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Environment and culture
Trevor Hogan, Divya Anand, and
Kirsten Henderson
The nature–culture dialectic
Nature is fate, culture is destiny. Nature is the condition of our material existence,
culture is our only means of encountering and re-forming nature. At the outset of a new
millennium, we are beginning to understand that the collective fate of humankind is in
our own hands but if we continue to ignore our natural limits we shall experience the
consequences in ways beyond existing cultural capacities.
Once upon a time, plastic trees were planted along a freeway in LA then uprooted by
protesting citizens. But it might be asked: “What’s wrong with plastic trees?” (Krieger
1973). We live after the “end of nature” (McKibben 1989). It is we moderns who first
learned to privilege artifice over nature and now imagine post-nature. No part of the
planet remains untouched by humans. All landscapes are enculturated, which is to say we
see, reflect, inscribe, and act upon the natural worlds that surround us (which we call
environment or that which environs us) (Hogan 2003; Seddon 1997). We experience
nature but our senses are mediated by our own languages, social imaginaries, and
technologies. For humans, nature is cultural and not only in ways of our choosing. It can
be said that it is in our human nature to be cultural. We have the material resources to
mass produce the simulacra of natural things. In mimicking the ways and forms of nature
we also change our meanings and values of nature, and of our own appropriations,
significations, imaginaries, and interventions.
We not only mimic nature, we consume it (Flannery 1995). Yet, we are still embodied,
material beings that depend upon, and use, our “environment” for survival. Being
near the top of the food chain we are beginning to face the consequences of centuries of
homo sapiens’ domination of other species, a domination that has led to the extinction of
many other species of flora and fauna. Some of the animals under threat of extinction
compete with human populations for resources. Not only do we have these problems
with untamed animals, we have also made a massive imprint on the earth’s surface with
domestication programs—of livestock through to pets. Animals used for food production
have radically reshaped nature, turning parts of all continents from wilderness areas into
landscapes. But the process of enculturation is never one way; human societies that work
337
with animals are shaped by this close alliance that is at once cooperative and exploitative
(with the power heavily weighted in favor of the homo sapiens masters). Pastoralist, agricultural,
and industrial-urban societies alike have for many centuries worked with animals
in taming nature for productive purposes. These relationships in turn have reshaped
collective social imaginaries, institutions, and cultures—to name but three examples, the
Olympic Games, circuses, and horse-racing industries. In each of these areas of human
endeavor and play, homo sapiens is deploying animals that reflect our collective identities
as homo faber even as we exhibit our own capacities and characters as homo ludens. So too
our everyday conversation and jokes remind us of our codependencies and taboos
(e.g. sheep jokes in pastoralist societies).
If thinking human culture vis-à-vis our environment were not complex enough in
relation to animals, our domination of nature in food production extends the challenge
to vegetarians, omnivores, and carnivores alike. This is especially the case since the
industrialization of the countryside from at least the eighteenth century in England,
exported to the world by the beginning of the twentieth century, not least in the mass
production of food. It is another sign of our times: once mighty rivers dammed and
reduced to streams and mass storage lakes to irrigate thousands of hectares of monocultures
for mass consumption elsewhere, e.g. the tomato, the potato (for chips), maize
(for corn syrup) are but three famous examples in the US. These foods are genetically
modified, processed, and then distributed and consumed in contexts and settings very
different from their original points of production. But the story of our use and dependency
on nature is not only about production. Even the most humble of foodstuffs,
such as cereals and “root” vegetables, are highly enculturated objects that go to the
very center of human significatory practices and social imaginaries (see Gallagher and
Greenblatt 2000). A plethora of recipe books, celebrity chefs, global food histories,
and genealogies of particular food types (the curry leaf, the tomato, the potato, and the
coffee bean) in recent decades underscores this critical insight.
