Example research essay topic: Relations Between Homo Sapiens Relations Between Homo Nature - 1,460 words

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What are the relations between Homo sapiens and their cosmological, geological, and biological origins and contexts? It may be inevitable that we will begin our mini-conference about religion, nature, and culture with confusion at least, by articulating some of the things that are confusing me, or others. So I will break trail today by raising some of the questions and conundrums that complicate our question about relations between Homo sapiens and their environments. I hope that this week you also will confess your confusion with us. First, but not most, I will skirt past a few construction conundrums by making the now obvious point that every term we might use to enter our deliberations will be contested and require careful defining. We can begin by way of example with the term religion, itself.

While gaining a consensus on the matter is unlikely before the gods resolve their differences, I find helpful this simple if circular definition, stolen from this mornings keynote speaker, David Chidester. He once defined religion as that dimension of human experience engaged with sacred norms understanding that what people hold to be sacred tends to have two important characteristics: ultimate meaning and transcendent power. Religion is not simply a concern with the meaning of human life, but it is also an engagement with the transcendent powers, forces, and processes that human beings have perceived to impinge on their lives. Some will resist such a definitions as circular or vague, or insist that belief in supernatural beings is essential to religion (as did, to my shock, J. Z.

Smiths recent Dictionary of Religion, I can only surmise that Smith didnt write that entry or read it carefully! ). Vagueness is an asset, however, when we try to apprehend the plural forms that religion assumes, perhaps especially when examining worldviews in which nature is a central symbol or sacred reference point. With regard to the second objection, some people consider themselves religious, and nature sacred, but eschew all supernaturalism, such as participants in the Society for Scientific Pantheism. It makes little sense, to me, to exclude by definition such people from the umbrella construction, religion. Nevertheless, it is critical to recognize that the term religion has been a contested category, that we should be careful how we use it, and that therefore a single, incontestable definition of religion cannot simply be established by academic fiat. As Chidester has also well illuminated in African history, religion has been defined as a strategic instrument often in violent power struggles and that we can only expect those struggles to continue.

What about the term nature itself, which is certainly no less a contested construction than religion? A number of scholars are building their careers out of nature, if nature is understood, in this case, as a scholarly resource to be mined for scholarly constructions. While some of this work is important for those engaged in the study of religion and nature, I have found that distinguishing between nature and environment helps me keep my sanity. Well, it at least helps me to distinguish between a nature that most of us, most of the time, experience as other than us, namely, the forces, and life-forms, surrounding us, impacting us, beyond our control, but in reciprocal relationship with us, at least to some, small degree and a notion of an environment that is included in this just described nature construction, but focuses instead on our built surroundings, those which we construct from this broader, other nature. Although such a distinction may helpful, it certainly does not resolve the philosophical questions regarding whether, and if so to what extent, humans should be considered a part of nature. But it may at least keep us alert to the dialectical relationship between human culture, including religious perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors, and the wider natural world from which all human activities arise.

Perhaps no term illustrates this more fully than animism, coined by E. B. Tylor, and used to distinguish the primitive, recently recognized religions of this region, from European ones believed to be further evolved. Because this religion-term was deployed as a strategic instrument to denigrate and subjugate African and later tribal peoples elsewhere, some scholars have erased the term from their lexicons.

But the suggestion that Animism should not even enjoy an entry in the encyclopedia of religion and nature, or be used in scholarly discourse, is certainly no solution. Not only would it promote historical amnesia about the origins of the term, such a convention would obscure from view a host of phenomena, including what may be considered, or who may consider themselves, revitalization movements, in which nature or aspects of it are believed capable of communicating with humans. Let me provide one example that speaks both to the terms religion and animism. Freeman House, one of those participating in the San Francisco Renaissance and the beat culture (which imported non-western religions and promoted native American spiritual ities) who eventually joined in the back to the land movement in Northern California, wrote a path-breaking article called Totem Salmon nearly 20 years ago.

In it, House asserted that the Salmon have long been a totem animal for many peoples of the Pacific Rim, and that they speak to us, if only by their disappearance, about appropriate values and lifeway's. House considers himself religious, specifically, an animist, but given his naturalistic formulation of an animist perception, some scholars would refuse to apply either the construction religion or the animism to him. Here is an example where inflexible adherence to scholarly fashions can obscure the social realities that should to be illuminated. Totem Salmon is written with a Grateful Dead flow of descriptions, and unfolds like an epic poem set to the rhythmical ambience of a stream dropping over rocks. One image remains particularly strong. House describes the extinguished salmon of a overwhelmed habitat as "the ghost of a feeling that seems to come where a lost limb once was. " These ghosts, whether fish or tiger, whale or herb, live on in an ecosystem as a palpable presence in our memory.

Fortunately for all of us, there are people like Freeman House capable of describing the difficult process of rehabilitation with such passion and clarity that his enthusiasm finally becomes catching, bound to make many more people jump into the dirty creek bed to work next to him. Each autumn, adult salmon leave their far-flung Pacific haunts and log thousands of nautical miles to the coastline of North America. There they beat their way up rain-swollen rivers, surmounting unrelenting currents, boulders, and fallen logs to spawn in waters that sometimes are barely deep enough to keep their great muscled bodies afloat. And the fish dont choose these streams by guess-work.

For reasons that keep on to eluding scientists, adult salmon find their way back to their birth waters. Over thousands of years of evolution this site-specificity has produced many different stocks of Pacific salmon, each sharing certain physical, behavioral and quite possibly even genetic distinctions. So differentiated were these stocks that coastal old swore that they could tell them apart by tasting them. House has mastered the bio regional lessons of the Mattole watershed.

He offers a compelling account of the life history of salmon without succumbing to poetic excess. And without the New Age gushiness that characterizes so much modern writing about American Indian cultures, House discusses the salmons mythic as well as practical role in the lives of the regions native people. Another example is the construction nature religion, which Catherine Albanese used strategically to illuminate the worldviews and practices of groups and figures not always considered religious, but who take nature to be an important if not central rubric. Albanese showed that often the expressed desire for harmony with nature masks a mastery impulse (over non-human nature or other humans). She thus provided one of a number of recent scholarly exposes on what we might call the shadow side of nature-oriented religiosity. Her construction of nature religion, however, blurred an important distinction between religions that consider nature to be sacred, in some way, and those in which the idea or experience of nature plays an important religious role.

In my own effort toward greater clarity about nature religion, I have taken to distinguishing between nature-as-sacred religions (which some scholars and many pagan religionists consider equivalent to the nature religion term) and nature-influenced-religions (in which nature is an important but not sacred symbol or meaningful referent). It would be stylistic torture to constantly use these awkward, adjectival clauses, and after making clear which Im dealing with, I try to not repeatedly recite it. But such precision can be helpful, alerting us to the diversity of nature-related religiosity. Sources 1. Greene Edward Totem salmon, London, 2001

Research essay sample on Relations Between Homo Sapiens Relations Between Homo Nature