Nature/culture Dichotomization

En este trabajo nos proponemos abordar el tópico concerniente a la dicotomía naturaleza/cultura y la relación de ésta con la cuestión de la diferencia antropológica. Reconstruiremos algunos de los puntos centrales del debate reciente en torno a estas nociones, para luego adentrarnos en las consecuencias filosóficas que, según entendemos, pueden desprenderse de las investigaciones del psicólogo evolutivo contemporáneo Michael Tomasello. Pondremos el énfasis en la reconstrucción de sus argumentos acerca de la estrecha relación que se da entre la cognición humana y la cultura, delimitando la especificidad de estas con respecto a las de los primates no humanos. Lo que se propone es, a grandes rasgos, una mirada acerca de la relación entre cultura y cognición. Palabras clave Dicotomía naturaleza/cultura-Diferencia antropológica-Cognición primate-Michael Tomasello N º 38, V o l. XVIII, 2 0 1 8, www.agoraphilosophica.com 143

Conrado Zuluaga schrieb 1989 dass der Protagonist in José Eustasio Riveras Roman 'La Vorágine' (1924) nicht Arturo Cova sei, der verhinderte Poet, der seine entführte Alicia im kolumbianischen Urwald verfolgt, sondern dieser Wald selbst. Der Naturraum des Romans entwickelt verschiedene Naturdimensionen, die in Wechselwirkung zur Figurenkonzeption stehen. In dieser Arbeit wurde ein geschlechtlich belegter Naturraum in Bezug auf den Maskulinitätskonflikt Arturo Covas untersucht. Hierbei werden Inhalte der Gender Studies, der Raumtheorie und der direkten Textanalyse verwendet.

This entry begins by reviewing the definitions of “human”, “environment,” and “dichotomy”, consequently turning to the debates concerning the human–environment relationship. Synthesizing various studies, it supposes that advanced tool use, language,
hypersociality, advanced cognition, morality, civilization, technology, and free will are distinctly human. However, other studies describe how nonhuman organisms share these same abilities. The biophysical or natural environment is often associated with all living and nonliving things that occur naturally. The environment also refers to
ecosystems or habitats, including all living organisms or species. The concepts of the biophysical or natural environment are often opposed to the concepts of built or modified environment, which is artificial, that is, constructed or influenced by humans.
The built or modified environment typically refers to structures or spaces from gardens to car parks. Today, one of the central questions in regard to human–environment dichotomies centers around the concept of sustainability.

Ekologia w krótkim czasie zyskała rzesze zwolenników na całym świecie, stała się nie tylko nieodłącznym składnikiem intelektualnego krajobrazu i elementem codziennej praktyki, ale również doskonałym produktem marketingowym. Jednak podejrzliwi myśliciele postanowili nie szczędzić słów krytyki kierowanych pod jej adresem, jednocześnie próbując nadać teoretyczny kształt zjawisku przybierającemu charakter masowy.

PhD dissertation in Swedish, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden 2017.

In 1909 the Swedish national parks law was adopted with the assumption that the Sámi people living in the areas to be preserved were, in principle, one with nature. Therefore the perception of their land as pristine was consolidated and they could be excepted from park regulations. About thirty years later the national park administration stated that the aim to keep the national park nature untouched would fail without a restriction of Sámi rights within the parks. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the distinction of nature from culture was renegotiated during the conflicts that preceded and followed this new stance.
    Tracing the impulses that fostered the reactions of the state administration back to their original contexts, complex interactions of differing interests are revealed. These contexts are examined in three case studies. The first case centers on nomad school superintendent Erik Bergström and his warning of the effects on the national parks from reindeer herders activities. The intersection of nature preservation and Sámi politics sheds light on their common outset in the use of the nature-culture dichotomy in approaching the Sámi. This contributes to explain the resistance by which the interest of change was met by those invested in the prevailing state policy towards the Sámi.
    The second case concerns a conflict of Sámi land use in the Abisko national park by the early 1930s. Several factors that possibly induced state officials to react on Sámi fishing and hunting in the national park are illuminated. These include different understanding of nature preservation, the moral ecology among the Sámi and antagonism between Sámi reindeer herders and inhabitants in the railway towns.
    The third case involves concerns raised in the process of establishing a new national park in the Muttos/Muddus area. A shift in focus from mountainous to forest landscapes among nature preservationists resulted in the inclusion of new stakeholders and fields of knowledge about land use and its effects. This seems to have spurred problematizing of both the ideal of pristine nature and of Sámi land use. A conflict was triggered by the in-migration of two reindeer herding families.
    In conclusion, it will be argued that it was a series of quite contextually different conflicts that interacted to undermine the institutionalized demarcation of nature. This simultaneously challenged Sámi rights in the national parks and took place in ideological opposition to the foundation of segregationist Sámi policy.