In this essay, we address this dialectic of nature and culture by first defining the key
terms “nature” and “environment.” Because the elemental forces of nature are the
absolute conditions of our material being, becoming, and dying (individually and collectively),
it is a common-sense view to presuppose that nature is underlying and
impervious to human being and action upon it. “Nature is natural: it just is!” Over the
past century, social theory and the social sciences more generally have gone a long way
to shifting this common sense to a critical sense of nature: these days it is relatively
uncontroversial to assert the enculturation of nature. We affirm this achievement but add
the rider that we are in danger of creating a new common sense that loses purchase on
the radical otherness of nature that both forms and informs our very existence and
destiny. The nature–culture dialectic demands that we read our own culture in
and through nature, and that we understand nature as that which is not ultimately
subordinate to human action. Having first restored our critical appreciation of nature/
environment, we then seek to rethink “culture” in the active present tense of human
being and becoming.
Our essay then shifts register to put our discussions of key concepts to work on two
regional case studies involving a key element—water—in order to display the differing
and changing meanings, stories, institutions, and actions that shape human engagement
with ecological settings. We hope that these examples not only illustrate the value of
what Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (2001) have called “a strong program of cultural
sociology,” but promote a cultural sociology that places the nature–culture dialectic at
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the forefront of a rethinking of culture as performative, autonomous, creative, and in
continuous movement.
Defining “nature” and “environment”
We use the terms “nature” and “environment” interchangeably, with the former the
generic term, and the latter as its sub-set—a specific example or expression of nature as a
whole. In doing so, we are reflecting the bias of the greater part of Western literature
and specifically of the English language. “Environs” is a Middle English word that depicts
that which surrounds us. Thomas Carlyle, a renowned coiner of many new words
and trafficker of exotic terms into common English-language parlance, is said to have
been the first—in the 1820s—to turn “environment” from a verb to a noun: his specific
innovation was to give the term a sociological application from its original natural
life-sciences context (Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles 1993).
But it is “nature” rather than “environment” that has dominated debates about
modernity, and for the very good reason that nature points us back to the material terms
of being and becoming and dying—something that is tangibly beyond human mastery,
an objective and critical horizon above and beyond our own interests and concerns. To
put the matter in common-sense terms, “human nature” is only a bit part of “nature”
writ large. The term “environment,” on the other hand, too readily keeps an uncritical
(i.e. unthinking, unselfconscious) focus on ourselves. We humans have been too readily
given to speaking of “our” environment as if it is simply a background context that we
own and which we deploy for our own interests, uses, and pleasures alone.
One of the most familiar—and enduring—understandings of nature in culture is that
of nature as an infinite storehouse of wealth upon which industrial capitalism and the
consequent flourishing of human culture are built. The famous exponent of this idea is
Karl Marx. Far from viewing the progressive technological exploitation of nature for
societal reproduction and change as a problem, Marx shares with the political economists
from Adam Smith onwards an enthusiasm for the liberation of humanity from dependence
on nature—as a liberation from “nature idolatry” and “rural idiocy.” For Marx,
the capitalist mode of production uses nature as object, subordinate to human interest
and mastery. The potential that these new material conditions of plenty offer for
homo faber to obtain the just conditions of good work and freedom from exploitation,
alienation, and immiseration was the hope of the young Marx. Capitalism’s technological
revolutionary potential for freeing humans from work itself is the hope of the late Marx
(Rabinbach 1998). As for Marx, so too the dreams of “progress” and “development” in
the twentieth century.
By the time the Frankfurt School theorists, Horkheimer and Adorno, came to write
Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, however, they had witnessed two world wars, a
great depression, and the rise of Bolshevism and Fascism. Consequently, they were
less sanguine about human prospects. The paradox of human domination of nature
in modernity is for Horkheimer and Adorno the tragedy of development first grasped by
Goethe’s Faust. Far from liberating human beings from the vagaries of superstition, scarcity
and want, the development of instrumental reason and the systematic separation
of human culture from its natural basis had produced a fundamental contradiction.
Horkheimer and Adorno recognized that human mastery via instrumental reason
not only led to alienation from nature but to the domination of one human group
over another (i.e. of masters over slaves, from, between, and across classes, races,
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and genders). The rule of reason was founded on a myth of reason that was ultimately
tyrannical.
