The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

In Memory of Her! Exploring the Political Power of Readings—Feminist and Ecological

Abstract: Over the last 30 years or more the feminist and ecological movements have contributed significantly to two major shifts in the human social imaginary. These shifts have lead to new ways of reading/interpreting classical texts, and in this instance, biblical texts. This article addresses the political function of readings which have attended to gender, power and a range of multiplicative vectors over the recent decades of feminist interpretation. The more recent shift in the social imaginary to what Lorraine Code calls ‘ecological thinking’ has called for a move beyond anthropocentrism. Such a shift requires new ways of reading. This article concludes with a reading of Mt. 26.6–13 from an ecological perspective taking account of the materiality and sociality encoded in the text.

“Gorilla Trails in Paradise”: Carl Akeley, Mary Bradley, and the American Search for the Missing Link

Abstract: In 1881, Ward's Natural Science Bulletin published the anonymously authored poem "The Missing Link." Referencing decades-long debates over the relationship of man to ape, and the spiritual, intellectual, and moral capacities of apes, chimpanzees, and orangutans (Desmond 45, 141, 289), the poem recounts the following tale of a simian king ordered by his council to find a bride. When pressed by his "lords of state" to "mate," as the time arose for him to perform his royal duties, the simian regent replied with indignation that he would not make a "mesalliance" with a chimpanzee. Despite assurances that the female of the lesser simian species would suffice as royal consort, the gorilla king declared that he would wait for someone worthy of his royal bloodline. Suddenly, from his treetop viewpoint, the sight of "a vision of beauty" never seen before-"[a] maiden young and fair, [a]s the charcoal's ebon tint" surprised him. Her teeth were white as cowry shells, "[h]er locks of a crispy curl," and "[h]er feet of a mammoth size." The gorilla king felt so moved by this "bewitching dream" that he declared: "Now by my kingly troth, This maid shall be, I think, My royal bride, and supply beside Mr. Darwin's missing link." The African woman, "thoughtless" and "[sjuspicionless of guile" strayed beneath the trees where the simian court convened. When the "monarch spake his love" to her, "the lady smiled on him," at which point the gorilla king stuck "his great prehensile toes" in her hair and carried her off into his arboreal kingdom. "Thus was the monarch wed, [a]nd thus the race began, [w]hence, thro' various links, somewhat strange methinks, [c]ame the "Descent of Man!" (Ward's Natural Science Bulletin 8). The Bulletin, the official journal of Henry Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, enjoyed a wide readership in America and a selective reading audience in Europe. Ward's, an emporium, cabinet of curios, and taxidermy studio, boasted a reputation as one of the premier American (and Western) purveyors of natural history specimens (Kohlstedt, 647-48). In another poem "To the Gorilla in The Rochester University," which appeared in the Bulletin in 1882, the narrator questions the existence and purpose of the gorilla. At one point in the imaginary conversation with the stuffed animal on display, the author asks: "Could you not serve upon a rice plantation-[r]aise sugar-cane, and cotton, for the masses, [a]nd carry burdens, as do mules and asses?" ("To the Gorilla" 9). Both poems reflected popular and scientific discourses concerning the relationship between man and the animal kingdom in light of the publication of "Mr. Darwin's" The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), and allude to the importance of the gorilla in those discussions. More specifically, the poems' authors speculated that Africans and African Americans were the key to unlocking the transition from ape to man, as popular and scientific thought configured "Negroes" closest to the simian in form and intellect. In this complex exposition of race and gender, popular thought imagined the female African body as the producer of "the missing link"-a half-man, half-beast creature that would reveal the key to the descent of man. Analogies drawn between Africans, African Americans, apes, and gorillas in "missing link" narratives assumed that African women submitted to animal couplings due in part to their perceived hyper and bestial sexuality (Collins 99). This discussion of possible couplings between African woman and gorilla reflected a broader American captivation with the missing link. "Gorilla Trails in Paradise" explores the American obsession with primates and evolution, as informed by notions of race and sexuality, as an important current in American cultural and intellectual history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This preoccupation began with queries regarding the relationship between man and ape in light of evolutionary theories that predated the publication of Darwin's seminal treatises. …

Nicaragua's Buen Vivir: a strategy for tourism development?

Abstract: Although often framed as an emerging anthropocenic socio-ecological imaginary, the Latin American paradigm of Buen Vivir has provided a broad base of support for tourism development in the region. ...

‘Raw talent in the making’: Imaginary journeys, authorship and the discourses of expertise

Abstract: In the digital age, it seems that participation has been conflated with literacy, content with engagement, novelty with innovation and ubiquity with meaning (e.g. see Thornham and McFarlane, 2014; Gillespie, 2010; Dean, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; van Dijck, 2013) and encapsulated in terms such as ‘digital native’, ‘digital divide’ or ‘born digital’. In turn, these conflations have done something to technology, which is constructed as malleable, a supportive facilitator, and the user, who is constructed as active agent. Neither of these account for mediations nor for – crucial for us – the notion of the imaginary, which emerges in our research as so central to expertise. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out in Studio12, a media production facility for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds in Leeds, United Kingdom, we propose that the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race. Expertise is claimed, ...