Coviello, J. and Borgerson, J. L. (1999) “Tracing Parallel Oppressions: A Feminist Ontology of Women and Animals,” Feminista!  vol. 3(4).
Creates a philosophical/poetic dialog with Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, regarding parallel oppressions of women and animals. Draws together notions of hierarchical dualisms and the possibilities of Self/Other relations that do not subordinate.

It is refreshing to see there is an intelligent challenge to outdoor ‘recreation’ in its dominant, hegemonic form within this book by some of the authors. For example, Pip Lynch calls for more critical research; Karen Warren asks for a paradigm shift in thinking; Tony Rea and Sue Waite challenge the incompatibility of educational standards with outdoor education; Elizabeth Andre asks for a change in current ‘Leave No Trace’ assumptions and practices; and the editors, Bruce Martin and Mark Wagstaff, have provided the opportunity for the authors to reassess some of ‘the underlying assumptions on which the practice of adventure programming is based’ (p. v) as they purport, the ‘. . . industry is only as relevant as the social concerns that it tackles’ (p. vi). But the book itself missed an opportunity for intercultural readership and parity through its own Amerocentric language, ethics and choice of issues. In effect, this is a decent critique of the dominant discourse within current outdoor recreation trends by the dominant hegemonic group itself, yet it finds itself in a contradictory landscape as it fails to include those very voices that it claims to champion.

This chapter presents a broad view of an ecological science in search of new paradigms for tackling the ecological challenges of the Anthropocene. In a first part, I introduce the concept of ‘ecological novelty’ to characterise ongoing environmental change. The environmental change that brings about ecological novelty can be characterised by at least six attributes: it is 1) man-made, 2) large, 3) very fast, 4) multi-dimensional, 5) variable, unknown and unpredictable and 6) of global extent and even affecting remote wilderness areas. In the second and third parts, I focus on two fundamental challenges that ecological novelty poses for ecological research: (i) distinguishing between nature and culture as separate realms of scientific investigation becomes obsolete; and (ii) understanding how ecological systems change requires embracing the complexities of ecosystems un-der real-world conditions (as opposed to controlled experimental settings) result-ing from open system boundaries, contingencies and historicity. Ecology has long explored the transition zone between the natural and social sciences, and can sig-nificantly contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of societal adaptation, whether to climate or more generally to environmental change.

Folien zu Menschentypen und Wilson´s Schaltkreisen

Schaltkreise I + II     2
Matrisch – Patrische Ausprägung          3
Die 4 Temperamente des Hippokrates I             4
Die 4 Temperamente des Hippokrates II               6
Das reptilische und amphibische Gehirn       7
Schirm´sches Struktogramm + Schaltkreise I + II                       9
Schaltkreis III   10
Schaltkreise III bis VIII   11

The culture-nature division is fundamental to the division of academic labour between the social and natural sciences. In the face of climate change and other broad environmental threats, natural and social scientists are becoming critical of this division of labour. This paper considers Contested Natures (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998) and heterotopia in the social sciences and social-ecological systems in the natural sciences as attempts to undo this division. These attempts, I argue, reproduce the ontological division fundamental to the problem they aim to overcome. Using a curious coincidence on a trip to the field, I explore a language that avoids the subject/object distinction characteristic of this ontological divide. By closely considering the point on my journey where my travelling companions — a GPS navigator and a small Japanese sedan — encountered their limits, I find a metaphysical starting point for a multiplicity of natures that are more than mentally-held cultural constructions of nature, or linkages between diverse social systems and an ecological realm. The argument suggests that multiple worlds emerge from the disentangling operations of interobjectively extended bodies and that the apparent unity between multiple worlds is itself a product of such interobjectivity.

