Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

Rationality in Religion

This thesis is concerned with the social construction of nature and society through ecotourism on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. It demonstrates that ecotourism is based on an idealized conception of nature external to and separate from society, allowing uneven power relationships to go unexamined and causing themes of social justice and equity to go unaddressed in the development and implementation of it. In my research I show how society and nature are linked in a mutually re-constructive relationship in order to redirect attention onto the way in which powerful agents control the idea of nature in Costa Rica and privilege those who accept the idealized external form, ultimately resulting in uneven development. This is achieved, first, by showing how society constructs nature through discursive representation and, second, by exploring how those new natures reconfigure social relationships and re-order social structures. Methodologically, I take an interpretive approach to participant observation and employ a discourse and image analysis of travel media. Specifically, I analyze Costa Rican travel brochures, advertisements, guidebooks, and electronic sources and contrast two Osa tourism ventures, utilizing information collected from informal interviews and student course journals. I argue that nature on the Osa Peninsula is increasingly being re-made as an object external to society, that society is being reconfigured as a result, that the entire process is controlled by an elite minority, and that the outcome is inequity based on a willingness and ability to accept the dominant new ideas about nature in Costa Rica.

Costa Rican ecotourism and the (re)construction of social-natures on the Osa Peninsula

This chapter introduces a cultural-sociological account of contemporary contestations of the authority of science—contestations that suggest a decline in the authority of science and religion alike (‘postmodernization’) rather than its shift from religion to science (‘modernization’). This is why theoretical inspiration is sought from theories about the authority of religion. Informed by the theory of secularization, Part I discusses the erosion of the authority of science vis-a-vis other social realms. Informed by classical sociological theories about the social significance of religion, Part II then addresses the role of cultural worldviews in denying the authority of scientific truth claims. Informed by theories about the declining authority of religious institutions, finally, Part III argues that scientific institutions rather than science per se are losing their authority.

Introduction: A Cultural Sociology of the Authority of Science

I want to begin by referring to a headline in the New York Times (August 15, 1998), which some of you may have seen: “At the End of a Century of Philosophizing, the Answer Is Don’t Ask.” The story was about a panel at the World Congress of Philosophy in Boston, and the assembled group — W.V. Quine, Peter Strawson, Donald Davidson, Marjorie Grene, Karl-Otto Appel, and, to provide some diversity, Seyyed Hossein Nasr — were addressing the question: What have we learned from philosophy in the twentieth century? The author, Sarah Boxer, ends this way: “The original question had been torn to shreds (rather than answered.) The purveyors of logic and mathematics seemed to have ceded the floor to those who promised to bring back spirituality and reflection.”

SPT at the End of a Quarter Century: What Have We Accomplished?

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Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

Citations

Rationality in Religion

Costa Rican ecotourism and the (re)construction of social-natures on the Osa Peninsula

Introduction: A Cultural Sociology of the Authority of Science

SPT at the End of a Quarter Century: What Have We Accomplished?

A Student’s Guide to Studying Weird Things

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