Nature as Culture

The pentagon representing Nature as Culture consists of an eye looking down a long road to a view of nature. Here, the eye represents the cultural lens through which we gaze: to some, this may be a beautiful landscape; to other cultures or perspectives, this may be an exceedingly forlorn, barren place. Whatever we say about nature may thus tell us about ourselves as well.

A diffuse vision of nature arising in the social sciences and humanities concerns nature as culture. This vision emphasizes nature’s inextricable connection with human meaning, in contrast to the prevalent notion of nature as entirely separable from culture. As with the other visions, it poses important challenges and opportunities for rethinking science and religion, in this case as human endeavors versus direct conduits to reality and God.

The separation of nature and culture is one of the most deeply-engrained divides in Western thought (Glacken 1967). It can be traced back at least to Aristotle, for whom nature (physis) is that which is not made by humans, in contrast to techné, that which is of human origin. It underscores ideas of objectivity which arose in the 17th century valorization of scientific rationality, often grounded in nature as an objective referent, as a means of technical ordering of society based on a new, naturalist “religion” (Toulmin 1992). The idea of objectivity forced culture into the diminutive category of subjectivity, and forced God into two polar alternatives as either equivalent in status to the objectively-verifiable reality explored by science, or merely the subjective projection of a wishful or oppressed people.

The vision of nature as culture has roots in Kantian philosophy and earlier expressions of idealism, but it is best known for its recent flourishing in opposition to naïve notions of objectivism underscoring the practice and interpretation of natural and behavioral science. It is often called social constructivism or the “social construction of nature” thesis (cf. Hacking 1999), and should be understood as primarily an epistemological assertion concerning our knowledge of nature rather than an ontological assertion concerning the reality of nature itself (Proctor 1998, 2001). Nonetheless, one of the primary tenets of social constructivism is that biophysical and human nature are incomprehensible outside of culturally-based knowledge schemes, so the vision of nature as culture cannot be readily dismissed as merely a vision of ideas of nature versus nature itself.

The vision of nature as culture has been primarily championed among the social science and humanities disciplines—those for which culture is a primary category of analysis—and its assertions that reality is as much constructed as apprehended have prompted important reflections among theologians for several decades (Altizer 1962; McFague 1982; Van Huyssteen 1999). Its most vocal opponents have been scholars working in the natural sciences. This debate, known popularly as the science wars, has tended to portray philosophical caricatures of naïve realism, asserting the reality and ready knowability of nature, against naïve relativism, questioning the truth-value of all scientific knowledge (Gross and Levitt 1994; Gross, Levitt, and Lewis 1996; Ross 1996). Fortunately, an excellent and growing body of scholarly work has refused to accept these polarized terms of the epistemological debate over nature and culture (Simmons 1993; Cronon 1995; Keller 1995; Castree and Braun 2001). That much of this scholarship has emanated from the discipline of geography is unsurprising, given its position straddling the natural and human sciences.

The work of French sociologist of science Bruno Latour may serve as an example of this nonpolarized approach to the vision of nature as culture, and its implications for science and religion. Latour’s reframing of science and religion follows from a larger argument he has made about modernity (Latour 1993). Latour detects two contradictory processes at work in modern societies: first, the increasing proliferation of hybrids mixing nature (the physical, “objective” world) and culture (the human, “subjective” world), and second, the recurrent tendency of purification, which attempts to reinforce the epistemological separation of nature from culture, object from subject. At the very moment in history, in other words, that the science wars seem to pit objectivity against subjectivity, the evidence of complicated intertwinings between the two realms seems unmistakable. Latour’s contention is that objectivity and subjectivity are modern myths that support a whole host of questionable dualisms, many of which refer directly to science and religion as antipodes (Latour 1999).

Latour proposes to replace these dualistic terms with blended notions, e.g. the notion of “factish” (combining fact and fetish) which implies that both scientific knowledge and religious belief are fabricated, but must be well-fabricated in order to be epistemologically or morally defensible. Science, to Latour, is a craft constructing knowledge of reality; but not just any construct will do, as all scientists know. The operative question to Latour is not “Is it real or is it constructed?” but “Is it constructed well enough to become an autonomous fact?” (Latour 1999, 274). Latour’s analysis points out the structural similarity between typical scientific and religious authority, in that both are defended in terms of their ostensible autonomy from human construction, whereas to Latour both could be more realistically defended in terms of how well-constructed their truths are, acknowledging the relatedness of subject and object as a necessary precondition versus an inevitable weakness.

The vision of nature as culture, then, resonates with a diffuse epistemological position characterizing many of the social sciences and humanities. It has been understood by some as standing in fundamental opposition to science, but it need not be, as long as dualistic caricatures are rejected. On the contrary, this vision poses a powerful means of potentially reconciling the “two cultures” problem of the sciences and humanities (Snow 1987), and bears important potential for bringing science and religion together.

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