As Murphy and Roberts (2004) highlight, however, modernity is characterized by a
dialectic not just of enlightenment but also of romanticism. There is more than one way
to be modern: nature is not only subjected to an instrumental rationality of domination,
exploitation, and alienation, but is also a complex semiotic well-spring for a radical
alteration in human self-understanding and engagement with the non-human world,
embracing the sciences, religions, aesthetics, and new versions of subjectivity and reflexivity.
This dialectic of romanticism vis-à-vis the non-human worlds involves various
contradictory constructions of its otherness—as the sublime (wilderness) and as the projection
of human affectivities and individuated self-formation. The significance of
romanticism in all its various instituted cultural formations as a quintessentially modern
phenomenon is underscored by the rise of various social movements of reform, from
preservation and conservation to anti-urbanism and urban reform, along with their
associated new institutions, professions, and bureaucracies of management.
It is in this context (mainly “First World” trans-Atlantic), that “environment” as a
popular term of discourse has emerged since the mid-twentieth century. The rise of
environmentalism manifested in social movements and ecological politics has brought the
term “environment” into popular consciousness and everyday use. As demonstrated
in the work of the Australian eco-political theorist and activist Robyn Eckersley (1992),
these movements and ideas have deep roots in the emergence of romanticism in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Eckersley develops a typology of contemporary
environmental movements and ideas that connects the historic emancipatory
promise of the dialectic of enlightenment and the deep ecological values of the dialectic
of romanticism as revealed in contemporary left socialist, anarchist, feminist, and ecological
movements. She grades them according to their normative orientations—from
anthropocentricity to eco-centricity, and from mono-dimensional to comprehensive
eco-political policies and programs. This exercise is helpful insofar as it highlights the
intrinsic importance of ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions of cultures
and repositions the ideological and material interests of political movements vis-à-vis the
question of culture itself.
Defining “culture”
“Culture” is the abiding preoccupation of sociology. The contrast with “environment” is
substantial. Environment is at best outside the house of society. It has been an “external
environment,” as it were, to a century of conceptual and methodological struggles concerning
social structure and agency. Compared to the somewhat tortuous journey of the
concept “culture,” “environment” has not been a conceptual problem for sociology.
Rather it has been treated as an external variable. The rise of a sub-discipline called
“environmental sociology” represents a reflexive anxiety and ethical response by sociologists
rather than a critical re-conceptualization of sociology’s own terms of discourse.
Even where a leading English environmental sociologist, Steven Yearley (2005), looked
at the Cultures of Environmentalism, he undercut his own cultural turn by expressing
a suspicion of theory and rhetorically resorting to concept-free empiricism. We are
left with an undialectical appreciation of both “nature” and “culture” alike, let alone a
dialectic of the nature–culture relation. Even sociologists’ attempts to conceptualize the
environment—most famously, Ulrich Beck’s risk theory—whilst empirically rich in
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application persist in viewing collective social action and decision-making as matters of
calculative reason, and as power struggles between contesting stakeholders and vested
interests (Lash et al. 1996).
So, how best can we think about culture so that environmental concerns and the
question of the nature–culture dialectic can be brought into the house of sociological
theory? At the risk of simplification and in potted form, we nominate four ways to think
about culture:
1 Culture is performed. This is the ordinary anthropological sense of culture as something
held and practiced in common—a whole way of life. Culture is something
humans do. Therefore, we need to keep the critical focus on our doing and our
thinking of our doing. This means paying more attention to narrative, to place and
time, and finding ways of talking about the practice of culture and less on identifying
factors, variables, and abstract ratios of power.
2 Culture is autonomous. Culture is viewed here as signs, customs, symbols, codes, and
texts of meaning. It thus is not reducible to power structures or social construction
itself (Alexander and Smith 2001). Sociology, as the in-house professional
discipline of trans-Atlantic modernity, has too readily held culture hostage to
power—modernization, social action, and systems theories. We think that in the
twentieth century sociological theorists became so obsessed with structures and the
science of power that they lost purchase on understanding culture as creation,
reflexivity, and expressivity.
3 Culture is creative. Human cultures are expressive, reflexive, and creative. Collective
creativity in turn needs to be explained as socio-historical yet unfounded by
any external agency and not reducible to logics of material or social power
(Castoriadis 1997). Hence the notion of the “social imaginary” is intrinsic to any
self-respecting cultural sociology.
