from Part II - Turning to Fundamentals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2021
A term like “environment” communicates that a place is something that “surrounds” people. As such, environments are “outside” and separate from what a human being is. In this chapter, Wirzba argues that this way of speaking distorts our humanity because it does not adequately appreciate how deeply entangled people are in their places, with creatures and creaturely processes constantly circulating within and through our bodies. He develops the idea of life and world as a “meshwork” reality as framed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. Meshwork transforms how people think about places by shifting our attention from a spatial location to complex, interlacing paths of codevelopment. Places are as much events and processes as they are locations on a map. This insight revolutionizes what we think a human being is by showing it to be intimately entangled in life’s embodied movements. The idea of transporting people to other planets or a disembodied heaven is a dangerous fantasy because it assumes that a human being could live a disentangled life apart from the bio-social meshworks that are its indispensable condition.
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