The Nature / Culture distinction is one of the most visible of those "marked" oppositions in Western thought, that attributes a superiority of one term over the other. The unmarked category is the category present to itself, the category of identity. The marked category is the category of "otherness," of value defined by another. Of course, sometimes the latter term is used in the critique of a particular dualism -- and held up as a superior term (perhaps under another set of conditions)...
For the most part, culture is considered superior to nature, just as mind is thought to be "over" body, men over women. Much of what we (who?) count as nature -- as outside of culture -- is part of culture for women. A modern consensus of cultural relativism, skepticism, and historicism has made the old conception of "Nature" with a capital N somewhat of an anachronism, yet the distinction between nature and culture still seems structural to Western thinking, even natural, so to speak.
What is the history of this distinction? Is it universal to all cultures? Is it possible to think about it dispassionately, without surrendering to its politics?
According to the anthropologist Philippe Descola, “The opposition between nature and culture is not as universal as it is claimed to be. Not only does it make no sense to anyone except the Moderns, but moreover it appeared only at a late date in the course of the development of Western thought.” — during the seventeenth century.(Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. xviii)
One of the fundamental ontological issues that this opposition addresses is the relation between humans and other beings, as well between living beings and things. According to Descola, modern naturalism is “but one of the possible expressions of … schemas that govern the objectivization of the world and of others”.
In his project of comparative anthropology, Descola explores several widespread ontological regimes: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. I
The fundamental variables that concern Descola are “interiority” and “physicality.” Interiority” is an attribute (but not necessarily an exclusive one) of humans in all these schemas. It is a “universal belief that a being possesses characteristics that are internal to it” (p.116), while physicality concerns external form and substance….not simply as the material aspect of bodies, but including the whole set of dispositions that are reputed to result from morphological and physiological characteristics that are intrinsic to it.
Descola defines four ontological regimes as the matrix of permutations of these two variables:
Animism considers human and non-human to share interiority, but to differ in physicality. Even if plants and animals now possess physicalities different from those of humans, they are persons, clothed in the body of an animal or plant. In Totemism humans and non-humans share similar interiorities and physicalities (by virtue of some defining attribute). They are particularized materializations of classes of properties. Neither animism nor totemism require a distinction between nature and culture.
An Emu Man Performing the Sacred Totem of His Group, Australia, 1922
Naturalism is defined through dissimilar interiorities but similar physicalities. Humans are distinguished from non-humans by virtue of their interiority, in the form of self-consciousness and mind, while Analogism is based on dissimilar interiorities as well as dissimilar physicalities.
Does the distinction between “wild” and “domesticated” landscapes support the distinction between nature and culture? For the Australian Aborininals, as for other hunting peoples, the opposition between wild and domesticated is not very meaningful…because they inhabit the entire environment as a spacious familiar dwelling place. ( Descola, p.36)
European thought has tended to imagine a "state of nature" prior to culture. In its Hobbesian guises, this state has been one of " warre", while the state of nature imagined by Rousseau is a golden age of peace. For Rousseau, "Nothing could be more gentle" than man in his natural state.
Language has been used to distinguish mankind from all other species, as the basis for the distinction between nature and culture. The traditional contest between painting and poetry, what Leonardo called the paragone, or more broadly between images and words, has rehearsed the opposition between the "natural" or iconic signs of images, versus the conventionality or arbitrariness of language. Affirming the superiority of language becomes a token of our freedom from and superiority to nature. Affirming the naturalness of the image makes it a universal means of communication that provides a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of things. (see WJT Mitchell, Iconology, pp.78-79)
see: Hilary Putnam, "Convention: a Theme in Philosophy" , New Literary History 13:1 (Autumn, 1981)
A new relation between nature and culture?
“The Anthropocene is the sign of our power, but also of our impotence.” (Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene.)
By joining geology and human history into geo-history Paul Crutzen “pioneered a new view of nature and of ourselves, with his hypothesis that human beings can change the Earth in such profound and lasting ways that they usher in a new epoch or era. “Geohistorical forces ceased to be the same as geological forces as soon as they fused at multiple points with human actions… We have to get used to it: we have entered irreversibly into an epoch that is at once post-natural, post-human, and post-epistemological! We are no longer living in the Holocene!” (Bruno Latour)
Latour goes on to call for a new “aesthetic” – in its old sense of capacity to “perceive” and to be “concerned” – in other words, “a capacity to make oneself sensitive that precedes all distinctions among the instruments of science, politics, art, and religion.” (Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime) For Latour, this is what it means to live in the Anthropocene: “sensitivity” is the term he applies to “All the actors capable of spreading their sensors a little farther and making others feel that the consequences of their actions are going to fall back on them, come to haunt them. There is probably no better solution than to work at disaggregating the customary characterizations until we arrive at a new distribution of the agents of geohistory – new peoples for whom the term human is not necessarily meaningful and whose scale, form, territory, and cosmology all have to be redrawn. To live in the epoch of the Anthropocene is to force oneself to redefine the political task par excellence: what people are you forming, with what cosmology, and on what territory?”