Abstract
Around 10,000 BC, rapid global warming led to the development of agriculture, sedentary life, and the long distance transport of goods, services, and knowledge – the precursors of contemporary civilization. Concurrent with these events arose the utilitarian philosophy that the natural world should be exploited for material advancement and that parcels of land could be privately owned and developed. This practice continues to the present day through individual ownership of houses and their surrounding yards. Interviews with American homeowners can provide semiotic insights into how the land under their direct ownership is viewed. Findings lead along a complex trail of images suggesting that the relationship between humans and nature is deeply conflicted. Tracing this relationship back in time through various philosophical positions regarding nature suggests that humans may not be ideologically committed to environmental preservation.
Appendix 1: Yard project protocol
Walk through the yard with the interviewee and look at different areas. Ask him or her to “tell me about your yard”
Take notes or tape record what she/he says. Ask permission to take pictures of areas in the yard.
Specifically ask:
How long have you lived at this house?
What did the yard look like when you moved here?
What changes have you made?
Are there things you would still like to do?
What is your favorite part of the yard?
What part of the yard do you like least?
If you could change your yard in any way, what would you do?
How are the seasons different in your yard – winter, spring, summer, fall?
What do you do during each season?
Be sure to request the interviewee’s gender, approximate age, approximate education/profession, ethnicity, country of origin, and marital status.
References
Barbour, Ian G.1973. Western man and environmental ethics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Search in Google Scholar
Bar-Yosef, O. & A.Belfer-Cohen.1989. The origins of sedentism and farming communities in the Levant. Journal of World Pre-history3. 477–498.10.1007/BF00975111Search in Google Scholar
Bate, Jonathan.1991. Romantic ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition. New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Belk, Russell W.1988. Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research14. 139–168.10.1086/209154Search in Google Scholar
Berman, Morris.1981. The re-enchantment of the world. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Birks, Melanie & JaneMills.2011. Grounded theory: A practical guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: SageSearch in Google Scholar
Bormann,F. Herbert, DianaBalmori & Gordon T.Geballe.2001. Redesigning the American lawn. New Haven: Yale University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bryson, Bill.2010. At home: A short history of private life. New York: Doubleday.Search in Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund.1757. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. London: R. & J. Dodsley.Search in Google Scholar
Campbell, Joseph.1991. Occidental mythology: The masks of God. New York: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar
Coates, Peter.1998. Nature: Western attitudes since ancient times. Berkeley: University of California Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cohen, Michael P.1984. The pathless way: John Muir and the American wilderness. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Search in Google Scholar
Corbin, Juliet & AnselmStrauss.2008. Qualitative Research,3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Search in Google Scholar
Cronon, William.1996. Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. New York: Norton.Search in Google Scholar
Dewey, D. M.1877. Handbook of practical landscape gardening. Rochester, NY: F. R. Elliott.Search in Google Scholar
Dobscha, Susan & Julie L.Ozanne.2001. An ecofeminist analysis of environmentally sensitive women using qualitative analysis: The emancipatory potential of ecological life. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing20. 201–214.10.1509/jppm.20.2.201.17360Search in Google Scholar
Elliott, Emory.1984 [1877]. American colonial writings: 1606–1734. Detroit: Gale.Search in Google Scholar
Evans, Estwick.2007 [1819]. Pedestrious tour of four thousand miles. Carlisle, MA: Applewood.Search in Google Scholar
Foster, Benjamin R.2001. The epic of Gilgamesh. New York: W. W. Norton.Search in Google Scholar
Franklin, Sarah, CeliaLury & JackieStacey.2000. Global nature, global culture. London: Sage.10.4135/9781446219768Search in Google Scholar
Fussell, Edwin.1965. Frontier: American literature and the American west. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Search in Google Scholar
George, Andrew R.2003. The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic: Critical edition and cuneiform texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gilpin, William.1803. Three essays: On picturesque beauty, on picturesque travel, and on sketching landscape. London: R. Blamire.Search in Google Scholar
Gordon, George, LordByron.2009 [1816]. Childe Harold’s pilgrimage. New York: Feather Trail Press.Search in Google Scholar
Hirschman, Elizabeth C. & Morris B.Holbrook.1982. Hedonic consumption: Emerging concepts, methods, and propositions. Journal of Marketing46. 92–101.Search in Google Scholar
Horwitz, Elinor L.1980. On the land. New York: Atheneum.Search in Google Scholar
Jenkins, Virginia Scott. 1994. The lawn: A history of an American obsession. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.Search in Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel.1960 [1764]. Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime, John T. Goldthwaite (trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.Search in Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel.1987 [1790]. Critique of judgment, Werner S. Pluhar (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett.Search in Google Scholar
Kellaway, Herbert J.1907. How to lay out suburban home grounds. New York: John Wiley.10.5962/bhl.title.21124Search in Google Scholar
Landy, Joshua & MichaelSaler (eds.). 2009. The re-enchantment of the world. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Lawson, R. & B.Wooliscroft.2004. Human nature and the marketing concept. Marketing Theory4(4). 311–326.10.1177/1470593104047641Search in Google Scholar
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 2005 [1978]. Myth and meaning. London: Rutledge and Kegan-Paul.Search in Google Scholar
