Our Land Is Not Just Soil: Knowing, Feeling, and Doing Environmental Activism in the Arkansas Ozarks
Date of Graduation
12-2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Anthropology
Advisor/Mentor
Nolan, Justin M.
Committee Member
Erickson, Kirsten C.
Second Committee Member
Sabo, George III
Keywords
Arkansas; Cultural Anthropology; Environmental Activism; Environmental Anthropology; Ozarks; Social Science
Abstract
The Ozarks is a holey place, an ancient plateau formed from ancient rocks and the sediment of millions of years of living things. The Ozarks is also, from another perspective a place made from a mesh of overlapping lines, lines of migration, lines of living things, lines of water movement over and through the land. This dissertation engages with the practice of conservation and environmentalism as it is performed and lived by Ozarkers and Arkansawyers, natives and transplants. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, Save the Ozarks, Arkansas Master Naturalists, and with Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area, this dissertation examines how emotion, affect, enacted knowledge through performance, and strategic reinterpretations of the nature of political engagement are all part of a local system of conservation. In this dissertation, I seek to analyze links between individual emotion, social performance of expertise, political organization, and conceptual understandings of the physiogeography of the land.
Citation
Moore, R. A. (2017). Our Land Is Not Just Soil: Knowing, Feeling, and Doing Environmental Activism in the Arkansas Ozarks. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2560
Included in
Biological and Physical Anthropology Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons