The cognitive geometry of nature: a contextual approach

Abstract

That conceptions of nature vary historically and ethnographically, and are, therefore, themselves intrinsically cultural, is so widely asserted nowadays that it is often assumed to have become a selfevident anthropological truth. Perhaps the best example of this in popular environmentalist discourse, as in some anthropology, is the opposition drawn between the holistic systemic vision of ‘traditional’, ‘tribal’ or ‘archaic’ societies and the dualism of the modern scientific and dominant Judaeo-Christian tradition. How conceptions of nature vary beyond such abstractions is welldemonstrated in individual studies, both historical (e.g. Collingwood 1945, Thomas 1983, Horigan 1988, Torrance 1992) and ethnographic. In particular, much attention has been given to how these might arise from particular practices of environmental interaction (e.g. Ingold 1992, Bird-David 1993), and how these in turn might sustain, or (e.g. Schefold 1988) be sustained by, particular social ideologies.1 As Philippe Descola puts it: each specific form of cultural conceptualisation also introduces sets of rules governing the use and appropriation of nature, evaluations of technical systems, and beliefs about the structure of the cosmos, the hierarchy of being, and the very principles by which living things function.

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