The Animalizing Imagination

Animals appear not just as biological creatures, but as vehicles of meaning for human imagination, mind and culture. Animal life may form the basis for an animalizing imagination that can enhance our cultural, religious and aesthetic sensibilities. This imagination is rooted in the pre-modern affective relationship between shamans and their familiars, but can be tracked to our post-modern ecological crisis, where we can reclaim a totemic identification with animals as signifiers of a new ecological understanding.

This text argues that animals appear not just as biological creatures, but as vehicles of meaning for human imagination, mind and culture. Animal life may form the basis for an animalizing imagination that can enhance our cultural, religious and aesthetic sensibilities. This imagination is rooted in the pre-modern affective relationship between shamans and their familiars, but can be tracked to our post-modern ecological crisis, where we can reclaim a totemic identification with animals as signifiers of a new ecological understanding.

The volume brings together eight new essays on Amos, which focus on a range of issues within the book. They represent a number of different approaches to the text from the text-critical to teh psychoanalytical, and from composition to reception. Arising out of a symposium to honour John Barton for his 60th birthday, the essays all respond, either directly or indirectly, to his Amos's Oracles Against the Nations, and to his lifelong concern with both ethics and method in biblical study.

The Stage Lives of Animals examines what it might mean to make theatre beyond the human. In this stunning collection of essays, Una Chaudhuri engages with the alternative modes of thinking, feeling, and making art offered by animals and animality, bringing insights from theatre practice and theory to animal studies as well as exploring what animal studies can bring to the study of theatre and performance. As our planet lives through what scientists call "the sixth extinction," and we become ever more aware of our relationships to other species, Chaudhuri takes a highly original look at the "animal imagination" of well-known plays, performances and creative projects, including works by: Caryl Churchill Rachel Rosenthal Marina Zurkow Edward Albee Tennesee Williams Eugene Ionesco Covering over a decade of explorations, a wide range of writers, and many urgent topics, this volume demonstrates that an interspecies imagination deeply structures modern western drama.

This is a book of psychoanalysis. However, the patient is not a human, but place and imagination of placing. The islands of Okinawa, placed on the border of Japan and Taiwan, consist of a complex of subtropical islands in the East China Sea with marine life abundantly found in the beautiful emerald ocean. However, Okinawa is a history of deterritorialization starting from colonization of the former Ryukyu kingdom by Japan in 1879, followed by the World War II and the US occupation until 1972. These tiny dots on the Pacific Ocean became subject to the collective fate of the world. However, placing oneself in these tiny dots and looking at the world from within provides a picture that is totally different from looking at them externally. There are numerous accounts by ethnographers and anthropologists who carried out research in this region of carnival masks and costumes, their belief in the oceanic paradise, worship of nature, ancestor and women's spirituality. Psychoanalysis of the anthropological research unfolds complexity of this field and deconstructs dualistic modern mind that separates nature from psyche. What appears is an ecological perspective of the psyche of the new era.

In The Emerald City, Dan Willis takes us on a flight of imagination that paradoxically never strays far from the most tangible, even intimate subjects. His essays range from the Tower of Babel to the Wizard of Oz, from Christo to Christmas trees, from the "lightness of being" to the "weight of architecture." This ultimately optimistic book suggests that architecture is as vital as ever: "It is tempting to say that our present cultural situation...has rendered architecture nearly impossible if not unnecessary. But it is also possible to look to what our lives, at the turn of the millennium, typically lack-fulfillment, spirituality, a sense of belonging, weight-and to conclude that the ground for architecture has never been more fertile. The texts-intelligent and readable-draw equally from literary sources, architectural practice, philosophical analyses, pop culture, and everyday experiences. Willis's perspective as a writer, architect, artist, and teacher informs his work; his texts are at once reflective and proactive, as they challenge readers to rethink their participation in the built environment. Accompanying the text are the author's original illustrations, which link the forms and forces surrounding architecture at the end of the twentieth century in novel, thought-provoking ways.

From sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders to contemporary animal art, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing examines the cultural and poetic history of preserving animals in lively postures. But why would anyone want to preserve an animal, and what is this animal-thing now? Rachel Poliquin suggests that taxidermy is entwined with the enduring human longing to find meaning with and within the natural world. Her study draws out the longings at the heart of taxidermy—the longing for wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance. In so doing, The Breathless Zoo explores the animal spectacles desired by particular communities, human assumptions of superiority, the yearnings for hidden truths within animal form, and the loneliness and longing that haunt our strange human existence, being both within and apart from nature.