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4 - A Meshwork World

from Part II - Turning to Fundamentals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2021

Norman Wirzba
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
This Sacred Life
Humanity's Place in a Wounded World
, pp. 90 - 122
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • A Meshwork World
  • Norman Wirzba, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: This Sacred Life
  • Online publication: 08 October 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026185.007
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  • A Meshwork World
  • Norman Wirzba, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: This Sacred Life
  • Online publication: 08 October 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026185.007
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • A Meshwork World
  • Norman Wirzba, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: This Sacred Life
  • Online publication: 08 October 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026185.007
Available formats
×