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suggests that far from microbes being that which most threatens
humans, they may
have been the most signifi cant historical actors in the genetic composition of humans.
In the words of Melinda Cooper (2006, p. 115), 'We are literally born of ancient
alliances between bacteria and our own cells; microbes are inside us, in our history,
but are also implicated in the continuing evolution of all the forms of life on earth'.
Microbes, apparently, have made us what we are, right down to our DNA.
In each of these examples, scientists - both physical and social - are saying
something about nature. On some matters they agree. All, for instance, bear witness
to a world of fabulous transformations, where bodies and their capacities are actu-
alised in surprising and unpredictable ways. There is nothing static about living
beings in these accounts. Regardless of whether the focus is on genetic mutation
and the evolution of species, or the developmental trajectory of individual organ-
isms, nature is presented as a realm of dynamic change in which bodies have no
fi xed or eternal form. Admittedly, these accounts are heterodox - the majority of
scientists continue to point to processes that remain relatively static or predictable,
and in everyday life, 'nature' is often taken to name things that are eternal and
immutable. But even as these examples share certain assumptions about nature, they
disagree about others. For the butterfl y scientists, nature names a realm
external
to
humans, reduced to 'predator-prey' relationships that help shape the direction of
evolutionary change. For these scientists, nature is something 'out there' to be
studied and science tells us what is going on. For the virologist, on the other hand,
the human body is an emergent effect of its interaction with the non-human world:
much like the butterfl y that adapts to parasitic bacteria, bacteria and viruses have
made humans what they are. But can we say that these exchanges are
natural
pro-
cesses? And if they were in the past, can we still say so today?
We may have always lived in a viral ocean, but as SARS, HIV and avian fl u
suggest, it is diffi cult to imagine today's viral economies apart from the socio-
technical networks - airplanes, food chains, virtual research communities, immigra-
tion law and antiviral medications - that stretch these viral geographies across
immense distances or seek to regulate their form. Hence, if we agree that human
bodies are part of nature, must we also say that technology is too? Where does
nature end and society begin? This question is equally evident in the work of the
geographer Steve Hinchliffe and his fellow conservationists, for whom apparently
'natural' beings like voles cannot be separated from the urban environments in
which they have come to embody unique characteristics not shared by other voles.
In a world of ongoing differentiation, it is not just the case that natural kinds (voles)
differ from others (rats), but that they
differ from themselves
, resulting in quite a
problem for conservationists, who have long imagined that conservation takes the
'species' as its concern, and that one water vole is the same as another. Nor is arriv-
ing at knowledge about these shape-shifting creatures a straightforward process:
voles afford themselves to observation only in certain ways - through their traces,
for instance, rather than direct observation - and so the observer of voles must
engage in certain disciplined bodily practices by which he or she can be 'affected'
by the voles, and thus 'make present' the voles within orders of knowledge. What
counts as 'nature' is not separate from its representation; but representation, in turn,
is irrevocably tied to the embodied actions of the observer. In these cases familiar
culture-nature and representation-matter binaries fail us.
If anything comes clear from these examples it is that nature is an immensely
diffi cult word to defi ne. For some, it names the essence of things, such as when we
