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Named one of the 2026 Southwest Books of the Year

Throughout history, humans have sought creation stories to define our identity and affirm our connections with the universe, diverse life forms, and one another. Over the last two centuries, science has delivered a bold new creation story full of immense time and space, extraordinary objects, and powerful natural forces. Science ideas can seem mere abstractions, but at the Grand Canyon, better than anywhere else on Earth, our new creation story is manifested physically and powerfully.
 
A major work of literary nature writing, Canyon and Cosmos takes readers on a journey through the Grand Canyon's deep time, geological forces, and biological evolution, making them very real, personal, and meaningful. Through decades of hiking and kayaking, author Don Lago has gotten to know the canyon intimately. Ranging through world mythologies and Native American spirituality, he explores how humans have sought to understand the universe. He confronts existential questions of whether humans can find enough meaning in the scientific cosmos. Through poetic prose, symbolism, and philosophical insight, he shows how existence itself is our deepest source of life and meaning.  

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life’s work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, eminent scholar Yi-Fu Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Illustrating this contention with examples from both his native China and his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, one thoroughly grounded in one’s own society but also embracing curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, this important volume lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.”

Hardcover:In this moving meditation on the difficult choices facing humanity in the next millennium, celebrated scholar Yi-Fu Tuan reaffirms his faith in the value of a cosmopolitan worldview. In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Hearth is our house and neighborhood, family and kinfolk, habit and custom. Cosmos, by contrast, is the larger reality-world, civilization, and humankind. Tuan addresses the extraordinary revival of interest in the hearth in recent decades, examining both the positive and negative effects of this renewed concern. Among the beneficent outcomes has been a revival of ethnic culture and sense of place. Negative repercussions abound, however, manifested as an upsurge in superstition, excessive pride in ancestry and custom, and a constricted worldview that when taken together can inflame local passions, leading at times to violent conflict-from riots in American cities to wars in the Balkans. In Cosmos and Hearth, Tuan takes the position that we need to embrace both the sublime and the humble, drawing what is valuable from each. Illustrating the importance of both cosmos and hearth with examples from his country of birth, China, and from his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, the “cosmopolitan hearth,” that has the coziness but not the narrowness and bigotry of the traditional hearth. Tuan encourages not only being thoroughly grounded in one’s own culture but also the embracing of curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, Cosmos and Hearth lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.” Born in China and educated in Australia, the Philippines, England, and the United States, Yi-Fu Tuan is professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minnesota, 1977), Landscapes of Fear (Minnesota, 1982), The Good Life (1986), and Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (1993). Excerpt: “Thinking yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos-to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.”

The Baniwa Indians of the Northwest Amazon have engaged in millenarian movements since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. The defining characteristic of these movements is usually a prophecy of the end of this present world and the restoration of the primordial, utopian world of creation. This prophetic message, delivered by powerful shamans, has its roots in Baniwa myths of origin and creation.

In this ethnography of Baniwa religion, Robin M. Wright explores the myths of creation and how they have been embodied in religious movements and social action—particularly in a widespread conversion to evangelical Christianity. He opens with a discussion of cosmogony, cosmology, and shamanism, and then goes on to explain how Baniwa origin myths have played an active role in shaping both personal and community identity and history. He also explores the concepts of death and eschatology and shows how the mythology of destruction and renewal in Baniwa religion has made the Baniwa people receptive to both Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

This special issue aims to channel the energies, tactics, critical forces, and comparative poetics Masao Miyoshi (1928–2009) carried out in his work from the 1970s on: coming to terms with his concept of aftering (the act of prolonging and transforming impacts across cultural, political, and disciplinary borders) and its temporal, border-crossing, translational, field-reframing, and revisionary effects. Contributors do not assess his scholarship and photography in any memorial, critical, or honorific sense. Instead, they seek to renew the critical visions that he distributed across various fields, from Asian to Asian American studies and beyond. Each takes seriously the mandate inside Miyoshi's work that cultural criticism envision its work broadly and courageously. Essays address the state of Japan studies; China's role in twentieth-century geopolitics, particularly involving Tibet; the critical ethos of "the planetary" in the Anthropocene; and the Korean film Snowpiercer, whose plot represents an embodiment of killer capitalism.

