Radical hope

ethics in the face of cultural devastation

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Jonathan Lear: Radical hope (2007, Harvard University Press)

Hardcover, 187 pages

English language

Published Aug. 22, 2007 by Harvard University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-674-02329-1
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How can one continue living a meaningful life when everything disappears that was used to make sense of the world? The aspect I found most interesting is how cultural change, re-invention and (Crow) identity was discussed; how to neither re-enact the past, nor be passive in the face of the cultural change.

For an academic book that combines some aspects of philosophyand anthropology, it is relatively easy to read, and emotionally moving and I enjoyed it; if you search for an interesting story and some ideas about it, that book would better have been a magazin article; If you search for a description of Crow culture look for an ethnography and how Crow people themselves describe their culture.

Review of 'Radical hope' on 'Goodreads'

Lear, who already wrote an excellent book on Freud (Love and its Place in Nature), has managed to introduce a Heideggerian conception of world and worldliness into a retelling of the oral history as seen by the last great chief of the Crow. It not only examines the devastation, even if mistakenly well meant, wrought by the white conquest of the native nations but points to a method for examining just how our own civilization is collapsing. This may be the century when the West must say, "after that nothing happened."

Although it was not examined it Lear also notes how the Crow tribe, while complying with the U.S. Governments push to give up the idea of communal property in favor of private property amongst the tribe was turned around making it possible for the tribe to retain communal property in a form.

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Subjects

  • Topics in philosophy
  • Philosophy
  • Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies - Tribes
  • Movements - Psychoanalysis
  • Social change
  • Ethics & Moral Philosophy
  • Philosophy / General
  • Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies
  • Ethics
  • Social sciences and ethics