Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
5 ENCLOSING NATURE:
BORDERS, BOUNDARIES
AND TRANSGRESSIONS
In
Part 1,
I said more than once that what counts as 'nature' is not given
in nature, just as the particular meanings we attach to things so categorised
aren't natural either. The previous chapter evidenced these arguments with
reference to three extended examples, which together covered a range of
ways in which we've come to know nature and its collateral referents. In this
chapter, I want to focus on something I left rather implicit in the previous
one: namely, the process of deciding where to draw the lines between phe-
nomena considered to be natural, and those that aren't. I'll examine how
semantic divides are enforced and sometimes challenged. Even though the
organising distinctions of Western thought listed in
Figure 1.5
have been
with us for many generations, we're constantly confronted with new sit-
uations in which we must determine when, where and how to best utilise
them. By questioning the ontological solidity of these distinctions, and their
usual contexts of use, we come to see that we are bound by them only to
the extent that we collectively allow ourselves to be. We see too the role
that various epistemic workers play in acts of mental and practical 'bor-
der enforcement', even as others intentionally try to remove, reposition or
render more permeable the dividing line between 'nature' and 'not nature'.
I've already offered a simple, but I think significant, insight into the
work of representational exclusion that some epistemic communities per-
form. In
Chapter 3
, I took the example of 'the science wars' and suggested
that the defenders of the citadel sought to sharply demarcate their prac-
tices from those of their erstwhile critics (STS scholars). In other words,
as a means of establishing their uniqueness, identity or authority, some
epistemic communities - when pushed to do so - will seek to outlaw (or
ridicule) 'impostors', rivals or dissenters. In this chapter, I want to focus on
borders in a different (though not unrelated) way. I'm interested in how
epistemic communities, as part of their ordinary practice, seek to determine
where the boundary of the natural lies. How, and with what implications,
are the edges of what counts as nature defined? What divisions within the
realm of nature are sanctioned? Why, and to what ends, might these bound-
aries be moved? These are my principal questions. Unlike the previous
chapter, where I examined how meaning gets actively assigned to 'natural
phenomena', the pages to come look at how and why meaning gets
circum-
scribed
. That is, I focus on the
limits
of assignation and processes of semantic
