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Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003
Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. If our environment changes at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of a world that is no longer familiar? One of Canada's premier historians tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past where state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and technological changes forced ordinary people to cope with transformations that were so radical that they no longer recognized their home and workplaces or, by implication, who they were. In concert with a ground-breaking, creative, and analytical website, megaprojects.uwo.ca, this timely study offers a prescient perspective on how humans make sense of a rapidly changing world.
- GenresEnvironmentHistory
304 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 2009
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April 22, 2022
4.5 stars.
Read for class. I have an intimidating backlog of unreviewed books that have amassed over the course of this past semester, so reviews for the next month will be of varying quality, tending towards threadbare and less insightful.
This was a fascinating book, that approached environmental history sensorially, including accounts of: “proprioception, the sense of bodily knowing in space; kinesthetics, the gait, pace, and posture with which the moving body encounters its surroundings; and proxemics, the emotional comfort with nearness and distance… Some are altered by contemporary technologies. Think of the difference in “an hour away” to a walker, a cyclist, and an air traveller”
There was a fascinating account in here of the NATO training base in Gagetown, New Brunswick — a really interesting contribution to Cold War environmental history, mixed unexpectedly with some interesting religious history. A very interesting account of the Chalk River Nuclear plant at Deep River, where my friend works. Not in this book, but Deep River is mentioned in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Parr’s account here of distributed responsibilities within Canadian nuclear facilities that extend to every single person in the lab, including janitorial staff, is a very fascinating counterpoint to Hecht’s thesis on African nuclear facilities, run by French firms, which have reproduced forms of colonial authoritarianism and highly specialized divisions of labour. Parr’s attention to intuition and sensorial experience is actually very congruent with my own experiences working in high voltage electrical engineering labs, and so much of one’s proficiency in a lab has more to do with this tacit Kierkegaardian form of experience as opposed to something you can absorb abstractly from a book. The Walkerton chapter was also fascinating, particularly in light of how this current pandemic has been handled. I also enjoyed the example of the St. Lawrence Seaway and how the Robert H. Saunders-Robert Moses Dam transformed life in a small river village, and how the refashioned community entirely changed social interactions. Fascinating how unexpectedly the river’s sound too was so central to the experience of place for community members and facilitating the flourishing of social life.
Perhaps my favourite example was the sort of embodied knowledge those living along the Columbia River in BC had as they internalized the rhythms of the seasonal rising and falling water levels into their sense of self (blurring first and second nature, in Marx’s terms). The variations of flow there had become markers of time that governed how locals worked on the land. However, with the arrival of the dam and reservoir, the water levels fluctuated unpredictably according to the demands of distant markets. An interesting account of how states and markets can become significant mediators in the way people relate to the environment and their daily practices of interacting with that environment.
The reason for the half star has more to do with my inability to understand one of the points Parr was trying to make pertaining to biological determinism. It had to do with her engagement with theories of post-structuralism, materialism, embodiement, and praxis, and I wasn’t really able to follow her point. But I did appreciate this one remark Parr made when sketching out some historiography in the introduction:
““Embodied history” is a term Pierre Bourdieu used to invoke the “active presence of the whole past ... internalised as second nature and so forgotten as history.” The idea is not new. In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx had argued for “the forming of the five senses ... [as] labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.” That human bodies are conditioned by the circumstances of time and place is easy enough for historians and geographers to grasp. Ours are fundamentally contextualizing crafts, committed centrally to the recuperation of elements that were once common sense, relationships enduring in the place and now passed out of mind.”
I also really enjoyed this passage from the Columbia River chapter, which I will finish off with, having just submitted my last course paper yesterday:
“Playing the contrarian, inviting “adverse comment,” and perhaps showing the influence of his own gentry rearing and his father-in-law’s socialism, he offered the “practically revolutionary” suggestion that a farmer “should actually down tools and rest for the whole of a Monday afternoon.” Who could disagree? “Work we must, if we would eat; but surely there should be moderation even in work.” And so he offered his readers this “regrettably sententious” (and unabashedly sensualist) resolution for the New Year, 1952:
‘Resolved that I, a farmer, will in the future and regardless of any decreasing material or financial reward, work less hard and for fewer hours; may I lift my nose from the grindstone long enough to see and to hear, to smell and to touch, to appreciate and to enjoy, and to give thanks for all my very considerable blessings; blessings both tangible and intangible, visible and invisible, material and spiritual.’”