4. Culture travels. And in its movement it is transformed. So culture is not only hybrid
(Bhabha 1994; Canclini 1995), it is embedded in a series of relationships and
exchanges across time and place that are asymmetrical but reflexive and transformative
(Beilharz 1997; Smith 1960). The classic text here is William McNeill’s The
Rise of the West (1963), which in turn is a reply to Oswald Spengler’s theory of
self-enclosed civilizations in The Decline of the West (1922–23 [1980]). McNeill
treats Eurasia as a single civilization defined by cultural exchange. Moreover, the
more hybrid and impure the culture, the further it travels (Sassoon 2006).
Towards a strong program of environmental cultural
sociology: two case studies
Let us see if we can seek some potential ways of developing a strong program of cultural
sociology—that is, one that views culture as performative, autonomous, creative, and in
continuous movement—by putting the program to work on the nature–culture dialectic.
To do so, we look at a natural resource essential to human survival and security, namely
“water.” Water is one of the most powerfully symbolic elements across all human
cultures. It is used in “baptisms, libations, holy ablutions, fertility rites, for blessings and
protection, and mortuary rituals” (Strang 2004: 85). When it is flowing, it is characterized
as the “river of life,” as a metaphor for the passing of time. In many locations such as
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Lourdes, Bath, and the Ganges, it is believed to have healing properties. By considering a
ubiquitous and quintessential natural element that is absolutely and universally essential to
human survival and flourishing, we can tease out and highlight how human beings
enculturate water in our naming, imagining, institutions, and uses of it. Moreover,
recovering the centrality of nature to our survival and the meanings we give to nature
in our social stories and traditions is, we believe, central to the task of interpreting
contemporary environmental political struggles within and across nations and regions.
We examine just two examples in the Asia-Pacific region—the Sundarbans in the Bay
of Bengal (an eco-region that crosses a nation-state border), and the Australian islandcontinent
(a set of social imaginaries, cultural practices, and policy regimes within a federated
polity). Important to our argument, these two examples incorporate and cut across
the standard sociological structuralisms of class, ethnicity, and gender that inform most
environmental political and sociological analyses. They demonstrate a more general
point—that any regional analysis today involves respect for civilizations, empire-colonies,
nation-states, local governments, and global, national, and regional markets. In sum, they
point to the need for a cultural sociology of environmental struggles even if we have not
yet provided the means to its achievement.
Case study I: the Sundarbans, Bay of Bengal—a mangrove
forest delta swamped by human problems
The Sundarbans is the world’s largest mangrove forest area. In it, continent meets ocean
in a maze of rivers spawning thousands of islands. Water is the primary element of the
ecology, sustaining varied ecosystems where islands change shape with every turn of
the tide. In turn, water shapes the ecological and political history of the region. Our case
study reveals how creativity functions along multiple paths in the construction of social
imaginaries in a unique water ecology. To tell this story we must unravel the issues of
human migration, political geography, and economic development before we can
understand the nature of the water issue that saturates the environment and human
imaginations alike.
In this complex and dynamic water ecology can be found the largest contiguous
population of tigers in the world (their man-eating trait is attributed to the physical
properties of the water), living in uneasy alliance with a human population of seven
million. The divisions are not merely between humans, animals, and flora, but are political
also. The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 meant that 60 percent of the
Sundarbans was apportioned to East Pakistan (Bangladesh after 1971), triggering an
exodus of refugees into India. The majority of early refugees were the upper-caste,
educated elite (bhadralok), who with their social mobility easily integrated with
mainstream Calcutta society. Unlike the bhadralok, the lower-class, lower-caste refugees
(nimnobarno) were met with grossly inadequate rehabilitation practices and forcible
relocation. In a specific instance, refugees seeking a familiar water ecology occupied the
island of Morichjhapi. The island was part of the tiger-reserve buffer zone, and to
“protect” the tiger the government forcibly evicted the refugees, leaving several thousand
dead (Biswas 1982: 19). The Morichjhapi episode of 1979 found its way into local
narratives reconciling the violence perpetrated on the islanders by the state and the maneating
tigers. The people believe that the idyllic relationship between humans and tigers
was broken after the Morichjhapi incident, when—following the lead of the bhadralok
mistreatment of the nimnobarno and the government protecting the tiger at the cost of
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human lives—the tigers began eyeing the poor as “tiger-food” (Jalais 2005: 1758). The
cultural interpretation of the tiger–human conflict tied up with the class/caste struggle
points to the dynamism with which the physical environment continuously refashions
cultural narratives. The villagers rationalize and adapt to their social past and to the
changes in their immediate physical environment by a creative reinvention of traditional
beliefs. Culture and environment emerge as interlinked parts of a system of relationships
that embraces the transformation of both the natural and cultural environment.
