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Book Review
| Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. By Julie Cruikshank. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2005. xii + 312 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $85.00, paper $29.95.
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| Narrative, encounter, and locality come alive in this exquisitely written account about the sentient quality of glaciers. For the Tlingit and Athapaskan storytellers of the Pacific Northwest whose stories lie at the core of this text and for anthropologist Julie Cruikshank who authored it, glaciers are not inanimate entities but instead actively shape the physical and cultural environments through which they move. Cruikshank juxtaposes Tlingit and Athapaskan stories about glaciers with those told by imperial explorers, wanderers and scientists, among them Jean-François de la Pérouse, John Muir, and Edward James Glave, to illustrate just how dramatically these competing systems of representation differed in their narrations of the same glacial phenomena (and their human consequences) in the closing decades of the Little Ice Age in the Pacific Northwest. One of her main arguments is that the lives of glaciers narrated through the oral traditions of the Pacific Northwest's inhabitants are just too layered, too entwined with their biophysical environs, to fit a European taxonomy that prefigures physical and cultural distinctions. Europeans stories, on the other hand, whether motivated by commerce, spirit, or personal gain sought very hard to impose on this glacial world categories forged elsewhere. With a view to displacing the latter, Cruikshank encourages her reader to "listen for different stories," stories that acknowledge glacial sentience and that exceed such straightforward classification. Another argument is that stories about glaciers provide a living set of accounts for thinking about colonial history and encounter and for coming to terms with the way colonial legacies reverberate through present-day environmental concerns. Throughout the text Cruikshank reminds her reader that the dramatic glacial movements of the late Little Ice Age coincided sharply with colonial encounter, suggesting that glaciers do indeed respond to "hubris or arrogance" (p.11). Cruikshank reemphasizes this point throughout the text with periodic reminders that cooking with grease on glaciers is potentially very dangerous. |
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There can be no doubt Do Glaciers Listen? is an important piece of scholarship. In line with much recent cultural theory, Cruikshank denaturalizes the imagined divide between nature and culture. Importantly, however, she achieves this not by way of the theoretical canon (Cruikshank offers short but useful renderings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Harold Innis, and Walter Benjamin early on in the text), but by recounting stories about glaciers accumulated over thirty years of friendship and conversation with people who lived through the "contact" episodes she writes about, people like elders Annie Ned, Kitty Smith, and Angela Sydney. This is important because it privileges oral tradition and locality as productive, living sites in the political undoing of colonial relations, national imaginaries and, as Cruikshank calls them "metropolitan interpretive schemas" (p. 11). This book is exceptional for its style, prose, the quality of research and, perhaps most of all, for the passion the author brings to her subject. I strongly recommend this text to scholars working at the nexus of nature and culture. |
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Andrew Baldwin is currently a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor of geography at Queen's University. His research interests include environmental politics, postcolonial geography, nature, and whiteness. |
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