| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Julie Cruikshank. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 312. $85.00.
Julie Cruikshank's book is a fascinating example of what I would call "ecological epistemology": the analysis of human ways of knowing in relation to natural shapes. Her study follows in a line of books on interpenetrations between mental dispositions and natural surroundings that includes Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959), Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1964), Philip Kuberski's Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth, Text (1992), and my own Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (2003). Cruikshank adds to this tradition by meditating richly and convincingly on glaciers and their "intangible connections to recent human history" (p. 3).	1
Cruikshank focuses on human interpretations of the ice fields along the Saint Elias Mountain divide, a frozen mountain range on the northwest boundary of Canada and the United States. She is mainly interested in interactions between Aboriginal oral traditions and European colonial accounts. She finds that these two cultures often clashed in their respective readings of glaciers. Tribes speaking the Athapaskan and Tlingit languages tended to personify glaciers, to attribute to the moving ice the ability to listen and to see. In contrast, European colonizers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were prone to treat the glaciers as inanimate objects to be studied and possessed.	. . .

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