Probing Perspectives
Featured Jewish Environmentalism: Hazon View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Avalon Jade Theisen
Jewish environmentalism has roots in millennia of stewardship of God’s creation, teleology, and principles of not destroying. The nonprofit organization, Hazon, is just one recent manifestation of this tradition. Utilizing ecological passages from the Hebrew Bible, teachings of rabbis, and sustainable practices, Hazon has advocated for policy change for issues like sustainable food, environmental justice, and renewable energies. The nonprofit engages people through a call to community, specifically appealing to the identities of American Jews by emphasizing how Jewish traditions support stewardship of the Earth. I analyze this non-governmental organization from both an emic and etic perspective. To understand volunteers’ own understanding of their work, I examine Hazon’s website and social media. To gain a comprehensive view of scholarly approaches to Hazon, I study peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the organization. Using Hazon as a case study, I show how certain beliefs and practices traditional to Judaism are conducive to environmental health and advocacy.
Ecological Discourses in Beauty and the Beast and the Little Red Riding Hood View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wen Hui Chang
From childhood, we have listened to a lot of fairy tales.The stories are fascinating and imaginative to attract children. Fairy tales can make life colorful, expand the kids’ horizons to the world and even have the meaning of moral education. Beauty and the beast is a well-known fairy tales that everyone must had read. It talks about a brave and gorgeous girl-Belle who moves into a castle which the beast lives to save her father. As time goes by, Belle find out that the beast is not a real monster like she thought and start to fall in love with him. The moral of the story is also beautiful, it is “a person’s beauty comes from his or her heart but not the appearance”. The Little Red Riding Hood is an old French fairy tale told in cultures around the world as well, which was adapted into movies, picture books, and novels. However, the ecological discourses which the author wanted to convey are somehow different. This paper intends to analyze the two fairy tales from the ecological perspective. By comparing the natural elements and animal plots of the two stories, an attempt is made to summarize the ecological prototypes of European fairy tales.
Power Is Knowledge: The Story of Confucius’ Ascendance to Sagehood and Beyond
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yong-Kang Wei
Power can be knowledge, when we think of, in Foucauldian terms, the role the system of social institutions plays in legitimating, sustaining, and even creating types of discourse known as “knowledge.” In this paper, I share the story of how the historical Confucius was transformed into a “sage” in ancient China and use it as an example to explore how knowledge can just be a function of institutional power and needs. The historical Confucius was not a success story. Nonetheless, he was “redeemed,” after death, in writings attributed to him by generations of his disciples. He was also transformed from a frustrated old man to a great “sage” honored by the imperial court of the West Han dynasty hundreds of years later, with the Analects canonized. Thereafter, the Analects became the fountainhead of Chinese philosophy, as the imperial rulers felt the political need to institutionalize Confucianism as a state ideology. However, Confucius did not create Confucianism. It is anyone’s guess how he became its founder, but one thing would seem certain: If not Confucius, then Lifucius, Wangfucius, or whoever-fucius would be there to take his place. A figure head had to be institutionally set up to mark a system of ideology. This may explain why the historical Confucius got transformed from a “career failure” all the way up to “the sage of sages.” In short, the “wisdom” of Confucius, together with the Confucian canon, was institutionally sanctioned, promoted, and even created for political reasons: Power is knowledge.
