Cultural Discourses of Dwelling: Investigating Environmental Communication as a Place-based Practice

Abstract

In this essay, we contribute a response to intellectual and practical problems by presenting a perspective on environmental communication that is reflexively grounded in place. The perspective is designed to explore human relations with nature, while embracing cultural and linguistic variability. Our goals are to introduce a way to think through communication to places, and further to link that understanding to issues of engaged environmental action, to deeply seated notions of identity, and to the affective dimension of belonging that place-based communication often brings with it. Our way of doing this is to theorize and study cultural discourses of dwelling, which we explicate theoretically, then further illustrate by analyzing the discourse of adult-onset hunters. Our discussion concludes by exploring not only environmental speaking, but listening environmentally.

Keywords:

• Environmental Communication
• Place
• Cultural Discourse Analysis
• Ethnography of Communication
• Hunting
• Food

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

For support of this work, Carbaugh thanks the Finlandia Foundation National, the Fulbright Association, the University of Massachusetts Amherst Research Council, as well as the Whatcom Museum Jacob Research Grant program of Bellingham, Washington.

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2013.767658).

1. The first person singular refers to Donal Carbaugh, who drafted the earlier and latter sections of the article.

2. See Appalachian Mountain Club trail guide, section 6, of the Metacomet-Monadnock trail description, http://www.amcberkshire.org/node/25. The M-M trail in this section was certified as a “National Recreation Trail” by National Park Service (NPS) in 2001, and a “National Scenic Trail” by the NPS in 2009.

3. The following draw, for example, upon Henry David Thoreau's (1950) essay, “Walking,” from Walden and other writings (ed. B. Atkinson; pp. 597–632), New York: The Modern Library; John Muir's (1980) essays as collected in The wilderness world of John Muir (ed. E. Teale), Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; Aldo Leopold's A sand county almanac, New York: Ballantine Books; Terry Tempest Williams’ (2002), Red: Passion and patience in the desert, New York: Vintage; Edward Abbey's (1988) Desert solitaire, Tucson: University of Arizona Press; and Wendell Berry's (1993), What are people for?, San Francisco: North Point Press.

4. We thank Catherine Cerulli for drawing this quote to our attention.

5. Our point echoes earlier of our writings and Craig's (1999) theorizing about the constitutive nature of communication.

6. Our overall perspective is developed in detail elsewhere (Berry, 2009; Carbaugh, 1996a, 1996b, 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Scollo, 2011).

7. We emphasize that our analyses in what follows are illustrative and suggestive, not definitive or comprehensive.

8. The quotes here draw attention to technical concepts being used for purposes of this sort of analysis. See Carbaugh (2007a, 2007b).

9. The data segments produced here by Yvonne, and below by Carol and Frank, are from Cerulli (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donal Carbaugh

Donal Carbaugh is a Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Tovar Cerulli

Tovar Cerulli is a Doctoral Student in Communication and author of the book,The Mindful Carnivore