"In the Amazon you could say that every grove is a university library. The Amazon is full of fully qualified doctors of PhD students in their own way. Its full of art, its full of music its full of metaphor...The deforestation of the Amazon is actually a deforestation of mind, of human mind and human culture because to me those two things are not opposites. You know nature is not the opposite of culture and in the Amazon it could not be clearer. When we deforest the Amazon it is as if we took a Shakespeare and tied his hands behind his back with razor wire." Jay Griffiths 2007.
I first encountered the words of Jay Griffiths (pictured) while I was in Australia. Griffiths is the author of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time and Wild: An Elemental Journey. Both books examine what is Time from a cultural and social perspective. How Time is represented in narratives is of particular interest to me. I agree with the assertion of Griffiths that Time is a locus of power and the Time of pre-industrial cultures has the potential to be a subversive and liberating instrument of resistance in increasingly monitored and commodity orientated cultures. According to Griffiths our most accessible source of this rebellious Time is our children, although she spent seven years researching her second book, Wild: An Elemental Journey in the Amazon, in Australia, West Papua, the Arctic and with Roma Peoples. In the radio broadcast I heard(Available as a podcast with Griffiths speaking from 33:35 mins) the term 'ludic revolution' is used. I have ordered the book and look forward to reading it. More from Jay Griffiths can be found HERE (Colonising the Night) and HERE (Art as Weapon of Protest),HERE (Ruled by Time)
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