In 2002, the state government entered into a joint venture with a private corporation
to set up an ecotourism project in the Sundarbans, with tiger tours having pride of place.
Despite the inclusion of local people in the venture, almost every ecotourism claim made
was contested, and the project was abandoned in 2005. One of the strongest voices that
protested against the project was that of Amitav Ghosh. The publication of his novel The
Hungry Tide in 2004, with its seamless narratives of the many histories of the Sundarbans,
put the controversy into perspective for a global audience, especially with the poignant
fictionalization of the Morichjhapi incident. The Hungry Tide was successful in highlighting
the diversity and uniqueness of the Sundarbans, interweaving its social and
ecological histories as against the homogenized vision of the ecotourism project. The
novel was political as a cultural product that stood for an environmental ethos and a
vehicle of social change that refashioned a particular “environmental” outlook. Above
all, the title of the book—The Hungry Tide—pointed back to the central challenge facing
the region: water is both the source of life but, with rising sea levels, also a threat to
the survival of its inhabitants. The Sundarbans faces an immediate threat from climate
change, with studies predicting that more than 15 percent of the existing islands will be
submerged by 2020, leaving 70,000 people homeless.
Rising sea levels are a global problem, and governments and societies are fretting about
the need to increase the heights of their dykes (Netherlands) or to build them (Thailand).
Venice and Bangkok were already sinking cities, but now they face more permanent
flooding. Island states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans are now assessing their options.
The Maldives government recently announced an interest in buying land in India or
Australia to house its population. The irony is that the Maldives is flush with cash from
the ecotourism of the world’s rich, who have come there in droves to admire the atolls
of coral. Whole nation-states in the Pacific archipelagos are also facing this threat. The
twenty-first century looks to be one characterized by ecological refugee movements that
will add to the waves of forced migrations of the past century for economic and political
reasons. The increasing threat of islands permanently disappearing further exacerbates the
impasse of limited spaces and rising populations, decreasing standards of living, and
depleting resources.
Case study II: Australia—not enough water?
In contrast to the water civilizations of its neighboring archipelagos of the Indian and
Pacific Oceans (Jumsai 1988), Australia is a continent characterized by extensive arid
zones, unpredictable rainfall patterns, and large underground aquifers. It has much in
common with the arid regions of the Middle East and Northern Africa and now,
increasingly, Southern Europe. In all other respects, however, Australia is more readily
compared to the other New World settler-societies that emanated from the British
empire, namely North America, New Zealand, and South Africa. It has been “made” by
a number of influences that relate to the circumstances of its settlement, its historical path
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through modernity, and the relationship between itself, Britain, and the rest of
the world.
Water in Australia, despite being intimately associated with the cultural activities of
food production, reproduction, and religion, was always regarded by European settlers
as an “external variable” with no bearing on (settler) culture. Water is “irrigation,” an
“environmental flow” or an “entitlement.” In other words, water is an abstract entity,
as something without a history or a culture. Yet, water is neither ahistorical nor acultural:
it has human meaning attached to it. It evokes peace and serenity, or terror and violence.
Especially in Australia, its absence—as drought—can elicit powerful cultural responses
(West and Smith 1996, 1997).
These tensions have played out in the history of water management in Australia. After
the settlers came to terms with a hydrological environment that differed substantially
from European conditions and expectations, the initial haphazard and uncoordinated
delivery of water for mainly individual benefit was subjected to explicit state control of
the resource, and managed for the collective good of all citizens.
