Table of Contents for Avatar and Nature Spirituality edited by Bron Taylor

PART I BRINGING AVATAR INTO FOCUS

Prologue: Avatar as Rorschach | Bron Taylor

Introduction: The Religion and Politics of Avatar | Bron Taylor

Avatar: Ecorealism and the Blockbuster Melodrama | Stephen Rust

Outer Space Religion and the Ambiguous Nature of Avatar's Pandora | Thore Bjørnvig

PART II POPULAR RESPONSES

Avatar Fandom, Environmentalism, and Nature Religion | Britt Istoft

Post-Pandoran Depression or Na'vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception | Matthew Holtmeier

Transposing the Conversation into Popular Idiom: The reaction to Avatar in Hawai'i | Rachelle K. Gould, Nicole M. Ardoin, and Jennifer Kamakanipakolonahe'okekai Hashimoto

Watching Avatar from "AvaTar Sands" Land | Randolph Haluza-Delay, Michael P. Ferber, and Tim Wiebe-Neufeld

PART III CRITICAL, EMOTIONAL & SPIRITUAL RELFECTIONS

Becoming the "Noble Savage": Nature Religion and the "Other" in Avatar | Chris Klassen

The Na'vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration | Pat Munday

Calling the Na'vi: Evolutionary Jungian Psychology and Nature Spirits | Bruce MacLennan

Avatar and Artemis: Indigenous Narratives as Neo-Romantic Environmental Ethics | Joy H. Greenberg

Spirituality and Resistance: Avatar Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest | David Landis Barnhill

I See You: Interspecies Empathy and Avatar | Lisa H. Sideris

Knowing Pandora in Sound: Acoustemology and Ecomusicological Imagination in Cameron's Avatar | Michael B. MacDonald

Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience | Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sørlin

Epilogue: Truth and Fiction in Avatar's Cosmogony and Nature Religion | Bron Taylor

Afterword: Considering the Legacies of Avatar | Daniel Heath Justice

Contributors

Index

The Na'vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration

Pat Munday

Deploying what he calls "postmodern semiotics,"ÃfâEURSÃ,Â? science and technology professor Pat Munday focuses on the affinities between the hunting practices of the indigenous Na'vi and those of non-indigenous American hunters. He pays special attention to gender, noting that Na'vi hunters are both male and female, as are contemporary American hunters, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Munday finds in the practice of hunting a spiritual alternative to the dualisms of mainstream Western culture. He suggests, moreover, that such a spiritual hunting practice has affinities with the animistic spirituality expressed in Avatar and that this frame makes sense in the light of biophilia hypotheses.