Knowledge Encounters Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Knowledge Encounters - Essay Example Majority of scholars working on post-colonial effects in diverse fields like history, literature, geography, anthropology, and other sources of knowledge have led to complications when comprehending encounters and their socio-politics as a moment of hegemonic and totalizing dominance of culture and knowledge production. Rather, they make it out to be more variable, difficult, and nuanced moment, as well as space, of encounter as Kant would put it (Durkheim & Fields 10). However, according to Cruikshank, the encounter and its aftermath is about how our relations are structured and how man constructs knowledge about his physical surroundings. After European accounts following their encounters with landscapes supersede the accounts of the natives, travel and scientific discourses took up, position as the fundamental means through which northwestern geography could be understood (Cruikshank 88). For the people who were indigenous to the St. Elias Mountains, the glaciers were considered t o be permanent boundaries that separated the static landscape from the humans. In their case, they were moving structures that they endowed with the sense of hearing, taste, and smelling. However, the native accounts should not be valued as historically fixed or as the truth that needs to be examined and discovered by scholars or explorers (Cruikshank 89). Rather, the native accounts about sentient glaciers show the fact that nature and man mutually make, as well as maintain, knowledge of a world that is habitable. Cruikshank is careful in asserting that glaciers must not be reduced to metaphors or scientific data (Cruikshank 108). Glaciers in their forcefulness, unpredictability, complexity, and changeability give a model for cultural history and knowledge production. The author makes her argument in a way that pays careful attention to representative politics, which is made difficult by the fact that she is using oral testimony in her work, while also discussing the representative difficulties of nature. She discusses in her book the account, in glaciers given by the natives, an examination of accounts by western explorers, and the US. In addition, she discusses a critical look at the nature of the glacier as part of the border between Canada and the US, and mapping’s role in the context of nationalism (Cruikshank 115). By giving a history of the Alaskan Gulf region and juxtaposing it with historical accounts from Europe about their ice age and histories from Tlingit, the glaciers became social spaces where people produce knowledge, rather than discover it. Oral accounts also allow the ability to examine the relationship between culture and nature, as well as how knowledge was constructed according to their cultures. Glaciers as used by Cruikshank aid in the examination of how glaciers are depicted and how social and natural knowledge is entangled. In the latter Ice Age period, social upheaval and geophysical changes in the mountains coincided (Cruiks hank 120). The visitors from Europe came with conceptions about nature as a spiritual and sublime resource for the progress of man. To them, glaciers were inanimate features that needed to be measured and

Mapping and The Geometry of Form and Function of Cities Dissertation

Mapping and The Geometry of Form and Function of Cities - Dissertation Example However, these models fail to address the very issues related to urban form. The development of these contemporary models does not take into account the urban development geometry. Instead, these are developed at an aggregate level. Batty and Longley (p. 72, 1994) comment ‘The best way to begin describing fractals is by example. A coastline and a mountain are examples of natural fractals, a crumpled piece of paper an example of an artificial one. However, such irregularity which characterizes these objects is not entirely without order and this order is to be found in fractals in terms of the following three principles. First, fractals are always self-similar, at least in some general sense. On whatever scale, and within a given range you examine a fractal, it will always appear to have the same shape or same degree of irregularity. The 'whole' will always be manifest in the 'parts'; look at a piece of rock broken off a mountain and you can see the mountain in the part. Look at the twigs on the branches of a tree and you can see the whole tree in these, albeit at a much reduced scale.’ Although, it has been observed that there is an acceptable level of consistency between such models and urban form but when it comes to the geometrical considerations of urban development, these are not dependent upon the processes and mechanisms (Bertuglia et al, 1987). The urban system models which are theoretical in nature, like the urban economics models, have shown a dependency upon the urban form through a set of assumptions. However, urban form has been defined by these models in terms of treating urban space as quite simple (Thrall, 1987). Hence, building a model which links a given form to statics and dynamics is very difficult because the relevance of form is considered as given and not something that arises out of the forces in action. As a consequence of this, all the research that has been conducted in urban form is considered to be highly idiosyncratic. However, as a result of some major developments during the last decade the science of form has seen some significant changes, especially within the areas of mathematics and physics. These developments have been brought about by the requirement to establish a connection between urban form and growth processes. In addition to this, another driving force has been the analysis of natural forms on the basis of the occurrence of the geometry of the irregular. Remarkable developments in the area of computer graphics have initiated the mathematical description and visualization of the urban forms. Making use of mathematical principles on fragmented structures, visualization has achieved a milestone (Mandeibrot, 1983). The developments have come about in terms of simulating natural forms (like landscapes) in a simple, yet realistic manner. This majorly involves addition of fractal ideas to produce simulations which are more conventional. This gets further deepened into theoretical ideas whi ch involves the generation of fractal structures through physical processes. The physics of critical