HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 8

Marshall Sahlins (1976). It highlighted the moral-political dangers of sug-
gesting that certain differences among humans are natural, and thus both
intrinsic and unchangeable. Relatedly, a few years later the evolutionary
geneticist Richard Lewontin co-authored Not in our genes (Rose et al. , 1984),
which argued that what some took to be 'genetic behavioural traits' were,
in fact, the result of a combination of people's biological 'hardware' inter-
acting in complex, non-deterministic ways with a wider (non-natural) social
environment. 6 For Sahlins and Lewontin, it was too simple to say that some
people are 'naturally' athletic, clever, beautiful, thin, extrovert, etc.
Making sense of nature draws extensively on the multi-disciplinary body
of work that has developed subsequent to these two early attempts to
denaturalise what was being presented as natural. I interpret and organ-
ise its insights in ways that are, I believe, both productive and somewhat
novel. In the rest of this chapter, and the two to follow, I want to describe
in some detail the approach to 'nature' that I intend to take throughout
this topic. These are the most theoretical and programmatic portions of the
topic; however, I will illustrate each key point with a short example or two,
and will also pose study questions intended to get you thinking. Later in the
topic, I will amplify the points made with reference to more extended cases,
again accompanied by reflective questions directed your way.
As will become clear to readers, I'm assuming the role - sometimes
maligned in an age of specialists - of a 'generalist'. My tack is to 'bring
together [insights from] widely separated fields

...

into a common larger
area, visible only from the air' (Mumford, 1967: 16). My hope is that the
proverbial whole is more than the sum of the borrowed parts. Addition-
ally, I want to address readers in a specific way - not so much as 'students'
or 'academics', but simply as inhabitants of the early twenty-first-century
world. We're all members of highly complex capitalist societies marked
by very elaborate divisions of mental and practical labour. As the Preface
intimated, what you and I have in common, notwithstanding our differ-
ences, is this: we're obliged to understand both ourselves and the world
at large via a plethora of individuals, communities, institutions and organ-
isations that aim to shape our thoughts, attitudes, values, feelings, tastes
and actions. I'll come to this shared epistemic dependence in Chapters
2 and 3 (and return to it in the last part of the topic). First, and pre-
dictably enough, I begin by defining what we mean when we use the term
'nature'.

THE IDEA OF NATURE

'Nature' is a keyword rather than a buzzword. Keywords, as Raymond
Williams (1976) argued in his famous topic of this name, have three charac-
teristics. First, they are 'ordinary', which is to say used widely and frequently
by all manner of people in all manner of contexts. Second, they are enduring