Dissolving Nature and Culture: Indigenous Perspectivism and Political Ecology
I haven't yet read the whole article, posting this for care-full reading, thinking and feeling together. To stay in the forum's purpose and mission my own first guiding question is, what are the joints and possible disjoints between the article and naturalism of analytical idealism?Abstract:
Environmental movements have encountered significant dilemmas in advancing their claims for sustainability and protection of the nonhuman world. Environmentalism has typically articulated its claims in a conceptual language incorporating the antinomy of nature and culture. These concepts have created practical problems and conceptual paradoxes which have led to a strategic impasse. Diverse attempts have thus far failed to move beyond impasse because they inadequately unravelled the antinomy of nature and culture. The task engaged in here is not to privilege nature over culture, or to privilege culture by observing the socially constructed character of nature, or to examine the inner dialectical relations that connect them; nor is it to explore genealogical the deeper significance of the antinomy itself. Rather, this essay argues for stepping outside of this conceptual language into a different cosmology. This task is accomplished through an examination of the perspectivism and multinaturalism of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,which he developed in his studies of Amazonian cosmology. It is argued that at the root of the problems of nature, culture and environmentalism are ambiguities and paradoxes having to due with the doctrines of naturalism and objectivism. These ambiguities and paradoxes can only be overcome by recognizing the reciprocal intentionality of humans,animals, spirits and other kinds of subjects.
Introduction
The idea that nature should be the central concept of environmental political theory seems like a self-evident proposition. That environmental politics and political ecology are about nature seems so obvious that it is not worth mentioning. However, the concept of Nature has been the subject of considerable controversy in the human sciences. In the last ten years or so nature has come under fire in political ecology (Chaloupka 2000,2007). Bruno Latour (2004), an anthropologist and philosopher of science at Institutd'Études Politiques de Paris, in his work on political ecology
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, has gone as far as to say that the concept of Nature has stymied the conceptualization of political ecology. Green activists and ecologists have been shocked and defensive about these brazen attacks. They could not comprehend why intellectuals, supposedly sympathetic to their cause, would attack the idea of nature just as the environmental movement seemed to be gaining traction (e.g. Soule and Lease1995). But what was under attack, were not trees, rocks, deer, owls or wolves. The target was the concept of Nature that has had a dubious and infamous history in political theory and a dualistic and paradoxical relationship with its twin: Culture or Society. Also a target of criticism was the relations of authority these concepts establish among humans and between humans and non humans.
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