Humanities Core Midterm: Ecology, SGGK, and Climate Change

Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism puts humans at the center and treats human needs or interests as most important.

Biocentrism

Biocentrism recognizes that nonhuman life also has value. In Skywoman, animals help create the world and are partners, challenging a purely human-centered view.

Ecology

Studies relationships among living things and their environments.

Oikos

Greek for 'household'; frames the world as a shared home whose inhabitants depend on one another.The household metaphor connects ecology to care, responsibility, and interdependence

Anthropocene

Proposed geological epoch in which human activity has become a major force shaping Earth systems.

Capitalocene

Emphasizes that economic systems, especially capitalism, drive environmental change.

Anthropogenic change

Change caused by human activity.

Nature narratives

Stories and assumptions that explain what “nature” is and how humans relate to the more-than-human world. They can justify care, reciprocity, domination, or extraction. Skywoman and Genesis are contrasting creation narratives with different implications for human-land relationships.

Contingency

Means not inevitable or logically necessary; ideas change across time and place.

Tentacular thinking

Metaphor for thinking through many connecting 'tentacles,' highlighting entangled relationships.

Web, network, rhizome, mesh

Metaphors for interconnection. They replace simple either/or binaries and top-down hierarchies with many links, including hidden or underground connections. A rhizome is a spreading root-like plant structure; the mesh suggests that beings are connected in complex ways.

Speculative fabulation

Donna Haraway’s term for storytelling that speculates beyond present assumptions and imagines other possible worlds. It helps reveal invisible assumptions and expand what people believe is possible; it is not limited to science-fiction novels.

Backward speculation

A way of looking backward at history and asking what other paths could have been taken. In lecture, studying the past shows that social systems and ideas were contingent, and helps us imagine alternatives now. Do not confuse this with simply wishing to return to the past.

Cosmology

A worldview or account of how the world is ordered and how humans belong in it.

Cosmogony

Specifically an account of the world's origins or creation.

Cosmology of Skywoman

Skywoman falls from Skyworld, and creation is collaborative and grounded in gratitude.

Order of creation of Skywoman

Sequence of events from Skywoman's fall to planting seeds from the Tree of Life.

'Remember to remember'

A reminder to keep ancestral stories and teachings active in memory rather than letting them fade. In the Skywoman unit, remembering matters because stories carry guidance about how to live responsibly with the land and other beings.

Sweetgrass

A culturally and ecologically significant plant that calls for gratitude and reciprocity.

Anishinaabe

Refers to Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region.

Orientation vs. map

Original Instructions provide an orientation, not a detailed map.

Immigration as metaphor in Skywoman

Skywoman's arrival frames belonging as a relationship built through gratitude and care.

Woman and tree in Skywoman vs. its allusion to Eve

Skywoman receives seeds from the Tree of Life and plants them to make a world that supports life. Kimmerer contrasts this with Eve and the tree in Genesis, where eating the fruit leads to exile. The contrast highlights different story-shaped relationships to the living world.

The fall in Skywoman vs. the fall in Genesis

Skywoman’s fall is the beginning of a world-making story: she is received and helped by animals, and life grows through cooperation. In Genesis, the Fall follows disobedience and leads to expulsion from Eden. Kimmerer argues that these different stories can orient people toward different relationships with Earth.

Reciprocity

A relationship of giving and receiving that creates responsibilities to respond with care. Skywoman receives help from animals and responds with gratitude and by tending the land. Reciprocity differs from treating nature as a resource to take from without giving back.

Human exceptionalism

The assumption that humans are uniquely superior, separate from, or more important than other life. Skywoman challenges it by showing humans dependent on animal help and part of a wider community of beings.

The Great Chain of Being

A hierarchical worldview that arranges beings in ranked levels, traditionally with God and angels above humans and other creatures below. It can reinforce human superiority and fixed rankings rather than ecological interdependence.

Nature's femininity

A cultural tradition of associating nature with femininity and women. The association changes historically: Earth may be represented as a nurturing mother, but later as passive matter needing male control. Ecofeminist analysis asks how these images support gender and environmental hierarchies.

Nature as organism

The organic model treats Earth or the cosmos as a living body whose parts depend on one another. It emphasizes interdependence, unlike a later mechanistic model in which nature is treated as a machine or passive resource.

Man as microcosm

A traditional idea that the human body, especially the male body in some historical frameworks, mirrors the larger cosmos (“macrocosm”). It connects human order to the order of the universe and can make human hierarchies seem natural.

