Search results for ""Author Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov""

The village of Djarkhan is in the heart of Russia’s Sakha Republic, on the Central Yakut Plain. The world around Djarkhan, with its extreme subarctic climate and intractable permafrost, seems an unlikely place to look for a rich, historic, and exotic efflorescence of human life, and yet this is precisely what the authors found. Their book is a remarkable account of how the people of Djarkhan have created their own distinctive place through their unique relationship with a severe and demanding land. This book traces the way of life of the village’s Turkic inhabitants, the Yakuts, from their arrival in the 1600s through czarist times and the Soviet era to the present day. As a native of the village, geographer Bella Bychkova Jordan enjoyed unparalleled access to its people and their stories, myths, humor, problems, and folklore. Viewed through the prism of cultural geography, this material forms the basis of a remarkable portrait of a people wresting a living from the land in one of the coldest and most isolated spots on Earth. Published in collaboration with the Center for American Places.

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The most salient feature of the postmodern world, believe geographers Jim Norwine and Jonathan M. Smith, is a new set of beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that are not yet well developed or widely diffused, so that few if any postmodern people are entirely of the new world or the old. People are "perplexed," their values inchoate. Worldview Flux defines and describes the nature of perplexity and documents the shifts and changes of the postmodern world that lead to it, attending especially to the ways changes are experienced in particular places and human communities. In theoretical chapters contributors explain the reasons for our disoriented and disorienting world; empirical chapters describe strategies developed by individuals and communities to preserve, recover, or reinvent lost values, meaning, and identity. This volume is an accessible, engaging, and thought-provoking exploration of cultural geography in our time.

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Now in a completely updated, full-color edition, this leading textbook has been thoroughly revised to reflect the sweeping economic, social, and political changes the past decade has brought to Europe and to incorporate new research and teaching approaches in regional geography. The authors have especially expanded their discussion of climate change and other environmental challenges facing Europe, migration and the rise of right-wing populist movements, and Brexit and other challenges facing the EU. They employ a cultural-historical approach that is ideally suited to facilitate understanding of Europe’s complex geographical character. Their topical organization—including environment, ethnicity, religion, language, demography, politics, industry, and urban and rural life—offers students a holistic understanding of the diverse cultural area that is Europe. Inclusive, rich in ideas, lively, interesting, and humanistic, The European Culture Area remains the text of choice for courses on the geography of Europe.

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