In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time

By Calvin Luther Martin

Book Overview

As we prepare to count a new millennium, an award-winning historian questions the very nature of "historical time."

This meditation by an award winning historian calls for a new way oflooking at the natural world and our place in it, while boldly challenging theassumptions that underlie the way we teach and think about both history andtime. Calvin Luther Martin's In the Spirit of the Earth is a provocativeaccount of how the hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost--with devastatingconsequences for the environment and the human spirit.

According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged during neolithictimes, as humans began to domesticate animals and farm the land. In thehunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were spiritual beings and the earth areliable provider. But in neolithic innovations Martin finds the roots of ourown curiously alienated relationship with other living things and with theearth itself. This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice--thetechnology that moves us further and further away from nature--but even in theway we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically, perhaps, inthe horrific destruction we have visited on animals and landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting meant a new understanding ofourselves and the world--a new, powerful image of the self relative to plantsand animals. It led to food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance ofcities and ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and rulingelites--in short, to all the achievements, follies, and horrors of"civilization."

Martin argues that history--his own discipline--and human centered historicalconsciousness lie at the heart of this ultimately destructive ideology. Notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, fuel oursense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need torediscover the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of nature--aprocess that demands a much larger narrative than historians have been writingand telling. Without calling for a return to hunting and gathering, Martinasks if some of what we lost--or left behind--in the distant past might bereclaimed and used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace withourselves.

"Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go back To which I respond, But we never left--never left our true, real context, thatis. Homo is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamentaland necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all ofthat only, really, in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act ofimagination, an illusory image--most fundamentally, an image of fear--and so thecorrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that this place and itsprocesses (even in our death) always takes care of us--that Homo's citizenship, and errand, rest not with any creed or state, but with 'that star's substancefrom which he had arisen.'"--from In the Spirit of the Earth

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801847095
• ISBN13: 9780801847097
• Release Date: August 1993
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Interesting book, interesting man

Don't pay attention to Trickster. If you've ever had a course on Native-American mythology you'd know what a trickster is. There is nothing in this book about quantum physics. I was fortunate enough to have Calvin Luther Martin as a professor at Rutgers. I took one of his Native-American courses for fun and it was just that. Wildly fun. He was easily my favorite professor at Rutgers. He is a fantastic story-teller and if he's ever lecturing in your area by all means try to catch him. His lectures had a campfire-like atmosphere. That's how intimate and magical they felt. He would roam up and down the aisles of the lecture hall and speak in a soft yet energetic voice. This man is the definition of eloquence. This book is a very interesting read. Even though it's been about 8 years since I was first assigned to read it I've read it several times since then. Each time I pick it up I see something that I missed in the previous read. This is one of those books that you can't benefit from unless you've read it at least twice. The book will eventually blow your mind if you read it enough. It makes you look at history from a completely different perspective. That is no small feat.

the Indians knew about quantum physics

CHI-HO! Enter the mass of CLM and hear the gospel that you have ignored. Yes, you heard it here first--the Indians knew about quantum physics, but their knowledge of arcane physics was not enough to stop their destruction by the white man. Learn about superpositioning: this when Indians would teleport forward or backward in time (because time is cyclical). There is also a helpful section on painting oneself up like a tribal warrior of the past. My gripe with the book is that Mr. Martin has left out a crucial facet of Indian history--the smashing of the teleportation machines by the early Dutch settlers. This fact cannot be ignored in any survey of the period. CHI-HO!

This book changed my life: former student of the author.

As a student of Calvin's at Rutgers University this review is not without bias, and yet to call it a stirring book, and to pronounce Calvin a profound thinker is not gratuitous enough. This is a book which engages the metaphysics of Native American occupation of North America as a means to critique the Western understanding of human spatial and temporal existence. It is both historical and philosophical as it seeks to reevaluate the relationship between human beings and the "place" they inhabit. Calvin is one of those individuals who has the power to change the way you see yourself in relationship to the world around you; "In The Spirit of the Earth", contains this power.