Timothy R. Grieve-Carlson: Contact Zone, Gebunden

Klappentext

The Big Thicket is an exceptionally biodiverse region in southeast Texas that has gone largely unnoticed by everyone except multinational petroleum companies, ecologists, and field scientists. It is also teeming with phenomena of the sort that are often called paranormal. In the Big Thicket and places like it, ghosts cannot be reduced to metaphor, and the importance of the paranormal is impossible to ignore.

In Contact Zone, Timothy R. Grieve-Carlson explores the history and ecology of the Big Thicket to argue that the paranormal is a mode of unalienated environmental awareness that has been bracketed and denied in the development of modern subjectivity. He ranges across the history of the American oil industry, local field science and folklore, and the Big Thicket conservation movement to show how the range of experiences labeled paranormal are both startlingly common and intricately woven throughout modern culture. Grieve-Carlson develops a new understanding of religion as human techniques for mediation and negotiation with nonhumans. He contends that paranormal phenomena are fundamentally ecological and that today they represent a crucial way of confronting the reality of climate change.

Combining archival and field research with environmental philosophy and anthropological theory, Contact Zone demonstrates that nonhuman subjectivity and the paranormal are central to religions, politics, and culture in modernity.