HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 17

against what is actually part of themselves' (cited in Wetherell and
Potter, 1992: 206). This comment is offered as a personal, though
also 'factual', observation. While the term 'nature' is not used overtly,
its meaning is nonetheless present in the man's choice of the words
'blood' and 'race' (which become 'collateral concepts' for 'nature' -
see the following section). For him, humanity is separated into 'natural
kinds', that of European colonists and indigenous Maori in the New
Zealand case. People are seen as natural organisms (one part of 'univer-
sal nature'), but 'naturally differentiated' into groups (their 'intrinsic
nature' varies). These groups are mixed through interracial intercourse,
producing hybrid individuals. But in what does the hybridity really
exist? Is it purely biological in the man's view? Here we see just how
complex the interview excerpt is when scrutinised closely. The man
flips-flops between talking about genetic mixing and cultural mixing.
The 'intolerance' referred to seems to be the result either of an individ-
ual's desire to claim 'racial purity' in some biological sense, or of their
desire to claim a clear 'cultural identity'. The two are both conflated and
substituted.
NATURE'S COLLATERAL CONCEPTS
So, nature is a complicated keyword with various meanings popping up
in all manner of different situations. As critical theorist Theodor Adorno
insisted on many occasions, to examine a key concept like nature is, in
effect, to examine the mental and practical conventions of a whole soci-
ety. But it would be a mistake to limit our attention to this term alone.
Williams rightly referred to 'particular formations of meaning' (1976: 13,
emphasis added) when explaining to readers how they might interpret a
signifier like 'nature'. His point was that in any given society at one his-
torical moment there are likely to be families of keywords whose meanings
bleed into, and borrow from, one another. In his topic Historical ontology ,
the philosopher Ian Hacking (2002: 35) explains this by distinguishing 'con-
cepts' (or meanings) from 'words' (the tokens we use to signify concepts).
Following Hacking, we can say that the concept of nature is not exclusively
associated with the word 'nature'; instead, the meanings are routinely sig-
nified by a range of other words that are (or have become) part of our
collective vocabulary. In this sense, 'nature' is something of a 'ghost that
is rarely visible under its own name' (Olwig, 1996a: 87). Its meanings often
appear as collateral concepts (Earle et al. , 1996: xvi). That is to say, they
are signified by different keywords that refer us to similar or additional
referents.