MacNeish, Richard S.1992. The origins of agriculture and settled life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Search in Google Scholar
Marsh, George Perkins. 1864. Man and nature: Or physical geography as modified by human action. New York: Scribner.10.5962/bhl.title.163042Search in Google Scholar
Martin, Vivian B. & AstridGynnild (eds.). 2011. Grounded theory. Boca Raton, FL: Brown Walker Press.Search in Google Scholar
Marx, Leo.2000 [1964]. The machine in the garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Mithen, Steven.2003. After the ice: A global human history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1997. Man and nature: The spiritual crisis of modern man. Chicago: ABC.Search in Google Scholar
Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1982. Wilderness & the American mind, 4th edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Perlman, Daniel L. & Jeffrey C.Milder.2005. Practical ecology for planners, developers, citizens. Washington: Island Press.Search in Google Scholar
Press, Melea & Eric J.Arnould.2011. How does organizational identification form? A consumer behavior perspective. Journal of Consumer Research38. 650–666.10.1086/660699Search in Google Scholar
Redman, Charles L.1978. The rise of civilization: From early farmers to urban society in the ancient Near East. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.Search in Google Scholar
Rindos, David.1984. The origins of agriculture: An evolutionary perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Search in Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2009. The works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau [E-book]. Houston: Halcyon.Search in Google Scholar
Schama, Simon.1996. Landscape and memory. New York: Vintage.Search in Google Scholar
Schultz, Warren.1999. A man’s turf: The perfect lawn. New York: Three Rivers PressSearch in Google Scholar
Schuyler, David.1986. The new urban landscape: The redefinition of city form in nineteenth century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Thompson, C. J. & G.Coskuner-Balli.2007. Countervailing market responses to corporate co-optation and the ideological recruitment of consumption communities. Journal of Consumer Research34. 135–152.10.1086/519143Search in Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. 1960. Thoreau on man and nature. Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press.Search in Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. 1991. Walking. Boston: Beacon Press.Search in Google Scholar
Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1921. The frontier in American history. New York: Henry Holt.Search in Google Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein.2008 [1899]. The theory of the leisure class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Virgil. 1987. Eclogues and Georgies, H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
- Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
- What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
- Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
- In the arena: Communication between animals and Christians in damnatio ad bestias
- Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
- Mathematics and Peirce’s semiotic
- Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
- The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro
- Kenneth L. Pike and science fiction
- Environmental communications: The reader’s perspective
- A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category
- The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity
- The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective
- From Saussure to sociology and back to linguistics: Niklas Luhmann’s reception of signifiant/signifié and langue/parole as the basis for a model of language change
- The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
- Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
- Who said it? Voices in news translation, from a semiotic perspective
- Why semiotics, why poetry?
- How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”
- Film space as mental space
- Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
- Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
- Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
- Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
- Heidegger and the signs of history
- To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
- Empiricism within the limits of postmodernism alone: On the emergence of the logically real within the multi-perspectival field
- Propaganda mala fide: Towards a comparative semiotics of violent religious persuasion
- Review article
- Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
- Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
- What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
- Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
- In the arena: Communication between animals and Christians in damnatio ad bestias
- Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
- Mathematics and Peirce’s semiotic
- Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
- The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro
- Kenneth L. Pike and science fiction
- Environmental communications: The reader’s perspective
- A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category
- The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity
- The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective
- From Saussure to sociology and back to linguistics: Niklas Luhmann’s reception of signifiant/signifié and langue/parole as the basis for a model of language change
- The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
- Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
- Who said it? Voices in news translation, from a semiotic perspective
- Why semiotics, why poetry?
- How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”
- Film space as mental space
- Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
- Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
- Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
- Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
- Heidegger and the signs of history
- To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
- Empiricism within the limits of postmodernism alone: On the emergence of the logically real within the multi-perspectival field
- Propaganda mala fide: Towards a comparative semiotics of violent religious persuasion
- Review article
- Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored