what about the whales entrapped at water parks? How do they feel about this? Are they content with their environment?
The movie whale rider is a 2002 New Zealand- German family drama movie directed by Niki Caro. The movie is inspired by a book of the same name by Witi Ihimaera. The movie takes place in present day New-Zealand and focuses around Pai, a twelve year old Maori girl who desires to be the next chief of her tribe, but the current tribe chief and her grandfather Koro opposes the idea of a girl ever becoming a chief and undermines all her achievement.
observation, a beautifully detailed manner of writing, a love for the beauty of nature, and an interest in how people interact with the natural world. Like Leopold, Bishop examines human interactions with nature on both the personal and the ecological level. On the individual level, a hunter’s contact with the animal he or she is hunting changes his or her attitude toward nature in both Bishop’s poem “The Fish” and Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.” On the larger level, both Bishop in her poem “The Mountain” and Leopold throughout the Sand County Almanac envision the role of human beings in relation to the rest of the natural world as one of exploration and interpretation through science and art.
In his world-famous thought-provoking novel, Walden, Henry David Thoreau presents his readers with a simple, inspirational guide for living. Written beside the beautiful Walden pond and completely surrounded by an unencumbered natural world, Thoreau writes about his own relationship with the beauty that surrounds him. His book provides an outlet for everyone to learn from his lessons learned in nature, whether they be city-dwellers or his own neighbors. One of Thoreau's most prominent natural lessons running throughout his novel is that of his deeply rooted sense of himself and his connection with the natural world. He relates nature and his experiences within it to his personal self rather than society as a whole. Many times in the novel, Thoreau urges his readers to break away from their societal expectations and to discover for themselves a path that is not necessarily the one most trodden. He explains that everyone should "be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought (341)." Walden inspires its readers to break out of the mold of tradition, away from outwardly imposed expectations, and out of the loyalty to society over loyalty to oneself in order to find truth and self in nature.
The prehistoric times stand evidence to the power of language as a tool for communication and growth. Language has proven to be an effective medium and factor surrounding the evolution of man. Language has played a big role in the development of individuals and societies. What is spoken and/or written, help in the initiation of imagination, expression of feelings, and conveyance of thoughts and ideas. “The pen is mightier than the sword” (Bulwer-Lytton 1839).
Whales living in captivity become aggravated and have been known to take out anger on themselves by self harming. In the pools they live in, metal bars are placed in between the pools to prevent the killer whales from swimming to another pool. On several occurrences, the whales have attempted to bite and break the metal bars. This leaves the whales with broken teeth and a risk of infection. Infections in killer whales can lead to death in many cases. If a whale gets an infection, they have to be taken out of the pool and placed into another pool by themselves to prevent any problems with other killer whales they live with. In many cases, whales with infections need serious care from whale specialists.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life; and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”.Here in this essay, it is divided into two parts exploring the two various extracts from Emerson and Thoreau. Both these textsexchange individual views on the relationship between Man and Naturebut I would like to focus more on the similarities than the differences of this relationship.
In “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, the narrator attempts to understand the relationship between humans and nature and finds herself concluding that they are intertwined due to humans’ underlying need to take away from nature, whether through the act of poetic imagination or through the exploitation and contamination of nature. Bishop’s view of nature changes from one where it is an unknown, mysterious, and fearful presence that is antagonistic, to one that characterizes nature as being resilient when faced against harm and often victimized by people. Mary Oliver’s poem also titled “The Fish” offers a response to Bishop’s idea that people are harming nature, by providing another reason as to why people are harming nature, which is due to how people are unable to view nature as something that exists and goes beyond the purpose of serving human needs and offers a different interpretation of the relationship between man and nature. Oliver believes that nature serves as subsidence for humans, both physically and spiritually. Unlike Bishop who finds peace through understanding her role in nature’s plight and acceptance at the merging between the natural and human worlds, Oliver finds that through the literal act of consuming nature can she obtain a form of empowerment that allows her to become one with nature.
