ABSTRACT
The idea of nature, its construction and reproduction, performs an important cultural work. It is an idea that reverberates across all conceptual fields, and is modified as it passes through and by the elements and concepts of that field. The content of the idea of nature, however, is disputed, mobile, and relative to ethnic position. Culture–nature interplay became, and has remained, a constant and outstandingly important aspect of all human situations, including the situation in which we find ourselves now. In one sense this is a common-sense statement, almost trivial – it is what human history is all about: take the biological components out of human situations, and we, i.e. humans, cease to exist. But the fact that the world exists for us as ‘nature’ is an achievement among many actors. It is a kind of relationship; nature emerges as co-construction among humans and nonhumans, machines and our other partners. Nature is artifactual, at every level; that is, made – but not just by us.
