6 Nature and Culture: Phenomenological Approach

Soumi Dey

Contents:

1.      Introduction

2.      Role of Ecological Anthropology to Understand the Interaction between Nature and Culture

3.      The experience of Nature and Culture: Phenomenological approach

4.      Eco- Phenomenology to Understand Nature and Culture

5.      Summary

Learning Outcomes:

After studying this module individuals would be able to understand:

• The discourse of complexity of interconnections exists between nature and culture from theoretical underpinning.
• The role of Ecological Anthropology to comprehend nature and culture dualism.
• The concept of nature and culture through Phenomenology.
• The Eco- Phenomenological approach to understand the relationship between human culture and the natural environment.

    1. Introduction

The distinction between nature and culture is one of a succession of classic logocentric oppositions described in Western scholars’ writings. They believed that anything which is the result of human intervention cannot belong to nature and in the same way, human achieved cultural development by opposing nature. Boas elucidated that cultural differentiations are not the products of differences in outer environment; rather he defined it by inner biology and of course some commendable forces within culture itself. Perhaps, his student Benedict opposed Boas for his strict biological viewpoint and pointed out, “The institutions that human cultures build up upon the hints presented by the environment or by man’s physical necessities do not keep as close to the original impulse as we easily imagine. These hints are, in reality, mere rough sketches, a list of bare facts. They are pin-point potentialities, and the elaboration that takes place around them is dictated by many alien considerations” (Benedict, 1934). Benedict also argued that many cultures are at the complete opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to specific areas of culture and lifestyle. But like Boas, she believed that culture was the product of human choices rather than cultural determinism.

Indeed in this context French anthropologist Levi-Strauss’s argument is most influential. He argued that nature and culture distinction is present all over the world across societies in the form of cognitive tool to understand the world. He also opined that universality of distinction between nature and culture clearly manifests the opposition between human (the controller of nature) and animal (natural). Some of his followers even suggested that the binary opposition between man and woman could fall in this dichotomy as woman gives birth which is a natural endowment and on the other hand man who controls political and/or ritual processes is a cultural entitlement (Mc Cormack & Strathern, 1980). Structuralists believed what is natural (not determinate by any norms) is universal and what is specified and regulated by the norm of a society is culture and thus culture vary from society to society.

The nature-culture distinction became blurred after the pacing of post-structuralists’ concept that structure is always unstable. If incest is universal it means it is natural and present in all society but Derrida (1978) discussed in the book Writing and Difference that incest is also specific for the cultures as every culture has a tendency to work beyond laws in its own way. He also stated:

“It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest” (Derrida, 1978).

He questioned how something can fit on both the sides of nature and culture considering structuralist view point. Derrida believed the totality of a ‘text’ (a structure that objectively describes words/things) as a unit of study is nothing but a fallacy of structuralism. Structuralists’ defined stable system (in a form of language) and delimited the structure of knowledge. In this sense, the difference between nature and culture is actually creating an effect of decidable meaning, is indeed a structuralist (like Levi-Strauss and others) fallacy, what Derrida (1979) called “scandal”. As Derrida portrayed that binary opposition are basically hierarchies, the nature and culture opposition not simply define the differences of two poles rather privileging one at the price of the other (eg. humans are superior to animals). Derrida’s concept explained that meaning is “deferred” from one interpretation to another in an endless way, so it is fact that knowledge constantly deconstructs itself.

Recently R. F. Ellen, Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology tackled the problem of nature and culture in a distinct way. Ellen (1996) said, “culture emerges from nature as the symbolic representation of the latter”. He also stated that culture is a subclass of nature and nature cannot be fully specified by using common language, which is a kind of “symbolic culture”. He said “If culture gives meaning to nature, then nature gives meaning to culture (humans adapt), and so on ad infinitum…the opposition of nature and culture is therefore a psuedo-problem arising out of reflexive symbolic constructs (ordinary language) within culture itself” (Ellen, 1996).

2. Role of Ecological Anthropology to Understand the Interaction between Nature and Culture

The term Ecological anthropology emerged during the 1960s, this was due to the contributions of many cultural ecologists, including Daryll Forde, Alfred Kroeber, and, especially, Julian Steward (Kottak, 1999). Steward’s cultural ecology (which took cultures as the units of analysis) influenced many ecological anthropologists like Roy Rappaport, Andrew P. Vayda and others but the analytic element shifted from “culture” to the ecological population, which was seen as using culture as a means (the primary means) of adaptation to environments. Until 1960, the concept that environment is responsible for shaping culture (environmental determinism) was the dominant approach in ecological anthropology. But frequently a question comes up that whether cultures adapt to their environment in the same way that organisms do? Researchers started to believe that the process of adaptation could explain the customs and institutions (Salzman & Attwood, 1996). Perhaps after 1960s, ecological anthropologists became more structuralist in their view. According to Biersack (1999),

“Cultures and ecosystems are not directly commensurable. An ecosystem is a system of matter and energy transactions among unlike populations or organisms and between them and the non-living substances by which they are surrounded. ‘Culture’ is the label for the category of phenomena distinguished from others by its contingency upon symbols”.