Have you seen beached whales? These massive creatures strand themselves on the beach, alone or in a group, the whims of the moon’s tidal forces. Sometimes, a single whale trapped by the moon’s pull calls in distress, drawing the sympathy of the whole pod, a case of symphony dooming the whole community stranded on the beach to a slow death. In “Why we care about whales”, Marina Keegan writes about witnessing fifty or so stranded pilot whales “lying along the stretch of beach in front of her house, surrounded by frenzied neighbors and animal activists” (35,36). Like the others, she jumped in to help—a futile task which finally led to “23 pairs of whale eyes glazed over” (32,33). Keegan suggests that despite the logic that human welfares are more important than animals’, emotions of compassion towards animals blind us from(better words) feeling the fragility of human suffering near or far away from us. She herself couldn’t think philosophically in the present of dying whales. The ambiguity of her thoughts reveals the paradox between logic and emotion. (unfinished)
“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that if he won the battle he would find himself on the losing side” (E.F. Schumacher, 1974).
The characters also are involved in the belief of the anti-transcendental philosophy. The story shows how each character acts with nature and each other. Many of the whalers must protect the boat and each other as they trek through the wild tides and horrible weather conditions. They try their hardest to fight these conditions, but sadly the narrator is the only survivor. These men exemplify the philosophy by fighting the animals; especially the whales ...
William Cronon tells the “story” of postmodern environmental history and postmodern historian's various methods of narrative discourse: “As often happens in history, they [conflicting accounts] make us wonder how two competent authors looking at identical materials drawn from the same past can reach such divergent conclusions” (2). What Cronon is saying is simple; history can be told from different viewpoints. Furthermore, in his example of the case of the history of the Dust Bowl, Cronin argues that the narrative form breathes life into otherwise seemingly meaningless accounts by pitting humanity against what we call “Mother Nature”. It seems to me that, without the human element of the story, we, as humans, are not all that interested in the natural elements. For example, storms like Hurricane Katrina and Sandy come and go. Yet, without people in the story, the stories hold no significance to humans. The thought a thousand lives lost resonates in the memory more than the loss of a thousand acres of uninhabited land. It is how the chr...
Philosophical Psychology, 21:5, 641-671. doi: 10.1080/09515080802412321. Chomsky, N. (1976). The Species of the World. Reflections on the language of the ages.
The wild children are children who have grown up with minimal human contact, or even none. They may have been taken care by animals or somehow have survived all alone in wilderness. Normally, they are lost, stolen or abandoned in childhood and then, years later, discovered, captured and collected by the humans . The cases that are known for feral children are of great scientific interest. They constitute a kind of degree zero of human development and it teaches us what we would have been without the support of humans, abruptly it shows the fragility of our animalism, and reveals the precarious root of our human life. In terms of language, the wild children only know the mime and the sounds made by the animals with which they were living, especially those of their host families (Melson & Fine(2006). Their ability to learn a language on their return to human society is
"[H]uman knowledge is organized de facto by linguistic competence through language performance, and our exploration of reality is always mediated by language" (Danchin 29). Most higher vertebrates possess ‘intuitive knowledge’ which occurs as the result of slow evolution of species. However, the ability to create knowledge through language is unique to humans. According to Benjamin Whorf, "language…. is not merely a reproducing instrument from voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas…. We dissect nature along lines laid down by language" (Joseph 249). In addition, the development and acquisition of language seems to be related to "complex sequential processing, and the ability to form concepts and to classify a single stimulus in a multiple manner" (Joseph 178). Antione Danchin suggests that the knowledge we create through language allows us distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world to produce models of reality, which become more and more adequate due to the "self-referent loop" which enables us to understand ourselves as objects under study. This "path from subject to object," which is common to all humans, Danchin claims, suggests the existence of a universal feature of language (29).