Contributors. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Arif Dirlik, Harry Harootunian, Reginald Jackson, Mary Layoun, Christine L. Marran, George Solt, Keijiro Suga, Stefan Tanaka, Chih-ming Wang, Rob Wilson

Caesar Augustus promoted a modest image of himself as the first among equals (princeps), a characterization that was as popular with the ancient Romans as it is with many scholars today. Paul Rehak argues against this impression of humility and suggests that, like the monarchs of the Hellenistic age, Augustus sought immortality—an eternal glory gained through deliberate planning for his niche in history while flexing his existing power. Imperium and Cosmos focuses on Augustus’s Mausoleum and Ustrinum (site of his cremation), the Horologium-Solarium (a colossal sundial), and the Ara Pacis (Altar to Augustan Peace), all of which transformed the northern Campus Martius into a tribute to his major achievements in life and a vast memorial for his deification after death.

Rehak closely examines the artistic imagery on these monuments, providing numerous illustrations, tables, and charts. In an analysis firmly contextualized by a thorough discussion of the earlier models and motifs that inspired these Augustan monuments, Rehak shows how the princeps used these on such an unprecedented scale as to truly elevate himself above the common citizen.       

How did the ancient Maya rule their world? Despite more than a century of archaeological investigation and glyphic decipherment, the nature of Maya political organization and political geography has remained an open question. Many debates have raged over models of centralization versus decentralization, superordinate and subordinate status—with far-flung analogies to emerging states in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Prudence Rice asserts that neither the model of two giant "superpowers" nor that which postulates scores of small, weakly independent polities fits the accumulating body of material and cultural evidence.

In this groundbreaking book, Rice builds a new model of Classic lowland Maya (AD 179-948) political organization and political geography. Using the method of direct historical analogy, she integrates ethnohistoric and ethnographic knowledge of the Colonial-period and modern Maya with archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic data from the ancient Maya. On this basis of cultural continuity, she constructs a convincing case that the fundamental ordering principles of Classic Maya geopolitical organization were the calendar (specifically a 256-year cycle of time known as the may) and the concept of quadripartition, or the division of the cosmos into four cardinal directions. Rice also examines this new model of geopolitical organization in the Preclassic and Postclassic periods and demonstrates that it offers fresh insights into the nature of rulership, ballgame ritual, and warfare among the Classic lowland Maya.

In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. Drawing on the theories of Leibniz, Glissant, Deleuze, and theoretical physicist David Bohm—who each conceive of the universe as being folded in on itself in myriad ways—Marks contends that the folds of the cosmos are entirely constituted of living beings. From humans to sandwiches to software to stars, every entity is alive and occupies its own private enclosure inside the cosmos. Through analyses of fiction, documentary and experimental movies, interactive media, and everyday situations, Marks outlines embodied methods for detecting and augmenting the connections between each living entity and the cosmos. She shows that by affectively mediating with the ever-shifting folded relations within the cosmos, it is possible to build “soul-assemblages” that challenge information capitalism, colonialism, and other power structures and develop new connections with the infinite. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.

This provocative volume, one of the most important interpretive works on the philosophical thought of the Renaissance, has long been regarded as a classic in its field.  Ernst Cassirer here examines the changes brewing in the early stages of the Renaissance, tracing the interdependence of philosophy, language, art, and science; the newfound recognition of individual consciousness; and the great thinkers of the period—from da Vinci and Galileo to Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy discusses the importance of fifteenth-century philosopher Nicholas Cusanus, the concepts of freedom and necessity, and the subject-object problem in Renaissance thought.

“This fluent translation of a scholarly and penetrating original leaves little impression of an attempt to show that a ‘spirit of the age’ or ‘spiritual essence of the time’ unifies and expresses itself in all aspects of society or culture.”—Philosophy