ENVI 405(S) The Arctic: Memory, Landscape, Tradition (Same as English 405)
This is an interdisciplinary course for those interested in the future of ice, climate change, and indigenous Arctic peoples around the top of the world. We will investigate the material, spiritual, and ecological knowledge of indigenous Arctic people from Alaska, Nunavut (ArcticCanada), Greenland, Sapmi (Lapland), Western Russia, and Chukotka (northeastern Siberia) using the ethnographic notes of Knud Rasmussen, Waldemar Bogoras, Ernest Burch,and Igor Krupnick, and Jan Malurie, among others. We will discuss what we lose when we lose whole cultures, and how, in losing a language and a material culture, we lose a way of knowing the world-ecological and ceremonial knowledge that cannot be reclaimed.
Format: seminar. Evaluation will be based on classroom participation and one long paper, which will be due near the end of the term and which will combine research and original thinking about the importance of language, tradition, ancestral stories, and ecological knowledge in Arctic society, and the ways in which landscape, genius, and spirit shape society.
Enrollment limit: 19. Preference given to Environmental Studies concentrators.
This course satisfies the "Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences" requirement for the Environmental Studies concentration.
Hour: EHRLICH