Gregory Stock, "The Enhanced and the Unenhanced" and:

David Abram, "The Ecology of Magic" and Michael Pollan, "Playing God in the Garden"

Michael Pollan, "Playing God in the Garden"

Stock, Abram & Pollan: Changing Worlds

David Abram writes an anthropological analysis of The Ecology of Magic. In some ways Abram is critical of Western attitudes and behavior toward the world. One might conclude that he is, among other things, writing about moving between worlds, for he writes about the process of moving between A cultures @ and recognizes the need to move between A the temporal structure that it bounds(as it) is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else. @ Michael Pollan and Gregory Stock also paint the portrait of a vastly changing world, albeit from a different perspective, but it is, nevertheless, a vastly changing world.

How would you reconcile these worlds, or would you? How does knowledge play an important role for each author, or does it? How can both worlds co-exist, or should they? What might one world learn from the other? Write an essay that looks at the basic question of how we know what we know in relation to any of the above questions, or one that you personally find compelling.

Paul Herman, Fall 2005

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Stock & Pollan: Biotechnology and Progress

Question Prompt: While Michael Pollan shows a hint of skepticism towards the use of biotechnology to enhance agricultural products, Stock is vociferous about the ways in which technology has helped human progression and sees it as the ultimate tool of human evolution, which he thinks has stagnated at the present moment. How has reading Pollan after Stock influenced your views of biotechnology and its effects on biodiversity (broadly speaking) in our environment? Formulate a project that considers the critical roles of science and technology in human evolution as Stock does, while also taking into consideration the complexities that can arise from breaking species’ boundaries, as Pollan hints at in his essay.

Further questions for brainstorming: What are the causes for monoculture in agriculture and the lessening of natural diversity in the environment? Is becoming more in some ways becoming less in other ways? How does this apply to Stock as well as to Pollan’s presentation of the issues at hand? Where does the idea of enhancement come from? Is it about becoming more strong, more powerful, more in control over nature? Do other species have a place in Stock’s schema of human enhancement? Is Pollan against technology? What is he trying to point at with his comparison of different kinds of farming, organic and conventional? Is species enhancement the best way to go about progress and development? What would be the alternative ways to remake ourselves and the world? What kind of humanity are we in need of? Can technology help us to get there?

Rama Lohani Chase, Fall 2005

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the Stock link-o-mat.

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