Class Description:

Intimate Nature: Communication Older than Words
Fall, Winter, Spring/Coordinated Study
Faculty: Laurie Meeker, Sarah Williams, Sean Williams
Enrollment: 72
Prerequisites: None. This all-level program accepts up to 25 percent or 18
first-year students.
Faculty Signature: Yes
Special Expenses: $75 per quarter for media production; $40 per quarter for Yoga or Liangong; $100 for overnight field trips.
Internship Possibilities: No

Is our engagement with a sparrow's song, an Irish poem, an abstract film, a yoga pose a matter of remembering and unlearning? Could it also become a practice of intuitive knowing? How can we respond to a friend's grief, the destruction of the salmon, the horror of a clear-cut forest, and our own ineffectiveness in the face of such problems?
As human beings our encounters with ourselves, with other species and lands are often in languages older than words. We feel these encounters in the body first, perhaps at a 'heart' level; then, we process them through our intellectual and cultural filters. Our individual filters are shaped by our childhood, our language and culture, our encounters with the media, arts, environment and our experiences as thinking and feeling adults. We are interested in how these filters become shields that block and cut us off from older, indigenous, intuitive, non-anthropomorphic and more sustainable forms of communication.
This program will explore the intimate nature of the relationship between our experiential realities and the intuitive and intellectual processes of understanding them. We want to create a learning community that serves as a refuge. We see this as an experiment that attempts to balance intellectual processes with body and spirit and embraces emotion in the classroom. Silence, sitting in circles for discussion, reflection in natural settings, the creation of artworks, musical practice, retreats and movement workshops are ways in which we intend to balance our reading and research.
Using films, texts, music, movement and fieldwork, we will intentionally create opportunities to engage in remembering and awakening our practices of intuitive knowing. We will study lives and the work of artists, naturalists and scientists who are interested in the politics of interspecies communication and who have found ways to engage older ways of knowing. We will use ethnographic studies, autobiographies, fiction, poetry and field journals to connect with our own intimate natures.
Credit awarded in: anthropology, cultural studies, feminist theory, media, ethnomusicology and women's studies.

Total: 16 credits each quarter.
Planning Unit(s): Programs for First-Year Students; Culture, Text and Language and Expressive Arts.
Program is preparatory for: careers and future studies in the performing arts, media arts, cultural studies and women's studies.
Program Updates: (11/19/02) Faculty Signature added