Any mediation of the humanity-nature divide driven by environmental concern must satisfactorily account for ecologically destructive human behaviour.  Holmes Rolston, III argues that human cultures should “follow nature” when interacting with nature.  Yet he understands culture to necessarily degrade ecosystems, and allows that purely cultural values could legitimate the destruction of nature itself.  Edward O. Wilson, meanwhile, argues that culture’s evolutionary function is to fit humanity to its niche; culture necessarily follows “epigenetic rules” naturally selected for this purpose.  But because humanity cannot but follow these rules, any human behaviour – even (post)modern societies’ ecologically catastrophic behaviour – is entirely natural.  Therefore, Rolston’s reconciliation is too weak and Wilson’s too strong.  Yet the two can be mutually modifying.  Rolston’s “pure” culture should follow the natural value of human nature; humans must be free to disobey (at their peril) Wilson’s epigenetic rules.  Humanity thus becomes reconciled to nature by freely following its own nature, which is violated when the wider natural world is treated unnaturally.

The paper aims to tell the story of archaeozoology and utilize it to point out changes in the perception of nature and culture, the perception of animals as organisms that belong entirely to the domain of nature (unlike people who ‘build’ culture onto their nature), as well as display how these perceptions shaped the discipline of archaeozoology and influenced its position within archaeology. Animal remains, almost as a rule, represent some of the most common findings at archaeological sites; however, the attention which has been given to them in archaeological analysis and interpretation was largely dependent on the dominant paradigms in science. With the appearance of the ‘new’ or processual paradigm in archaeology and the concurrent development of archaeozoology, findings like these became the object of study and an important ‘key’ for understanding questions of sustenance, economy and strategies of survival in the past. The strict divide between the natural sciences and humanities (which is a consequence of the wider modernist narrative about the dichotomy of nature and culture), meant that only specialized experts could study animal remains, and that animal remains should be viewed, studied and published on separately from studies on architecture, sculptures and figurines, tools and other artifacts. Thus, archaeozoological reports long represented merely a kind of ‘addition’ to archaeological publications and rarely figured significantly in interpretations. With the paradigm shift brought on by post-processual archaeology, the research focus shifted from economic and functionalist explanations of social phenomena to the study of the influence of culture on shaping human behavior and values. Social theories of cultural constructivism indicate that concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’ are culturally shaped and a product
of discourse, but they often ignore osteological analyses of human and animal remains in the process. Even though at first glance it may seem that constructivist studies and the positivist scientific method on which osteology is based are mutually exclusive in contemporary archaeology, their integration can provide a more detailed picture of how animals shape the way in which humans experience the world, of meanings ascribed to animals, as well as of the very nature of boundaries between people and animals in different cultural contexts.

Most critics I cited in my initial article Nobody Likes Dichotomies (but sometimes you need them) are specifically drawing attention to situations where strict designations of human and nature made by groups of environmentalists’ – who are generalised, and often misrepresented as misanthropic – can effectively sever indigenous/local people from their land and livelihood(s), and that environmentalist/local relations should be understood through the lens of power indifferences. My criticism of this position is that by displacing entire non-human communities – and in some cases annexing their entire habitats and exterminating them – the perpetrators of ecological injustice seem unaware that they themselves support the apparatus of oppressive governance that entirely discounts the most vulnerable groups – those of non-humans (Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2016; Kopnina 2016a, 2016b).

Thus, the issue at stake is not so much whether humans are part of nature or not – of course they are in one way or another – but whether their influence endangers all other elements of nature. After all, Ebola virus is part of nature as well, yet it is questionable whether the spread of its population and influence should be welcomed by other species. The fact that, when we speak of justice for all, we do not speak of all communities of life on this planet, seems lost here. Just as we have become attentive to the ways that conservation can disadvantage local communities, I hope that we can also avoid discriminating against all other species, in practice and in our academic writing.

