User:NChapman98/be bold

Being bold is important on Wikipedia.

I thought that this week’s readings had a lot of interesting overlaps with previous week’s themes. In looking at Native Beringian groups, we see a conflict between Foreign and Native conceptions of space and time, and the idea of non-Western historical conceptions as “timeless/unthinkable” once again appears. I think the core of the book is a study of a clash of perceptions of time and history being applied to a region that resists linear conceptions of history. In addition, the book expands this perception of time past human application to look at how notions of power apply to both landscapes and animals.

I will not dwell too much on the impact on humans, as the story of native Beringians has sufficient overlap with previous weeks. I’m particularly interested in how linear notions of time, production, and power affected the environment.

One of the clearest conflicts in notions of time comes from a cyclical versus linear understanding of time and progress, especially when it comes to the reproduction of animals, which is based on factors that belie American market demands or Soviet planning, as demonstrated especially in the Fur, Reindeer, and Whaling industries. In attempting to “enclose” these markets (as seen in our look at Neoliberalism), these  powers tried to force nature into a system of upwards linear growth that it could not support.

This can also be expanded out to human interaction with the landscape and natural resources, wherein human demand routinely outstripped the land’s capacity to give, permanently altering it. This linear demand for resources also lead to increased exertion of power on both foreign and native communities, leading to native starvation, wage slavery, and the Soviet Gulag, all in an attempt to force linear time and production onto a landscape and people who were not equipped to handle it.