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reason we call her mother. She has the power to give us energy [Niagara Falls is
shown] and the power to make us smile [lions cubs are shown playing].
(Cited in ibid.: 126-7)
There is, Roach argues, nothing natural about depicting 'nature' as either
a woman or, more specifically, a mother. The reason that ' “Father Nature”
has no cultural meaning or resonance at all
...
' (ibid.: 9) is because of a
historically acquired habit of mind in which only one gender is routinely
synonymised with the non-human world. In certain of their meanings and
uses, 'nature' and 'woman' thus become collateral concepts. However, con-
tra Ortner (1974), Roach shows that the 'formations of meaning' operative
are complex and even contradictory - echoing Williams's point about how
'keywords' get used together in practice. Thus, the Corps' film trades on the
recognised, highly negative, lay idea of a 'bad mother' who fails to meet her
child's needs. By contrast, the ECO film anthropomorphises the Earth as
a 'good mother' under assault from a 'bad child'. Though the films oper-
ate in the same representational genre, one is ostensibly about the need to
control nature, the other about the need to treat it less instrumentally. And
yet, as Roach shows, both films reproduce gendered ideas and assumptions
about parenthood and womanhood abroad in the wider society. They arise
from, and help reproduce, what Alexander Wilson (1992) called a culture
of nature . In the United States, a certain notion of the 'good' and 'bad'
mother exists that's bound up with complex histories of patriarchy, racism,
colonialism and nationhood. These histories form the background to the
production and reception of the films that Roach analyses.
Study Task: Can you think of any other epistemic communities that have
made active use of the 'mother nature' trope? You might find an answer by
typing 'mother nature' into an Internet search engine and then exploring
the results. Try to find some concrete instances of references to 'mother
nature' in discourse (and maybe imagery too). Then examine the content of
these references closely. Do the literal and implied meanings therein echo,
or depart from, those discussed immediately above?
Translating between communicative genres and sub-genres
Second, more literal acts of representational exchange and translation occur
routinely between different epistemic communities. Such exchange and
translation is made possible, in part, by what Bruno Latour (1987: 227)
has called 'immutable mobiles'. These are transportable media (like this
book or an emailable PDF) that both materially 'fix' and disseminate the
representations produced by various epistemic workers. Thus, the Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) periodic 'assessment reports'
are immutable mobiles just as much as a DVD of Steven Spielberg's
 
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