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“A Miner Knows Better Than Anybody You Have Little Power Over Mother Nature”: Exploring Genesis 1:26–31 and the Concepts of Control and Power with South Derbyshire Coal Miners

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Published/Copyright: November 6, 2015

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze a contextually-reflexive reading of Genesis 1:26–31 that was produced by a group of contemporary “ordinary” readers – in this case, a group of South Derbyshire coal miners. The coal miners used Genesis 1:26–31 as a literary platform upon which they interrogated two principal issues: How ‘masculinity’ is constructed, performed, understood, enforced, and legitimized in coal mining culture; and, what the relationship is between humanity and Earth. This resulted in a reading whereby an attempt was made to synthesize how a man’s understanding of ‘masculinity’ impacts upon his relationship with, and attitude towards, Earth.


Corresponding author: Tiffany Webster, SIIBS (Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies), The University of Sheffield, UK, e-mail:

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Article note:

I would like to gratefully acknowledge that my research has been funded by the University of Sheffield’s Hossein Farmy PhD Scholarship. I would like to thank Professor James Crossley and Dr. Anthony Rees for taking the time to read the initial drafts of this paper and for providing me with invaluable feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the coal miners who participated in this study. Without their wonderful willingness to contribute, my research would never have made it past the proposal stage.


Published Online: 2015-11-6
Published in Print: 2015-11-1

©2015 by De Gruyter

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