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Description
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Details
In this lucidly-written, ground-breaking survey, Professor Tuan delves into many cultures and reaches back into our prehistory to discover what is universal and what is particular in our inheritance of fear. Starting with fear in animals, he raises and explores a variety of questions: What is specifically human about fear? Is there or has there ever been a “fearless” society?
Professor Tuan examines the most specific forms fear takes in the mind of the child, among hunters and agriculturists, inside the walls of a medieval Chinese city, among Navaho Indians and American immigrants. He explores the ways in which authorities create landscapes of terror to instill fear in their own populations; and he probes that most basic of all contradictions between the need for human security and the fear of human nature. Professor Tuan particularly emphasizes how, in coping with fears of enemies, strangers, the insane, wolves, wind, witches, mountains, dragons, rain, or the terror that the universe itself might crumble, humans respond adventurously by creating “shelters,” ranging from fairy tales to cosmological myths. We watch as human beings continually draw and redraw their “circles of safety,” never feeling entirely at peace within them.
Kindle Book
- Release date: January 2, 2013
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307819024
- Release date: January 2, 2013
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307819024
- File size: 1953 KB
- Release date: January 2, 2013
Formats
Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook
subjects
Languages
English