Read for class. I have an intimidating backlog of unreviewed books that have amassed over the course of this past semester, so reviews for the next month will be of varying quality, tending towards threadbare and less insightful.
This was a fascinating book, that approached environmental history sensorially, including accounts of: “proprioception, the sense of bodily knowing in space; kinesthetics, the gait, pace, and posture with which the moving body encounters its surroundings; and proxemics, the emotional comfort with nearness and distance… Some are altered by contemporary technologies. Think of the difference in “an hour away” to a walker, a cyclist, and an air traveller”
There was a fascinating account in here of the NATO training base in Gagetown, New Brunswick — a really interesting contribution to Cold War environmental history, mixed unexpectedly with some interesting religious history. A very interesting account of the Chalk River Nuclear plant at Deep River, where my friend works. Not in this book, but Deep River is mentioned in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Parr’s account here of distributed responsibilities within Canadian nuclear facilities that extend to every single person in the lab, including janitorial staff, is a very fascinating counterpoint to Hecht’s thesis on African nuclear facilities, run by French firms, which have reproduced forms of colonial authoritarianism and highly specialized divisions of labour. Parr’s attention to intuition and sensorial experience is actually very congruent with my own experiences working in high voltage electrical engineering labs, and so much of one’s proficiency in a lab has more to do with this tacit Kierkegaardian form of experience as opposed to something you can absorb abstractly from a book. The Walkerton chapter was also fascinating, particularly in light of how this current pandemic has been handled. I also enjoyed the example of the St. Lawrence Seaway and how the Robert H. Saunders-Robert Moses Dam transformed life in a small river village, and how the refashioned community entirely changed social interactions. Fascinating how unexpectedly the river’s sound too was so central to the experience of place for community members and facilitating the flourishing of social life.
Perhaps my favourite example was the sort of embodied knowledge those living along the Columbia River in BC had as they internalized the rhythms of the seasonal rising and falling water levels into their sense of self (blurring first and second nature, in Marx’s terms). The variations of flow there had become markers of time that governed how locals worked on the land. However, with the arrival of the dam and reservoir, the water levels fluctuated unpredictably according to the demands of distant markets. An interesting account of how states and markets can become significant mediators in the way people relate to the environment and their daily practices of interacting with that environment.
The reason for the half star has more to do with my inability to understand one of the points Parr was trying to make pertaining to biological determinism. It had to do with her engagement with theories of post-structuralism, materialism, embodiement, and praxis, and I wasn’t really able to follow her point. But I did appreciate this one remark Parr made when sketching out some historiography in the introduction:
““Embodied history” is a term Pierre Bourdieu used to invoke the “active presence of the whole past ... internalised as second nature and so forgotten as history.” The idea is not new. In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx had argued for “the forming of the five senses ... [as] labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.” That human bodies are conditioned by the circumstances of time and place is easy enough for historians and geographers to grasp. Ours are fundamentally contextualizing crafts, committed centrally to the recuperation of elements that were once common sense, relationships enduring in the place and now passed out of mind.”
I also really enjoyed this passage from the Columbia River chapter, which I will finish off with, having just submitted my last course paper yesterday:
“Playing the contrarian, inviting “adverse comment,” and perhaps showing the influence of his own gentry rearing and his father-in-law’s socialism, he offered the “practically revolutionary” suggestion that a farmer “should actually down tools and rest for the whole of a Monday afternoon.” Who could disagree? “Work we must, if we would eat; but surely there should be moderation even in work.” And so he offered his readers this “regrettably sententious” (and unabashedly sensualist) resolution for the New Year, 1952:
‘Resolved that I, a farmer, will in the future and regardless of any decreasing material or financial reward, work less hard and for fewer hours; may I lift my nose from the grindstone long enough to see and to hear, to smell and to touch, to appreciate and to enjoy, and to give thanks for all my very considerable blessings; blessings both tangible and intangible, visible and invisible, material and spiritual.’”
Displaying 1 of 1 review