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Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 110358
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0674027469
Dewey Decimal Number: 100
EAN: 9780674027466
ASIN: 0674027469
Publication Date: April 30, 2008
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Product Description
Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his storyaup to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this pointathat of a people faced with the end of their way of lifeathat prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’ story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse? This is a vulnerability that affects us allainsofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questionsaand these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition. (20060801)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 A brilliant research question July 22, 2008
Radical hope explores the question of how cultures, in this study the Crow Tribe, respond to the one situation that cultures are incapable of imagining, the demise of the core culture. The Crow were dependent of buffalo hunting and personal warriorship against their rivials the Sioux (Lakota) and Cheyenne. With the near extinction of the buffalo and the collapse of traditional life on the plains, Crow culture evolved to total irrelevancy overnight. This book focuses on the life of the last great Crow Chief Plenty Coups, who said that after the demise of the buffalo "nothing happened". This is the void that engulfed Crow culture in the last decades of the 19th century.
Radical Hope is a detailed exploration of the ultimate chaos that can afflict cultures when they quickly collapse from external pressures. This book shows how insight and the use of traditional problem solving provided Crow leadership with a pathway to re-establishing themselves in this most challenging of circumstances.
This book is highly recommended to those people fascinated with how culture institutions respond to crippling challenges and how hope can emerge in the bleakest of circumstances.
The nature of courage February 21, 2008
The analysis in this book is a bit labored at times, but the overall effect is successful. Where else can you get Aristotle, Freud, and the Crow tribe all wrapped up in one elegant little package! Most stimulating as an extended reflection on the nature of courage. Well worth reading.
 a hidden but not unknown warrior January 1, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Remarkable man, remarkable narrative , and fascinating messages. You don't have to be a weatherman to understand the meaning of storm clouds. You don't need to be a psychoanalyst or philosopher to understand this book. The author is not the most elegant with the English language, but a small price to pay, given the content.
How strange that Plenty Coups (Many Achievements) has been hidden in plain sight all of this time. His headdress and coup stick are apparently on display at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (The book explains why).
-The vision quest dreams of a 9 year-old, interpreted by tribal elders that offered a prophetic vision for a once wealthy and powerful tribe. Over half of that tribe had died as a result of smallpox.
-Courageous man who was outside the narrow cliche of brave Indian (pun intended) but ultimately self-destructive and tragic figure. American History has limited interest in non-stereotypes.
-Hmmm isn't this 2008. The pending return of Chinese empire in the news, daily. The return of dreams of Arab and Persian imperialism (Need I say they are not the same?). Religion held hostage to dreams of empire. The neo-con's dreams of empire turning in to a nightmare. 600 years of European domination on the world stage, was this suppose to go on forever?
This is current events, not history. The lack of industrial technology by the Crow tribe at that time has nothing to do with the complexities they faced or the integrity of their process of analysis. Although this book takes its historical base from American History, the issues are with us all (native American or not, American or not) for the foreseeable future
As an analogy, maybe the words of the Old Testament have some usefulness here:
Should ye not hear the words which the LORD hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity Zech 7:7
An alternative to the Ghost Dance July 25, 2007
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
In a time when any and everything can be pulled out from under one due to devastating political and cultural de-evolution, a growing and decadent mass media driven delusion and the bulk of wealth being in the hands of a small percentage of soulless idiots, this book offers an "a way."
At time when one might be tempted, like many Native American tribes were, to lament the past and vainly attempt to bring it back through the sad but hopeful ritual of the Ghost Dance (instead we listen to the Oldies Radio while media encourages us to celebrate some anniversary of some event that had meaning rather than helping us give meaning to current events).
It offers a vision of how a person, a culture and humanity itself can keep what is valuable and authentic from one's past and one's culture while navigating chaotic upheaval.
It's about keeping one's humanity intact in dehumanizing times and both keeping and building a personal and cultural integrity that endures.
So, if you have been a victim of mortgage lenders, student loan rip-offs, downsizing, corporate greed, credit card companies or the crisis in our lack of a health care system, this book lets you know that it just something you're going through.
It helps you become active rather than passive in your emotional and philosophical response. So, instead of feeling like a sitting duck, you begin to feel like someone facing challenges and helping others do the same.
Enduring and radical hope eventually trumps the temporal power of any oppressive junta in a way they cannot see coming.
At the same time, it builds heart, soul and culture.
This book has come at a good time.
Courage in the Face of Meaninglessness April 18, 2007
13 out of 17 found this review helpful
This book is a psychoanalyst's philosophical meditations on the words and experience of the last great chief of the Crow, Plenty Coups, a man who witnessed the complete erasure of the culture that formed him, and whose virtues he exemplified. The book is not completely satisfying. It seems unnecessarily repetitious and wordy at times. It seems to promise a tale of psychological and moral triumph, but to fulfill that promise ambiguously. Nevertheless, it provides a penetrating analysis of what one might call paradigm collapse and the suffering of the individuals who experience it. Courage is the core virtue necessary to one's survival of such damage, but, as Charles Taylor, writing in The New York Review of Books, explains more lucidly than I can, this is a special kind of courage, the courage to hope for a future good that cannot yet be conceived. As our society, and indeed societies around the globe, are facing partial or complete collapses of the assumptions that frame the experiences of their members, these ideas will have an immediate personal significance to the reader who understands that the rules of the game are changing, and that he must change too, or perish.
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