HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 36

racism. He has argued that while humanity is not divisible into 'races' on biological
grounds, humans have a mental disposition to so divide, meaning that racism is,
in effect, natural while 'races' are not. Arguably, this distinction between 'race'
( nature) risks implying that there's nothing to be done about

the latter! In Chapter 4 , I explore the use of the idea of 'race' in molecular genetics.
13 And, like many other analysts, Wilson went on to invest the neologism with system-
atic content in the co-edited book Biodiversity II (Reaka-Kudla et al. , 1997) and the
single-authored book The diversity of life (1992).
14 Two fine topics that elucidate the way the idea of 'biodiversity' has been both
invented and utilised are The idea of biodiversity (Takacs, 1996) and Saving nature's
legacy: origins of the idea of biological diversity (Farnham, 2007). By contrast, in their
book What is biodiversity? biologists James Maclaurin and Kim Sterelny try, unsurpris-
ingly given their 'scientific' backgrounds, to fix the concept's meaning and referents
with reference to genetic, specific and ecosystemic variation (Maclaurin and Sterelny,
2008).
15 Over the past 30 years, the Anglophone social sciences and humanities have been
intensely preoccupied with 'discourse' and 'representation' (I examine the latter in
Chapter 2 ). This interest has arisen out of a belief that language, symbolism and
denotation are not secondary to 'material concerns' (like earning a living) but key
elements in the structuring of the world. The key sources of inspiration for this 'lin-
guistic, cultural and representation turn' was a convergence of traditional linguistics,
semiotics, sociolinguistics and philosophies of language - all of which synergised in
the field of 'cultural studies' from the late 1970s. This turn has now, it seems, run out
of steam in the Anglophone academy.
16 A number of critics have suggested that the Western imaginary is 'mechanical' in
a metaphorical sense, this having very practical consequences for how we engage
with 'nature'. William Leiss (1974) famously went further and argued that by repre-
senting the physical world as a separate realm of 'nature', modern Westerners were
able to 'dominate' it (or treat it as something to be dominated). I am not, however,
making that argument here but rather a broader one about dualisms as providing an
overarching mindset for a range of more specific imaginaries of the real.
17 When introducing nature's collateral concepts earlier in the chapter, I made the
point that these concepts are not necessarily always simply synonyms for 'nature'.
The related terms 'sex' and 'sexuality' illustrate this point well. They can refer to
(1) biologically reproductive activities; (2) non-reproductive sexual acts (e.g. fellatio
or anal penetration); (3) the specific physical-emotional forms of attraction under-
pinning (1) and (2); and (4) subject positions and identities of individuals based on
(1)-(3). Here 'nature' does not necessarily feature in (2) through (4), depending on
how one chooses to understand 'sex' and 'sexuality' in these cases.
18 The idea of 'human exceptionalism', much used in bioethical and legal discourse,
aims for the purity of a categorical (and putatively ontological) difference between
humans and other creatures. It struggles, in other words, against the evident fact of
humanity's membership of the wider 'natural world'. I examine one concrete instance
of the 'work' this idea performs in Chapter 5 when I consider a case of bestiality in
Washington State in the United States.
19 I'm not going to quibble here about whether 'metonymy' or 'synecdoche' is the cor-
rect term. It's sometimes said that the former involves an external relation (e.g. pen
stands for writer), while the latter stands for an internal relation (e.g. sail for ship).
Metonymic references can be purely metaphorical, of course, but my focus is an those
that are taken or intended to be literal - where one thing is used to stand for another.
20 Metonyms and metaphors often work together to convey meaning. A metaphor, of
course, is a representation of one thing in terms of another. What I'm calling the
'nature effect', which is metonymic, is frequently achieved through metaphors - such
as the Earth as a 'spaceship' or 'ark' and of life as 'system' or 'web'. Brendon Larsen's
(2011) new book on the use of metaphors in discussions of the natural environment
is illuminating and offers many examples of metonymy in action.

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