Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Folk, traditional, and indigenous ecological knowledges have a significant role to play in ecojustice. A case study in the traditional ecological knowledge among one of the religious communities with whom I have spent several decades illustrates how they embody the main principle and three fields of an ecological rationality: the community of inter-related beings; the ways the beings participate in that community or place; and the relations of nature and the nonhuman world to humans and human nature. Ecological rationality stands in contrast to economic rationality, a branch of instrumental reason exemplified by what economists call rational choice theory. An ecological rationality is based in the principles of connection, relation, engagement, cooperation and interdependence, in contrast to the economic rationality of separation, distance, individualism, and self-interest. I conclude with a gesture to my current project of a sound ecology, a thought experiment in which sounds rather than texts or objects enable the connections that lead to sound experience, sound communities, sound economies, and a sound ecology. A sound ecology embodies an ecological rationality aimed at who we think we are, how we know what we know, and what we can do to bring about ecojustice in a sustainable world.
Source: Yale Journal of Music & Religion
Author: Jeff Todd Titon
Institution: Brown University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3010121094