HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 27

year before Ortner's essay, argued otherwise (Williams, 1973). His historical
analysis of what 'urban' and 'rural' had come to signify in England since
around 1600 showed that, while the dualism has survived the centuries, its
constitutive terms meant contradictory things simultaneously :

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, inno-
cence and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre:
of learning, communication, light. [But]

...

powerful hostile associations have
also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on
the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.
(Williams, 1973: 9, emphasis added)

A similar argument could be made about the idea of 'wilderness', which
has been especially influential in North America. The raft of cognitive,
moral and aesthetic meanings that have attached themselves to this term,
and its antonyms, reveal inconsistency and variety in what the word is
made to signify by different commentators and organisations. The vari-
ety is certainly not endless. But my wider point is that the dualisms that
underpin so much of our thought and action are not employed by us in
simple, mechanical or wholly consistent ways. There's a certain amplitude
of meaning and use, definite - though often interfering - patterns of sig-
nification in the plural. As Michael Thompson and colleagues mention in
their book Cultural theory , 'ideas are plastic; they can be squeezed into differ-
ent configurations but, at the same time, there are some limits' (Thompson
et al. , 1990: 25). There are, we might say, 'repertoires of meaning' attached
to semantic binaries.
A third and final complication that characterises the discursive architec-
ture I've been discussing relates to what we can call ambivalent categories .
These categories, in both their semantics and (some or all) of their material
referents, do not map neatly on to (or into) Figure 1.5' s antonyms. Instead,
they signify in more than one direction (e.g. they can have opposed cog-
nitive meanings or moral implications). As such, we typically find them
either troubling or immensely useful, depending on our circumstances and
goals. They reveal both the power of dualisms in organising Western thought,
and yet can be resources for challenging that power . Consider what terms
like 'hybrid', 'transgender', 'homosexual', 'alien', 'monster', 'miscegenation',
'bisexual', 'cyborg', 'transsexual', 'clone', 'zombie' and 'androgynous' signify
and refer to. Each is a boundary-crossing category that points us to things
that appear to exist outside of, or in between, the antonyms of Western
thought. These things strike us, ontologically speaking, as being unusual,
odd, impure, syncretic and (perhaps) even threatening or alluring. They're
about unconventional mixings and transgressions, and so give us pause for
thought.
Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein (published in 1818) is emblematic in
this respect. Often misinterpreted purely as a morality tale about the