Lecture 3 Nature versus culture

Lecture 2 Nature versus culture
The Nature versus Culture distinction is one of the most visible oppositions in Western culture.
For the most part, culture is considered superior to nature. A modern consensus of cultural relativism has made the old conception of "Nature"
Claude Levi-Strauss b.Nov.28, 1908
Stereotypical oppositions based on division between nature and
culture
Men Ritual, political Mind Social Cultural
Women Biological, childbirth
But: may be a people’s emotions and responses are instead conditioned by the particularities of the culture they live in?
Concepts of nature in Anthropology:
external nature, the ecosystem,
inner nature, or human nature.
CULTURE
Cultural is always something other than nature, culture always implies a transformation and denial of natural.
with a capital anachronism.
WHAT IS THE GREAT DEBATE?
in social science it is about what shapes us both as individuals and as members of society. Inherited genetic predisposition ("nature") or what we learn as we grow up ("nurture") that predominantly shapes us and our differences as individuals? Similarly, anthropologists ask how much of our behavior as a group is pre-determined by geography, culture, or history. Studies increasingly indicate what most of us know from common sense: these differences between us as individuals and those between groups of people can be explained by no single factor alone, but by the complex interaction between them.
The ways we tell differences between peoples:
• race, • genetics • their environment • religion, • economy, • technology • development
race and genetics NATURE or biology
religion, economy, technology
CULTURE
But two categories can overlap, since there has been an underlying assumption that those with the most advance culture are also ‘better’ naturally, that is, they have the best natural endowment (genes, intelligence, strength).
Body Domestic Natural
Nature raw materials culture is based on
BUT
strong relationship of mutual interdependence between the two.
nature stronger and more permanent in character than cultural products, cultural products - fragile, vulnerable and temporary. nature as threatening and difficult to control, yet provider of raw materials for cultural products.
• Now it is generally accepted not just that homo sapiens developed from their ape-ical ancestors to their modern form but also, more importantly, that culture was part of that development. Clifford Geertz informs us that ‘the greater part of human cortical expansion has followed, not proceeded, the ‘beginning’ of culture’.
technology of locomotion - some of the Western nations meditative practices - Hindus or Zen Buddhists most sophisticated.
19th century social theorists ranked peoples on an evolutionary, progressive, unilinear, and universe scale of cultures (with themselves at the top). Unilinear path of civilization. Only one scale and one orientation – up and West.
Ambiguous: nature simultaneously a source of a legitimation and an opponent.
Marilyn Strathern “After Nature” (1992): exceptional system of kinship and descent. Replacing ‘natural’ reproduction with (cultural) technologically controlled reproduction (test tubes, insemination, surrogate mothers). Changes our in conceptions of cultural and natural.
But questions arise:
Whose judges about ‘advanced’ vs ‘primitive’? Whose scale was being used as the standard? Advanced in what sense?
kinship - Australian aborigines kinship system is the most complex, as well as religious concepts.
Binary oppositions:
Levi-Strauss’s axiom: human societies distinguish between culture and nature.
Through cooking the transformation of the raw into cookedthat the passage from nature to culture is symbolised
The dichotomy between nature and culture can be partially explained by: - Darwin’s theory of evolution - colonial legacy of anthropology where non-western societies served as a contrast to complex and modern society of the West. - but also by the ways of differentiation:
Two approaches to the nature-culture relationship:
- how nature and the nature-culture relationship is conceptualised in different societies; - how nature (the environment or inborn characteristics of human) affects society and culture.
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