Gaia / Mother Earth

Personifications of Earth as a living, maternal being. They can encourage respect and interdependence, but may also associate women with nature in ways that support stereotypes about gender. The interpretation depends on how the metaphor is used.

The Goddess Natura

A medieval personification of Nature as a powerful female figure who governs or mediates the natural order. Her femininity reflects cultural ideas about women and nature; these images can both honor nature’s power and reinforce gendered assumptions.

Mining's impact on imagination of Earth

Lecture connects mining and extraction with a shift toward seeing Earth as material to be opened, measured, and exploited for resources rather than as a living organism. This shift changes both economic practices and cultural imagination.

The Green Man

A folklore/art figure represented through leaves or vegetation, often blurring human and plant forms. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Green Knight resembles a Green Man: he is both human and vegetal, challenging a firm nature/culture boundary.

Hybridity

The mixing of categories or identities usually treated as separate. The Green Knight is hybrid because he appears human but is green and linked to vegetation; Gawain’s armor and chivalry also depend on combinations of bodies, animals, materials, and cultural practices.

The ermine: symbolic value

Ermine is a prized white fur used in Gawain’s clothing/armor description. It signals luxury, status, and the material wealth of courtly culture. It also makes visible that knightly identity depends on animal bodies and materials from the more-than-human world.

Middle English

The form of English used in England roughly from the late 11th to the late 15th century.

Fitts

The poem is divided into four major sections called fitts.

Medieval romance

A medieval literary genre centered on knights, quests, tests, courtly behavior, and marvels.

Aeneid; translatio imperii

The Aeneid is Virgil's Roman epic about Aeneas and the origins of Rome.

Stock, bob, wheel (form and meaning)

Terms for parts of the poem’s stanza structure: the longer alliterative section is followed by a short “bob” and a rhyming “wheel.” The shift from alliteration to rhyme combines English poetic tradition with a rhyme form associated with French influence, making the poem itself a cultural hybrid.

Alliterative verse

Poetry organized around repeated initial consonant sounds in stressed words rather than end rhyme alone.

SGGK as a cultural hybrid

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight combines traditions: alliterative English verse with a rhyming bob-and-wheel, Arthurian/British material with French-influenced romance conventions, and Christian ideals with older green/folkloric imagery. Its form and story are mixtures rather than culturally pure.

Doublings and mirrors in SGGK

The poem repeats or reflects scenes and relationships: the exchange game mirrors the bedroom scenes; the hunting sequences parallel what happens indoors; the Green Knight and Gawain test each other; and Gawain’s public reputation mirrors his private vulnerability. These doublings reveal connections between seemingly separate spaces and actions.

The liturgical year

The Christian calendar of seasons and holy days.

Armor and assemblage

Gawain’s knightly identity is not produced by him alone: it depends on steel, leather, fur, clothing, the horse Gringolet, crafted objects, and the people who prepare them. An assemblage is a working collection of different human and nonhuman elements that together make an action or identity possible.

New Materialism

An approach that takes matter and material things seriously rather than treating them as passive background to human thought. Bodies, food, armor, animals, landscapes, and objects shape what people can do and who they can be.

Assemblage as household/oikos

An assemblage is a set of different elements that work together; oikos means household. Thinking of an assemblage as a household highlights mutual dependence among its members. Gawain’s ability to act as a knight depends on a whole network of bodies, animals, objects, labor, and social practices.

Chivalry

The practices and ideals associated with medieval knights, including courage, loyalty, courtesy, religious devotion, and service. The poem admires these ideals but tests their limits when Gawain’s body, fear, and dependence conflict with the ideal of perfect self-control.

Chivalric code

The set of ideals a knight is expected to uphold, such as truth, courage, loyalty, courtesy, and Christian faith. Gawain’s pentangle represents five groups of five virtues/qualities, but the plot exposes the difficulty of living up to a perfectly consistent code.

Five sets of five

The pentangle passage presents five groups of five qualities associated with Gawain: his five senses; his five fingers; the five wounds of Christ; the five joys of Mary; and five knightly virtues.

Five virtues

The five knightly virtues linked to Gawain's pentangle are commonly rendered as generosity, fellowship, purity, courtesy, and compassion/pity.

Buffered vs. porous self

A buffered self imagines a firm boundary between itself and the outside world, while a porous self recognizes that it is open to, shaped by, and dependent on other beings and forces.

Precarity

The condition of being vulnerable, dependent, and exposed to change or harm because no being exists entirely on its own.

