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pages to come, thereby making the reading less onerous. Second, this topic
is codifying, synthesising and putting to work the ideas of a loose, multi-
disciplinary epistemic community in order to analyse the representations of
nature disseminated by other epistemic communities working outside the
social sciences and humanities. In the interests of honesty and consistency,
I must therefore urge readers to adopt the attitude of 'positive scepticism'
towards my own arguments that I'm recommending we all adopt when deal-
ing with epistemic workers of various kinds in our daily lives. Obviously,
the framework of analysis I'm advancing in Making sense of nature can hardly
exempt itself from its own strictures, at least if they're applied rigorously.
ENDNOTES
1 The broad understanding of 'genre' that I am advocating here is advanced by, among
others, Garin Dowd et al . (2006) in their edited book Genre matters (where the latter
term means both matters concerning genre and that genre, in its various forms, is
important in modern societies).
2 Once, many decades ago, the difference between artistic and scientific visualisations
of nature was not as clear cut as it appears to be these days: Judith Magee's (2009) Art
of nature presents the drawings and paintings of the European naturalists who set sail
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
3 For more on the interesting and growing Sci-Art movement, see Siân Ede's (2005)
excellent book Art and Science .
4 These notions of 'maturity' and 'thinking for oneself ' are, of course, central to the idea
of education in Western research universities. Undergraduates move from instruction
(as exemplified by the lecture as a mode of communication) to independent and
critical learning in their final year(s) as students (as exemplified by the seminar as a
mode of interactive education).
5 The critical theorist Timothy Luke (1999) coined the terms 'environmentality' and
'green governmentality' to describe the enhanced role of references to the non-human
and of environmental spokespeople (experts, advocates, activists) in shaping people's
sense of identity. Stephanie Rutherford's (2011) recent book details these references in
four media (a museum, national park, theme park and a documentary). I share Luke's
and Rutherford's sentiments, but would broaden the focus to include references to
'human nature' (see the third section of Chapter 4 of this topic, for example). Luke
and Rutherford have been inspired by Michel Foucault's writings, which I will discuss
presently.
6 When first proposed in French academia in the 1960s, these ideas were seen by some
as pronouncing 'the death of the subject'. This was misleading in one respect but in
another accurate: the 'death' described was of a conception of the human subject as
some sort of timeless essence common to all (mentally unimpaired) homo sapiens .If,
instead, the human mind and body are seen as 'interfaces' with a wider 'ecosystem'
of ideas, symbols and materials, then they're necessarily products (and producers) of
a changing history . In social science and the humanities, this basic insight has been
developed in two directions: one, which much of this topic continues, explores the
sociocultural ecology; the other a wider material-semiotic ecology (on the latter see,
for example, Ingold (2008)).
7 Bourdieu's (1992) notion of a person's 'habitus' was intended to describe this 'com-
plex coherence'. A habitus is an ensemble of beliefs and norms that dispose a person
to act and react in regular ways to external stimuli (information, events, actions). A
habitus develops slowly and is not the product of conscious decision-making or a
plan on the part of the individual.
 
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