A diverse group of writers and scholars follow the lead of noted
folklorist Barre Toelken and consider, from the inside, the ways in
which varied cultures in the American West understand and express
their relations to the world around them. As Barre Toelken puts it
in The Dynamics of Folklore, "'Worldview' refers to the manner in
which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around
it." In Worldviews and the American West, seventeen notable authors
and scholars, employing diverse approaches and styles, apply
Toelken's ideas about worldview to the American West. While the
contributors represent a range of voices, methods, and visions,
they are integrated through their focus on the theme of worldview
in one region. Worldviews and the American West includes essays by
Margaret K. Brady, Hal Cannon, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard
Dauenhauer, James S. Griffith, Barry Lopez, Robert McCarl, Elliott
Oring, Twilo Scofield, Steve Siporin, Kim Stafford, C. W. Sullivan
III, Jeannie B. Thomas, George Venn, George B. Wasson, and William
A. Wilson. Each of the authors in this collection attempts to get
inside one or more of the worldviews of the many cultures that have
come to share and interpret the American West. The result is a
lively mix of styles and voices as the authors' own worldviews
interact with the multiple perspectives of the diverse peoples
(and, in Barry Lopez's "The Language of Animals," other species) of
the West. This diversity matches the geography of the region they
all call home and gives varied life and meaning to its physical and
cultural landscape.
eISBN: 978-0-87421-456-7
Subjects: Sociology, Anthropology
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