ABSTRACT
We have now reached the stage at which I can introduce the terms comprising the title of this chapter. I have observed that the possibility of an objective account of such natural phenomena as the behaviour of caribou, as well as the recognition of an indigenous account, such as that of the Cree, as fitting within a particular culture-specific cosmology, depend on a two-step movement of disengagement that cuts out first nature, then culture, as discrete objects of attention. Whereas the scientific account is attributed to disinterested observation and rational analysis, the indigenous account is put down to the accommodation of subjective experience within ‘beliefs’ of questionable rationality. What I wish to do now is to retrace the two steps in the reverse direction. Only by doing so, I maintain, can we level the ranking, implicit in what has been said up to now, of scientific over indigenous accounts. Moreover I believe it is necessary that we take these steps, that we descend from the imaginary heights of abstract reason and resituate ourselves in an active and ongoing engagement with our environments, if we are ever to arrive at an ecology that is capable of recovering the reality of the life process itself. In short, my aim is to replace the stale dichotomy of nature and culture with the dynamic synergy of organism and environment, in order to regain a genuine ecology of life. This ecology, however, will look very different from the kind that has become familiar to us from scientific textbooks. For it comprises a kind of knowledge that is fundamentally resistant to transmission in an authorised textual form, independently of the contexts of its instantiation in the world.
