Biographical Sketch for
James William Gibson, PhD
Keynote Speaker
James William Gibson is a professor of sociology at CaliforniaStateUniversity, Long Beach and a Faculty Fellow at YaleUniversity’s Center for Cultural Sociology. He attended college at the University of Texas at Austin and obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale. He has won fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and CornellUniversity’s Society for the Humanities.
Gibson’s first books wereThe Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986) and Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994), but he subsequently turned away from the study of war, becoming a free-lance journalist working for LA Weekly as well as an op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times, covering environmental issues in Southern California.
A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature, was recently published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. The title is a play upon Max Weber’s famous quote that modernization and secularization brought about the “disenchantment of the world.” Gibson’s book contends that disenchantment was never completely accepted—as in the works of Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville. In recent decades this dissident tradition has blossomed into a wider cultural reenchantment of nature that includes new forms of totemic kinship ties to wild animals and ways of consecrating lands and waters as “sacred” in a broad sense of the term. His book also analyses the internal problems of this emerging culture and the efforts to destroy it by the Bush administration and its conservative evangelical allies.
Gibson is married to writer Carol Mithers. They live with their daughter Melissa and chow-shepherd Casey in West Los Angeles. He goes scuba diving in coastal waters when they are not clouded by algae blooms and hikes in local mountain forests when they are not on fire. More about his writings can be found at He can be reached at .
Abstract
Title of Keynote Address: The Cultural Reenchantment of Nature and Its Implications for Veterinary Hospice
The veterinary hospice movement enhances our relationships with companion animals as they approach death by creating rituals that affirm human-animal bonds and our shared participation in the cycles of life. This presentation will frame this emerging social movement within a context of broad change, what Gibson calls the “cultural reenchantment of nature.” Max Weber described modernization and secularization as leading in the irrevocable “disenchantment of the world,” rendering lands and animals as simply inert resources for human use.
Although Weber was right for the most part, a dissident tradition—Thoreau, Melville, John Muir, Ansel Adams, Rachel Carson, to name a few--resisted disenchantment and insisted that animals were both sentient and spiritual beings, and landscapes intrinsically connected to a larger, mysterious cosmos. Over the past 40 years this dissident tradition has blossomed.
Of particular relevance for veterinary hospice are the multiple ways in which we are developing symbolic, totemic kinship ties with wild animals, and pay attention when they become threatened with death or extinction. By understanding the types of new stories and rituals being created about wild animals and how we respond to their plight, then the veterinary hospice movement can learn potential lessons to further its cause, and conversely, how the spread of veterinary hospice might promote better treatment of the environment.