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Chapter Main Title ix preface and acknowledgments Human history has been a rather episodic affair. Depending on where and when one was born into it, the world may have looked comfortingly—or oppressively —certain, stable, and secure; or it may have been dizzyingly openended and uncertain. Ours is one of the latter episodes. The certainties that had held together much of Euro-American modernity—stories about human progress, scientific rationality, and technical and social advance—seem to have lost much of their credibility of late, even in the West itself. Meanwhile , those that had held together non-Western or traditional cultures— certainties about God or gods, the cyclic and seasonal round of life, or a people’s covenant with its landscape—have either long dissipated or are struggling to reassert themselves in exclusionary and often aggressive ways. Our nascently global society exists in what could be called a metanarrative vacuum. For all the signs and symbols that increasingly fill this vacuum (internationally tradable currencies, the English language, T-shirts, Pepsi, Nike), there is no commonly accepted and genuinely credible grand narrative about who we are and what our purpose is on this Earth. So a bewildering array of competing tales are emerging to fill the gap. Among the more powerfully imposed are those of transnational capitalism and technoscience : respectively, the story that humans are wage laborers, entrepreneurial individualists, and cheerful consumers in a triumphantly global market economy, or that we are complex biocomputers driven forward by selfish genes, destined to advance evolution, through our technological proficiency , into realms of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and ultimately the colonization of other worlds. But these are only two of the competing tales in the much contested arena of global culture. This book is about one of their less visible but rapidly spreading alternatives. Specifically, it is about a certain global-subcultural strand of ideas, an alternative narrative, according to which humans and our planet are in the midst of an epochal shift to a more enlightened and ecologically harmonious era. Within this alluring tale, specific sites on the Earth’s surface are credited with extraordinary power, energy, sacredness, or even sentience—and are thought to play a catalytic role in this hoped-for preface and acknowledgments x global transformation. This book is about the spread, in the last thirty years or so, of these ideas about Earth’s “power places” and about the people who have felt drawn to such places. It is about what they do when they arrive there, and the wider social and natural contexts and effects of their activities . These alternative movements have come to be known by such terms as the “New Age movement,” “earth spirituality,” “Creation spirituality,” “nature religion,” and “neopaganism.” My interest here is in examining the cultural and ecological politics (and geographics) of these movements in their struggles with the surrounding culture. I describe and analyze the circulation of ideas about the Earth and about nature as these make their way between science, popular culture, and these alternative cultural milieux. I examine the clashes that occur between contending interpretive communities at two specific places that have been identified by these movements as sacred sites, as well as the negotiations between these human communities and their nonhuman environments, as people attempt to anchor their ideas about nature in the landscape itself. And I critically discuss how their respective ideas and practices reflect, support, or resist the pressures of a “postmodernizing ” global-capitalist culture. As such, this work takes an interdisciplinary approach to a subject that, by its nature, slips and slides across disciplinary boundaries. It is therefore addressed to several audiences, of scholars and of the broader public. To scholars in cultural and religious studies, this work contributes an ethnographic and sociocultural analysis of the New Age and earth spirituality movements (in two of their local variants), interpreted in context of a larger set of global processes. My intent is to bring these movements within the purview of a range of ideas developed by geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars—ideas about postmodernity, global cultural change, and the politics of space, place, and landscape. On a somewhat theoretical plane, I hope my thoughts will contribute to the ongoing work of theorizing the relationship between people, culture, and natural environments—an area that for some time has been characterized by, at one end, a social constructivism that ignores our (human) dependence on the natural world, and, at the other, an objectivist realism that reduces the human realm...

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