Engineers had a unique position within this national water/irrigation culture. They
held and controlled the knowledge about water flow, volumes, pressures, and evaporation
rates, and they combined this knowledge with bureaucratic skills. They played an
integral role in realizing water benefits through the actions of the state. Centralized,
state-run enterprises carried out a range of activities well outside their main jurisdiction
of water supply—including settlement of families on irrigation blocks, financial assistance,
housing, education, marketing advice, and even moral guardianship. Water engineers
were the embodiment of the notion that the principles of engineering could be applied
to social issues. But they did not act in isolation. There was widespread societal consensus
that the technological transformation of rivers and use of water for population settlement
and economic growth was a worthwhile exercise. What emerged from all this was a
complex mix of nation-building ideals, attempts to reconcile diverging foundational
myths and material interests, and responses to the imperatives of statecraft. In essence,
what was built (over and above dams, locks, and weirs) was a stable conglomeration of
ideas and institutions—not exactly the state, the nation, or communities, but organizations
and conventions that invented, re-invented, and responded to all three.
Today, the certainties of the “national Australian waterscape” are rapidly being
“washed away.” Changing social priorities, political philosophies that favor the market
over the state, and the challenge of climate change have ushered in a new management
regime. Water is now understood as an entity with a use-value in its own
right, as a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The potential exists
here for water to be used solely for wealth creation detached from production and
detached from any concept of it as a public good. As the price of water rises rapidly,
however, the general population of suburbanites and country folk alike are devising
both private and public solutions to perceived threats to water infrastructure, systems,
and flows.
The challenge and the promise of a cultural sociology of nature
This essay has argued several things. First, nature is a better concept than environment
to think with about the question of ecology, sustainable development, and human
flourishing. Second, sociology has always had a realist appreciation of the materiality of
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culture and this has informed its critical understanding of the nature–society dialectic.
Nevertheless this emphasis has been at the cost of an appreciation of the autonomous
power and creative value of culture that is performed as it moves. Third, culture is our
only means of expressing ourselves in our material worlds. So, although nature is beyond
human control, and therefore is a critical horizon of our own material being, it can only
be grasped in and through our human imaginings and actions. Demonstrating this was
our purpose in examining the two regional case studies by considering their cultures and
engagements with their ecologies vis-à-vis water. We think our two case studies point
towards the promise of a strong program of cultural sociology for understanding more
about struggles in the cultural politics of the environment, but our analysis is leavened
with a salty recognition that human ordering and society are but a part of larger ecology
that we call nature and that is neither ably described as “our environment” nor reducible
to our needs, fantasies, and uses.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, we know what the main ecological
challenges are: climate change, species diversity, non-renewable resource depletion,
entropy, population control, sustainable development, waste management, and livability.
Most of these issues are no longer even controversial in scientific circles, or now even
amongst the world leadership elites. Moreover, we have many tools at hand to solve and
apply the solutions to these challenges. Turning these knowledges and scientific innovations
and technologies to systemic, institutional, and economic ends is the central
conundrum of human collective life. There are no simple techniques of market or states
that can easily solve the challenges or apply the solutions. There are no structures,
systems, or hidden hands of nature to fix things. The politics of environment cannot
short-circuit the radical diversity of contexts and instituted forms of cultures across the
globe. The cultural politics of environment is intrinsic to the definition and practice of
the cultural transformations of world environment.
Paradoxically, conceptualization of culture has proven harder work than understanding
the environment—at least for sociologists. Yet all forms of representation of
nature—mythic, aesthetic, moral, and scientific—are but the work of culture itself: as
socio-historical imagination and creation, instituted culture, and autonomous modes of
meaning, symbolism, and interpretation. Innovative technologies, new cultural adaptations,
and ultimately new stories and new systems are being developed. That at least is
the challenge and the promise. Whether or not our collective cultural reflexivity is fast
enough in adapting to the demands of our natural environments is the central question
of our times, and one faced by all humankind—at once and as one—for the first time in
world history.
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