ABSTRACT
In traditional Western scientific thought, ‘nature’ is understood to be the raw resource that is studied by science and is worked upon and transformed by technology. In modern societies, nature is thus opposed to culture and represented as that which civilization has permitted an escape from while, conversely, being that which we are urged to escape to in our search for a means to transcend the impositions of civilized life. Romanticism emphasized the sublimity of the natural landscape and the redemptive properties of nature. Bruno Latour is recognized as one of the leading exponents of Actor Network Theory, which was largely a response to the problems posed by the so called ‘science wars’ of the 1990s. Latour and Donna Haraway suggest that we think in terms of ‘natures-cultures’ in order to deconstruct the way that nature is determined under the terms of contemporary ideologies.
