Seminar (SEM)

• COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inq

• Above class open to undergraduates only
• TOPIC: Nature and Culture in the Adriatic
• COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
• COLL (CASE) Sustainability Literacy credit

Topic: Nature/culture in the adriatic

A better title for this course is "Sustainability in the Adriatic: Human¿Nature In the Sea of Intimacy" The course explores questions of sustainability in a distinct place, the Adriatic Basin. It simultaneously employs that place to examine a series of intertwined natural and cultural challenges in the contemporary world, ranging from survival to meaning. We dance between two extremes throughout the semester. On the one hand, we approach these themes as common and therefore applicable to other places and other times. On the other, we approach this place as unique and unrepeatable. Put slightly differently, the course relies on cases that are thoroughly situated in their local context to then reach outward to include us as individuals interacting with others and with the natural world, inevitably together. We look at historical episodes (migration, disease, war, modernization, mass tourism), places (cities, estuaries, churches, prisons, islands, tombs), and practices (commerce, colonization, enslavement, agriculture, nationalism), and from these we delve into the larger contextual issues surrounding their connectedness and importance for the whole. Sustainability serves as a lens through which to examine the long-standing division between nature and culture. This enables us to question that very division as we explore the myriad ways these categories depend upon and melt into one another. In the process of exploring the distinctiveness of the region, we also look at other, neighboring conventional distinctions that often serve to reinforce the nature¿culture divide, such as those between civilization and barbarism, or ancient ruins and modern wreckage, or purity and corruption. The Adriatic¿s rich natural and human history will provide all the material we need for these explorations, indeed, much more than we need or can possibly exhaust in the course of a single semster. We¿ll do our best. The class is divided into three five-week segments. In segment one, ¿Sustainability in Context,¿ we explore basic definitions, develop a common set of terms to use for the rest of the semester, and study cases on stone, Roman centuriation, water, and changing political borders. In segment two, ¿Sustainable Human¿Nature,¿ we look more carefully at the ways people have tended to divide up what a local dialectal poet once referred to as ¿this corner of paradise¿ in their thinking about it, using categories such as ¿wilderness,¿ ¿savagery,¿ ¿civilization,¿ and ¿dominion.¿ And in segment three, ¿Sustainability in the Sea of Intimacy,¿ we follow more recent (and ancient) thought about conceptual bridges between aspects of the world that have often been conceived of as separate, including what is alive and not alive, what is foreign and what is intimate. Here students will also dip into the instructor¿s own current research on the Adriatic as a ¿sea of intimacy,¿ following a thought from the Yugoslav author Predrag Matvejevic in his *Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape* (UC Press, 1999): "The Atlantic and Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean a sea of proximity, the Adriatic a sea of intimacy."