Off the Map

To the thorough reviews below I'll just add:It's nice to see someone in my field working for rather than against the social forces that oppose the conformity and imperialism that show up nowadays as well-marketed, hyperconvenient, quick-fix "psychotherapy" (or is that psycho therapy?). Listening to the soul of the world, Chellis Glendinning hears in it an anguish echoing her own--and acts bravely and actively on behalf of both.There's an annoying idea at my school (Pacifica) that all such activism = acting out, a kind of puerile and heroic impulsiveness--whereas working the imaginal, perhaps from within a well-lighted office on convenient days, should be enough. The example of the author's way of being indicates otherwise. We certainly need to monitor our activism, lest it become just another kind of colonizing arrogance so characteristic of our empire-driven civilization; at the same time, to say and do nothing except in private is not enlightened or soulful, it is cowardly.Good work, Dr. Glendinning!

What impact has three hundred years of Western imperialism had on the way we treat each other -- and the Earth -- today?How is today's global economy simply our latest expression of colonization?How can our personal woundings become doorways to self-healing and form the basis of a commitment to sustainable planetary culture?In her new book, Off the Map (An Expedition Deep Into Imperialism, the Global Economy, and Other Earthly Whereabouts, Pulitzer-nominated author and psychologist Dr. Chellis Glendinning explores these themes with a directness, clarity and emotional intensity that awakens the reader to profound insight about the nature of today's world.In a lyrical braiding of three stories, she weaves the threads of her personal story of sexual abuse in a European-American (and Anglophile) family in the 1950s, the history of the last three hundred years of Western imperialism and a present-day horseback ride through the recently colonized Chicano world of northern New Mexico, where she currently resides.Glendinning sees Off the Map as a continuation of her past work. "My focus is always the relationship between the personal and the political," she notes. "This book is an effort to make clear that everyone on the Earth is still experiencing the legacies of the classical age of empire, that corporate globalization is just the latest expression of Western imperialism and that, ultimately, it cannot work."Throughout the book, we follow Glendinning's story of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, through her healing to the reclamation of her essential self and her reconnection to the power of land and nature. We also follow the story of the land-based Chicano peoples of northern New Mexico, a story that goes to the heart of the unspoken wound of imperial systems: the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.Glendinning, a highly respected eco-psychologist, received a Pulitzer nomination for her book When Technology Wounds (William Morrow). Other earlier works include My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery From Western Civilization (Shambhala) and Waking Up in the Nuclear Age (William Morrow). Off the Map is a compelling look at the unexamined implications of our rapidly expanding global economy and, as such, should cause a great stir among economists, sociologists and all those concerned about the future of humanity -- and all of life -- on Earth.

This book should be required reading. In both style and content, Glendinning has woven the mentality of colonialism and conquest into her personal history in such a way that the reader is captured and informed. This book will raise the hair on the back of your neck with it's power.I teach college sociology and have read excerpts of this book to my students. Their response has been amazing, with many wiping tears from their eyes. I didn't want to put this book down, and friends have had the same experience. If you have read Glendinnings other works, you will be amazed at this book. She has truly stepped beyond herself.

Chellis Glendinning argues that imperialism has been the dominant and dominating political force in human civilization from the age of the great European empires down to our own era of national and international corporate takeovers. The influence and effect of imperialism is felt in every area of our lives, from the global to the deeply personal. In Off The Map, Glendinning charts the course of empire across countries and continents, and on into individual minds, hearts, and bodies -- all within the context of her horseback ride through the wilds of New Mexico with her friend Snowflake Martinez, an Indo-Hispanic vaquero. As their dreamlike journey unfolds, Chellis and Snowflake strive to understand the results of their ancestors' fatal encounter: hers, the "people of empire"; his, "the colonized" -- weaving together current events with their childhood memories and the forces of history to reveal the extent of imperialism's legacy -- and to find a way "off the map", to a more hopeful future for human kind. Off The Map will prove to be of immense interest to students of history, economics, political science, psychology, social activism, and multicultural relations.

OFF THE MAP (An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, GlobalEconomy, and other Earthly Whereabouts) by Chellis Glendinning (Shambhala Books; 1999; 182pps; $21.95) review by Bob BannerThe woman who brought us the powerful My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery From Western Civilization has given us another wildly potent book. In this expedition she weaves three story lines. One is a historical account of the current empire with dates, names, places and facts that clearly depicts a harrowing future (but very consistent with all the familiar assumptions and internalizations from previous empires). The second is a travelogue with Snowflake Martinez, a Chicano vaguero and friend. They travel by horse "off the map" - talking about their histories and "with open hearts, want to understand the distance that lies between us." The third story line is her personal account of her childhood - the memories of grandparents adorning themselves with artifacts symbolic of the British Empire as well as the disturbing accounts of her father raping both her and her brother (for 12 straight years!). The weaving is brilliant. As I write this I am very distraught because the book opens a different perspective of my childhood and who I am. The book demands that we ask ourselves: How deeply did we buy into the colonialists' psyche? What elements of the dominator Empire still resides in us? and Have we made a commitment to thwart the mega machine and to make amends with the colonized? It's a weaving of the personal with the political, the colonizer with the colonized, as well as history with the present. We cannot console ourselves into thinking that this empire building is from the past and that our personal lives have not been tainted by it. Chellis reveals to us in subtle and not so subtle ways as to how we are interdependent - how what's happening to indigenous cultures now happened to us "a long time ago... only slower." The empire she describes... the colonizers, the dominator mentality of haughty arrogance, and the global economy affects all of us. We parade the colonizer within us as we are being colonized. The empire does not just affect the sweat shop worker in Indonesia working for Nike but it's the destruction of our ag land, communities, neighborhoods, killings in schools, teenage suicides, taking of drugs like Prozac, cocaine. and caffeine... the psychological abuse we tolerate when we internalize the fantasies on television commercials and magazine ads. The colonizers have become colonized yet "few are able to see empire." As Chellis writes: "Blindness is rampant. Denial, repression, outright refusal. And the more that is forgotten, the more that falls away, that dissolves and disappears, the more there is to remember." One more: "Imperialism's technologies, psychologies, and ideologies lunge like freeways toward the linear horizon, never knowing their place or purpose or end point, producing in their wake a disruption so massive it cannot, as is, be made susta