Book ID: CBB094804985

North Pole: Nature and Culture (2019)

unapi

Bravo, Michael T. (Author)


Reaktion Books


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 256
Language: English

The North Pole has long held surprising importance for many of the world’s cultures. Interweaving science and history, this book offers the first unified vision of how the North Pole has shaped everything from literature to the goals of political leaders—from Alexander the Great to neo-Hindu nationalists. Tracing the intersecting notions of poles, polarity, and the sacred from our most ancient civilizations to the present day, Michael Bravo explores how the idea of a North Pole has given rise to utopias, satires, fantasies, paradoxes, and nationalist ideologies across every era, from the Renaissance to the Third Reich. The Victorian conceit of the polar regions as a vast empty wilderness—a bastion of adventurous white males battling against the elements—is far from the only polar vision. Bravo paints a variety of alternative pictures: of a habitable Arctic crisscrossed by densely connected networks of Inuit trade and travel routes, a world rich in indigenous cultural meanings; of a sacred paradise or lost Eden among both Western and Eastern cultures, a vision that curiously (and conveniently) dovetailed with the imperial aspirations of Europe and the United States; and as the setting for tales not only of conquest and redemption, but also of failure and catastrophe. And as we face warming temperatures, melting ice, and rising seas, Bravo argues, only an understanding of the North Pole’s deeper history, of our conception of it as both a sacred and living place, can help humanity face its twenty-first-century predicament.

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Reviewed By

Review Jeremy Pool (2020) Review of "North Pole: Nature and Culture". Imago Mundi: A Review of Early Cartography (pp. 84-85). unapi

Review James A. Spiller (2020) Review of "North Pole: Nature and Culture". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 653-654). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB094804985/

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Authors & Contributors
Barrie Juniper
Yajun Mo
Trout, Bernhardt L.
Papadopoulos, Dimitris
Minkov, Svetozar Y.
Barrado Navascués, David
Concepts
Science and culture
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Travel; exploration
Nature
Science, general histories
Geography
Time Periods
Modern
19th century
Early modern
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Arctic regions
United States
Netherlands
Antarctica
Sweden
Portugal
Institutions
Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
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