Will Wright - Böcker

From the Preface: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into abstract structural theory as well as economic and political history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is based is available to all of my readers, either at the local theater or, more likely, on the late, late show.I hope you will take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle of the night, tell them firmly-as I often did-that you are doing research in social science.

'An extremely accessible, well structured and imaginative reading of market and social theory in terms of the myth of the Wild West frontier'

New Formations

This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff).

Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time. It is a unique discussion of market and social theory using cultural myth. Will Wright fully explores how issues of individualism, freedom and inequality in the myth of the Wild West connect up with questions of white, male superiority and environmental degradation.

What happens to species when climate disruption causes suitable habitat within one country to move or vanish? In Borders of Biodiversity, Will Wright examines the histories of transnational conservation efforts to address the tension between a warming world in which living things are on the move and an increasingly walled world in which their movements are constrained. Focusing on the histories of three border-crossing species—gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias—from the 1850s to the present day, Wright reveals how nonstate actors like citizen scientists think beyond political borders and diplomatic traditions and find collaborations with fellow-minded conservationists by following nature beyond the nation-state. The people at the heart of these intertwined stories in Canada, Mexico, the United States, and Indigenous nations of North America recognize that biota have their own forms of territoriality that should be respected and defended. Wright argues that the realities of climate change are fundamentally at odds with site-specific conservation, which follows the possessive logic of nation-building by bounding space to protect habitats when many ecologies do not naturally fit within traditional protected areas. Taken together, these stories make clear that conservation efforts must forge solidarity across borders for biological well-being—or face the extinction of shared species.

What happens to species when climate disruption causes suitable habitat within one country to move or vanish? In Borders of Biodiversity, Will Wright examines the histories of transnational conservation efforts to address the tension between a warming world in which living things are on the move and an increasingly walled world in which their movements are constrained. Focusing on the histories of three border-crossing species—gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias—from the 1850s to the present day, Wright reveals how nonstate actors like citizen scientists think beyond political borders and diplomatic traditions and find collaborations with fellow-minded conservationists by following nature beyond the nation-state. The people at the heart of these intertwined stories in Canada, Mexico, the United States, and Indigenous nations of North America recognize that biota have their own forms of territoriality that should be respected and defended. Wright argues that the realities of climate change are fundamentally at odds with site-specific conservation, which follows the possessive logic of nation-building by bounding space to protect habitats when many ecologies do not naturally fit within traditional protected areas. Taken together, these stories make clear that conservation efforts must forge solidarity across borders for biological well-being—or face the extinction of shared species.