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notes 1. power and desire in earth’s tangled web 1. My interest in this “third position” arises, in part, out of a commitment to thinking through the environmental crisis. Ecophilosophy and critical environmental theory today constitute a polyvocal arena made up of diverse analytical perspectives, including those of ecocentric deep ecologists (Evernden 1985; McLaughlin 1993; Sessions 1995b; Abram 1996), ecofeminists (Plumwood 1993; Bigwood 1993; Cuomo 1998; Sandilands 1999), social and political ecologists (N. Smith 1990; D. Harvey 1996; Peet and Watts 1996; Light 1998; Luke 1999), poststructuralists (Conley 1997; van Wyck 1997; Escobar 1999), and others (cf. Zimmerman 1994; Oelschlaeger 1995; Cronon 1995; Gottlieb 1997; Braun and Castree 1998; Zimmerman et al. 1998). My own particular take on the ecological (and cultural) problematic has been especially shaped by contemporary Continental philosophy, notably poststructuralism, the broad post-1960s theoretical movement which understands discourse, knowledge, power, identity, and materiality to be thoroughly intertwined and dynamically interrelated; and by recent postconstructivist or “posthumanist” attempts in the social sciences to rework social constructivism by acknowledging and theorizing human interdependence and embeddedness within broader-than-human material and ecological relations. I am interested in the development of a relational, performative, discursive, and co-constructive materialism, a theoretical approach which conceives of agency, power, desire, and so on, not as inhering in things (humans, scientific laws, nature) but as circulating within relational networks of actors, objects, ideas, and practices—networks which necessarily encompass (and therefore blur the dichotomy between) the “social” and the “natural.” The society-nature dichotomy has fulfilled numerous historical functions, some laudable (e.g., allowing the social sciences to carve out their sphere of authority as genuinely interpretive sciences in contradistinction to the more quantitative and positivist natural sciences), others far less so (e.g., providing a philosophical justification for some horrendous ways of treating other species), but its limitations today seem to me rather acute. Such a critical and reconstructive project places my arguments into dialogue with a much broader range of work stretching from the work of such philosophers as Heidegger (1977a,b), Merleau-Ponty (1962), Bachelard (1987), Foucault (1973, 1980), and Deleuze and Guattari (1987), through to various strands of theory and scholarship across the social sciences: in human and cultural geography (Seamon and Mugerauer 1985; Lefebvre 1991; Shields 1991; Duncan and Ley 1993; Keith and Pile 1993; Gregory 1994; Soja 1996; Pile and Keith 1997), cultural anthropology and archaeology (Ingold 1992, 1993, 1995; Bender 1993; Tilley 1994; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Descola and Pálsson 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997), cultural studies (Wilson 1991; Ross 1994; Slack and Berland 1994; Wolfe 1998), science and technology studies (Haraway 1989, 1991, 1992; Hayles 1991, 1995; Latour 1993; Sismondo 1996; Kuletz 1998; Law and Hassard 1999), environmental and rural sociology (Dickens 1996; Cloke and Little 1997), environmental history and historical ecology (Bird 1987; notes to pages 5–8 242 Worster 1994; Crumley 1994), human ecology (Steiner and Nauser 1993), social and ecological psychology (Gibson 1979, 1982; Barwise and Perry 1983; Michael 1996), and other areas. 2. The term landscape is not without its problems, largely due to its historical connection with the tradition of Western pictorial representation, which privileges a particular way of seeing based on the objectification of land or places into static aesthetic objects for contemplation (cf. Cosgrove 1984; Mitchell 1994). My use of the word follows in the recent line of cultural geographers and anthropologists (e.g., Bender 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995) who critically assess this tradition while expanding the uses of the word to include a broader representational, perceptual/cognitive (soundscape, smellscape, etc.), temporal, and cultural/political scope. Landscape, in this expanded sense, is image, symbol, and perspective (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), cultural process (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995), the material manifestation of human-environment interactions (Crumley 1994:6), and much else. 3. On the New Age movement see Melton, Clark, and Kelly 1990a, 1991; Lewis and Melton 1992; Hess 1993; York 1995; Heelas 1996; Hanegraaff 1998; issues dedicated to that theme in Religion (v. 23 [1993]), Religion Today (v. 9, n. 3 [1994]), and Social Compass (v. 46, n. 2 [1999]); and relevant chapters in Bednarowski 1989; Barker 1989; Albanese 1990; Jorstad 1990; and Bruce 1996. My use of the term New Age culture is intended partly to mitigate the implications of the more frequently used term subculture , which implies a position of subordination and of marginality in relation to a “dominant ” culture. Though my aim includes studying formations...

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