Ontological vs. artificial vulnerability

Common expectations include quests, tests of knightly virtue, courtly manners, aristocratic settings, marvels, supernatural encounters, and tests of reputation. SGGK uses these conventions while complicating the idea that a knight can be perfectly self-sufficient or morally flawless.

Conventions of medieval romance

Common expectations include quests, tests of knightly virtue, courtly manners, aristocratic settings, marvels, supernatural encounters, and tests of reputation.

Homosociality; fraternal orders

Homosociality means social bonds and alliances between people of the same gender, especially men, without necessarily implying sexual relationships.

Traffic in women

A critical term associated with Gayle Rubin for social systems in which women are exchanged, used to establish alliances, or treated as objects of transactions among men.

The medieval hunt

The hunt was an aristocratic activity governed by specialized practices and social codes, involving animals, hounds, hunters, terrain, weapons, and rules.

Allusion to Reynard

Reynard the Fox is a famous trickster fox from medieval animal tales, linking the fox with cleverness, deception, and the unstable boundary between human and animal behavior.

Brittling of the deer

A specialized hunting term for the butchering and division of a hunted deer, displaying aristocratic hunting knowledge.

Hunting assemblages

The hunt works through a network of humans, dogs, prey animals, weapons, scent, terrain, weather, and learned techniques.

Dark ecology

An ecological perspective that refuses to make nature seem pure, comforting, or separate from human life, recognizing entanglement and discomfort.

Ecofeminism

An approach that studies how the domination of women and the domination of nature are structurally connected.

Affinity ecofeminists, social ecofeminists, third position

Affinity ecofeminists emphasize a meaningful connection between women and nature, while social ecofeminists argue this connection is socially constructed.

The ecological self

A self understood as relational and interdependent, recognizing that identity and action are shaped by animals, materials, landscapes, social relations, and other people.

The uncanny

Something that feels both familiar and strange, unsettling the boundary between what is known and what is alien.

Rejection of vulnerability

The attempt to deny dependence, bodily limits, fear, or the possibility of failure.

Earth as living organism

The organic model imagines Earth as a living whole whose parts depend on each other, differing from seeing Earth as a machine.

Reproductive labor

Work that sustains and renews life, including pregnancy and birth as well as care, feeding, household work, and raising the next generation.

Flesh and finitude

Flesh means our embodied, material existence; finitude means that life has limits, including vulnerability, aging, and death.

Culture and transcendence

Culture is often associated with human-made achievements, reason, spirit, and the ability to rise above bodily/natural limits.

Morgan the Goddess

Morgan le Fay is a powerful, ambiguous female figure who orchestrates the test in SGGK, according to the Green Knight.

The feminine as model of relationality

Lecture's reading of Morgan and the feminized Green Chapel presents 'the feminine' as a model for relational identity.

Masculinity's hard enclosure

An ideal of masculinity that seeks firm boundaries, self-control, invulnerability, and independence.

Holocene

The geological epoch beginning after the last major ice age, roughly 11,700 years ago, during which human civilizations developed.

Industrial Revolution; fossil capitalism

The Industrial Revolution brought large-scale mechanized production and greatly expanded fossil-fuel use.

Greenhouse effect / climate change

The greenhouse effect occurs when gases in the atmosphere absorb and re-emit heat, warming Earth's surface.

The Great Acceleration

The sharp post-World War II increase in human population, production, consumption, energy use, and environmental impact.

Three episodes in the history of climate change

The lecture's historical overview tracks climate change from scientific discovery and early evidence, through the rise of public and political awareness.

The end of nature

Bill McKibben's argument that once human activity changes the atmosphere and weather, nature can no longer be understood as wholly separate from human influence.

Information vs. representation

Information gives facts or data; representation is how those facts are selected, framed, narrated, and made meaningful.

Pop culture as distraction/diversion

David Wallace-Wells argues that popular culture can distract people from the reality of climate crisis even while appearing to engage with catastrophe.

Amitav Ghosh's idea of recognition

Ghosh argues that climate change poses a challenge to literary and cultural forms because its scale and unusual events are difficult for conventional realism to represent.

Sublimation; culture conceals

Sublimation is the redirection of difficult or intense feelings into another activity or object.

Culture generates desires

Culture does not only reflect what people already want; stories, advertising, and popular media help create desires and define what feels normal.

Imaginative failure of climate crisis

Climate change is hard to imagine through familiar story patterns because it is gradual, distributed across many places and people.