Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Study Task:
Make a list of ten things you consider to be distinctive about
humans relative to other living species. Then, try to map them on to one or
other side of
Figure 1.5,
using the relevant categories listed there.
Did all ten things you have listed belong to just one side of
Figure 1.5?
Chances are they did not. This is why Neil Evernden calls us 'natural aliens':
we appear cusped between the natural and non-natural (Evernden, 2006).
Tim Ingold also expresses it well: “'human” is a word that points to the
existential dilemma of a creature that can know itself and the world of
which it is a part only through the renunciation of its very being in that
world' (Ingold, 2011: 113-14). Our life condition appears to be 'both/and'
rather than 'either/or', obliging us to use the contradictory ideas of nature
as 'external'
and
'universal' when discussing ourselves.
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I say contradictory because suggestions that biology 'governs' what some
take to be aspects of culture, socialisation and upbringing can cause real
alarm and very heated discussion. For example, there was something of an
outcry when the evolutionary biologists Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill
published
A natural history of rape: biological bases of sexual coercion
in 2000.
According to some, by portraying men raping women as an evolutionary
adaptation, Palmer and Thornhill were diverting attention away from the
important non-biological reasons why rape occurs. Some even suggested
they were arguing the immoral and harmful actions are 'natural' - a 'fact'
of human existence. In light of this and other controversial cases, it's no
surprise at all that many philosophers, poets, novelists, sculptors, painters
and scientists still feel compelled to debate the question 'what makes
us human?' at some length (for example, see Fernandez-Armesto, 2004;
Pasternak, 2007).
METONYMY: THE 'NATURE EFFECT'
I want to round out this description of how 'nature' takes on meaning for
us by discussing a dualism I've not mentioned so far, but which has been
implicit throughout: that distinguishing the particular and the general, the
concrete and the abstract. Again, we might regard this as a rather Western
dichotomy, even though it may appear to be universal. We're very accus-
tomed to regarding any given thing not only as something in its own right,
but also as a representative of (or else departure from) something larger or
broader. This could be a law, a system, a norm, a class, a force, or a pro-
cess that transcends any one moment of time or single portion of space.
Whatever the exact details, it involves what literary critics call
metonymy
:
reference to a given thing
also
involves implicit reference to something else,
