Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism (original) (raw)
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Nature and Culture Dualism: Genesis of an Obsolete Dichotomy
This paper will discuss the relation between the concepts of nature and culture and their intricate interdependency, focusing on Modernity. Moreover, it will analyze the dichotomy that has historically emerged and its implications. Human beings have had different conceptions about what is natural and what is non-natural throughout their history. Before Modernity we did not conceive nature as being a different ontological reality, we did not perceive it as being separated from us. After Modernity everything changed, and we began to see nature as a mere object. Nature became, then, a representation, like a painting on a wall. Our contemporary world vision, our Weltanschauung, was formed mainly during the XVI and XVII centuries. There was, at that time, a considerable change in the way we perceived and described the world. This new mentality and this new form of representing the cosmos provided the basis for our new way of thinking. They were the substrate upon which our modern paradigm was erected. The world’s conversion in an image only became a reality thanks to technology. But this change happened only because of the paradigm shift originated in the XVII century. Technique always has been a way to articulate how (and what) we think. With the Greeks, technique (techné) was, at first, an extension of the physis. Thus, the technique was a way of being instead of a way of thinking. After the paradigm shift in the XVII century (a metaphysical change, in the very way we connected to the world), the human being left his former place. Perhaps would be even better if we talked about nature and culture as being as a hybrid. What, at the source, was natural, through the flows of production and consumption, undergoes transformations and becomes something that is not natural anymore but, at the same time, not completely artificial either. Our world, once divided between the social and the natural, becomes a space where a constant process, a continuous flow, is constantly happening. From that dichotomy between something good and something bad arises a dialectic, in which we no longer can see any division whatsoever. Keywords: Nature, Culture, Dichotomy, World Vision, Hybrid
Progress in Human Geography, 1997
The dualism between society and nature and the processes by which nature is being socially constructed has become an area of increasing concern and interest to geographers in recent years. In this article, the abstract and concrete interrelationships between nature and society will be problematized, drawing on the work of Lacko, Wittgenstein, Harre , Bourdieu and Lefebvre, among others. A number of concepts that will enable us to work across the boundaries conceived to exist between the physical, the mental and the social and thus of great importance for the analysis of the social construction of nature will be proposed.
On the Duality of Culture and Nature
Philosophica, 1995
Much of the Western tradition can be understood in tenns of increasing self-consciousness about the difference between culture and nature. The problems that anthropology has recently discovered about culture parallel what Buddhism claims about the problem of the individual self. We alternate between the promise of technological progress (freedom through self-grounding) and yearning for a return to nature (security through regrounding). Since both are impossible for us, the conclusion considers whether there is any third alternative.
Philosophy of nature and culture and its role in shaping Humankind’s attitude to nature
Hybris
We live in an era of crises. One of them, the ecological crisis, arose from the fact that the human race plunders nature, destroying, among other things, the Earth’s biodiversity. In my paper I will show that the situation is rooted in a specific worldview. Moreover, I will interrogate the question of how we can deal with the problem. Humankind’s attitude to themselves and to the world (including nature) is based on beliefs and values which make up an unquestioned prejudgment. Individuals absorb it in the process of socialization, as they assimilate the widely understood traditions of the social groups to which they belong. In the Western tradition in particular, our understanding of humanity’s situation in the world and its relation to nature, which we have had since modernity, found its clearest articulation in the views of René Descartes (1596–1650). I will begin by discussing the main characteristics of this position most pertinent to the main problem identified in the title. T...
2013
In this paper, we will analyze how anthropological thinking, in the last twenty years, has put the conceptual categories of Culture and Nature into radical questioning. Nature was “denaturalized” and deemed as a social construction that was specific to the history of Western world. But to avoid the alternative between nature and culture one should develop a “non-dualist” approach and, in this sense, we will then consider Tim Ingold's works. According to the British anthropologist, the nature and culture divide is usually the outcome of an assumption recurrent in anthropology, that according to which our cultural frames determine our perception of outside world. For Ingold, phenomenological thinking reversed the ontological priorities of Western rationalism.
Ecological Nature: A Non-Dualistic Concept for Rethinking Humankind's Place in the World
This paper puts forward a concept of naturalness as an alternative to the wilderness concept, which has been criticized for problematically situating human beings outside the natural world and thus conceptually foreclosing the possibility of humans living in harmony with nature. After examining and finding inadequate two concepts of naturalness dominant in the work of environmental ethicists, namely the natural as opposed to the supernatural and the natural as opposed to the anthropogenic, the paper delineates a concept of ecological naturalness, which links naturalness to ecological normality and ecosystem health. Tracing the historical roots of this concept back to classical Aristotelian philosophy, the paper shows that a contemporary ecological version of it actually underpins the intuitive views of many current-day environmentalists and ecologists. The paper concludes that the concept of ecological naturalness is better suited than the wilderness concept to support efforts at enabling humans to inhabit the earth’s ecosystems in ecologically sustainable ways.
The Very Idea of an Ecological Worldview
Ethics & The Environment, 2021
In environmental philosophy, it has often been argued that adopting a new ecological worldview is necessary in order to generate environmentalist social change in response to ecological crisis. I introduce the analytical category of metascientific stance (tacit assumptions about the nature, practices, goals, and place of the sciences in society) in order to discuss the popular model of worldview clash in this article and contrast it with other models of science-environmentalism relation. I argue that its frequent combination with an epistemological holism, often implying antirealism, is entirely at odds with an environmental philosophy that recognizes the real asymmetrical dependence of humankind on the nonhuman. Moreover, it assumes a questionable metaethical relation between worldview and action. I examine three essential tensions in the worldview clash model for environmentalism and argue that because the very idea of a worldview has deep roots in Modernist dualism and anthropocentrism, it is a fundamentally flawed way of framing environmentalist action.