In questo lavoro ci proponiamo di ripercorrere i passi fondamentali che costituiscono il percorso di analisi della cultura e, nello specifico, dell’origine e del diffondersi delle credenze religiose, alla luce di una specifica teoria dell’evoluzione della cultura, la memetica.  L’obbiettivo finale è quello di ricercare quali possano essere state le cause della nascita di credenze religiose, che si traduce, evoluzionisticamente, in due domande fondamentali: Quali meccanismi del cervello permettono di generare la credenza in un agente sovrannaturale? E perché queste credenze sono così importanti per gli esseri umani?

Cultural landscapes represent a complex category where the nature-culture dichotomy seem to not be able to unfold the main features and the profound relations that humans have with the environment. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the saltpans of Sečovlje (Slovene Istria) and Janubio (Lanzarote-Canary Islands) this article examines informant`s perceptions about the awareness of the importance and the enhancement of the holistic values of both saltpans, as well as the impacts and benefits of tourism. Comparing these perceptions about both cultural landscapes, I try to suggest that the complex fruitfully relations between humans and nature in these saltpans are at odds with the neoliberal logic of nature which exploit and commoditize its resources depriving them of their respective agency. A sustainability to contrast the harmful activities of the market ought to be understood not as a simply isolation and fencing of nature for the sake of conservation, but as a preservation that need to foster the continuity of the deep interactions between human culture and non-human nature which are the core of the cultural landscapes.

El replanteamiento y la mejora del patrimonio natural y cultural de los paisajes culturales: el caso de Sečovlje y Janubio saltpans Resumen: Los paisajes culturales representan una categoría compleja en la que la dicotomía naturaleza-cultura parece no poder desplegar las características principales y las relaciones profundas que los humanos tienen con el medio ambiente. A partir de los datos etnográficos recopilados en las salinas de Sečovlje (Istria eslovena) y Janubio (Islas Canarias, Lanzarote), este artículo examina las percepciones de los informantes sobre la conciencia de la importancia y la mejora de los valores holísticos de ambas salinas, así como la Impactos y beneficios del turismo. Al comparar estas percepciones sobre ambos paisajes culturales, trato de sugerir que las complejas relaciones fructíferas entre los seres humanos y la naturaleza en estas salinas están en desacuerdo con la lógica neoliberal de la naturaleza que explota y comercializa sus recursos privándolos de su agencia respectiva. Una sostenibilidad para contrastar las actividades dañinas del mercado debe entenderse no como un simple aislamiento y cercado de la naturaleza en aras de la conservación, sino como una preservación que debe fomentar la continuidad de las interacciones profundas entre la cultura humana y la no humana. Naturaleza que son el núcleo de los paisajes culturales. Palabras Clave: paisajes culturales; Salinas de Sečovlje; Salinas de Janubio; Relaciones cultura-naturaleza; Mejora de los valores.

The present article analyzes two of Marsha Norman’s groundbreaking plays, Getting Out (1977) and ’night, Mother (1983), in the light of ecofeminism. From the viewpoint of ecological feminism, Western patriarchal culture, which is structured in a hierarchical and dualistic manner, is responsible for the domination of women as well as the destruction of the natural environment. Broadly speaking, ecofeminist studies fall into two main categories: social ecofeminism and cultural ecofeminism. Considering the theories and positions of both groups, the researchers analyze how ‘nature’ and ‘women’ have been historically, socially, and culturally oppressed by hierarchical and dualistic structures of patriarchal capitalism; and discuss how Norman in her selected plays challenges and destabilizes such structures. Accordingly, it is concluded that Norman’s conception of woman-nature connection corresponds more closely to the theories and positions held by social ecofeminists than those of cultural ecofeminists, and that she considers woman-nature affinity as more of a sociocultural product than a biological fact.

The role played by late nineteenth-century anthropologists in promulgating racist stereotypes, and as instruments of colonialism, is well known. Less understood is how the "disenchanted nature," against which anthropologists like Elsdon Best measured the "primitive superstition" of indigenous peoples, played out in colonial knowledge-making contexts. My own point of entry into this question is the overlap between botany and ethnography in colonial New Zealand. Specifically, this paper considers the European compilation of Maori and Polynesian plant names; the shift in European perceptions of this knowledge from the 1840s to the 1900s, and the ways in which botanical and anthropological ideas and practices during this period - of which Best was well aware - complicated any such rigidly dichotomous, modernist view of nature and scientific knowledge.