Scholars very often relate cultural materialism with ecological anthropology and showed the adaptive functions of cultural phenomena. Rappaport (1968) focused on rituals in the ecology of New Guinea people and at the same time Harris (1966, 1974) analyzed the adaptive conservatory role of the Hindu doctrine of ahimsa, with special reference to the cultural ecology of India’s sacred cattle. Murphy (1970) emphasized that human beings should be studied “apart from nature and opposite to it”. But he also admitted “This does not mean that the human sphere and the natural orders are unrelated, but only implies that the social order is independent despite its ties with the environment”. He explained culture in naturalistic term specifically with respect to its adaptive functions. Therefore, according to Murphy (1970), “the characteristics of a culture are not easily reducible to survival values”.

Howell (1996) in his essay “Nature in Culture or Culture in Nature”, portrayed Chewong, a small group of aboriginal people of the Malay tropical rainforest who defined themselves as ‘jungle people’ (bi brete) and as ‘digging people’ (bi bai) as they dig for wild tubers, i.e. they are foragers rather than cultivators. Howell showed how individuals and collective existential orientations are focused upon and derived their identity from the jungle. Howell argued the jungle in its totality like a material and spiritual world is cultural space, not natural. They move around in it with confidence derived from understanding and knowledge. It is full of signs which they know how to interpret— historically, practically, cosmologically. These may be paths made by animals, a fruit tree planted by an ancestor, stones which are inhabited by potentially harmful beings, fallen tree-trunks, the place where an event in a particular myth took place, etc. Thus to Howell, nothing in the forest is semantically neutral. The tree fell because someone, somewhere laughed near an animal, rain during sunshine indicates the presence of spirits who are hunting for meat which would include the human ruwai (alive/ soul, that distinguishes them from dead things) were they to encounter it, and so on. Like other hunting and gathering people, the Chewong displayed a detailed and intimate knowledge of the forest in which they live which goes far beyond any practical requirement, and they are engaged in a series of meaningful relationship with it. However, the principles of the symbiosis can only be understood by stepping back and placing it within their cosmological constructions.

Howell (1996) wrote, the people of Chewing’s understanding of species are integral to their world view, to their views of themselves and of others. However, while they do not employ an evaluative categorization between humans, animals or plants, there is a class of beings which is constituted on the basis of presence or absence of consciousness—in the sense of language, reason, intellect and moral conscience or knowledge. Consciousness in this sense makes one a ‘personage’ (ruwai in Chewong)—an expression to ‘human’—regardless of one’s outer shape (or ‘cloak’ in Chewong parlance) be it that of gibbon, human, wild pig, frog, rambutan fruit, bamboo leaf, the thunder being, a specific boulder or whatever. Absence of consciousness, on the other hand, does not entail membership of another encompassing category, such as animal or plant. It follows from this that there are no general characteristics of ‘animality’ or ‘vegetability’ which are used as a basis for evaluative comparisons. The Chewong think in terms of a series of species-grounded conscious and unconscious beings each with a different shape and adhering to their own particular social and—in the case of conscious beings—moral codes. In other words, one may not discern the familiar western conceptual opposition of ‘animality’ and ‘humanity’; no human behaviour may be classified as animal-like. Howell suggested that this may constitute the reason why the Chewongs do not have an overarching category of ‘animal’, but rather a whole series of named species which are not encompassed in a taxonomic classification scheme. This is consistent with their tendency to enumerate rather than to order things—or concepts—hierarchically according to clusters of perceived similarities. This is not to say that they are incapable of classifying according to such principles. For example, there are indigenous categories for birds, snakes, flowers and trees. But these are very shallow indeed, constituting an umbrella under which all the species are enumerated. Those who speak Malay appear to understand and use the Malay word for animal (binatang) while not incorporating it into Chewong language. Howell (1985, 1989) argued elsewhere that there is a schema predicated on identifying and naming rather than on clustering, and that the underlying ordering principle is equality, not hierarchy. This is manifested in the symbolic as well as the socio-political order.

3. The experience of Nature and Culture: Phenomenological approach

In seeking a new approach to see, think, understand and construct the world, phenomenology tries to understand first what has happened and what has been assumed in what context. This approach studies the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of view, meaning how things appear to our conscious awareness or how the world appears to people in terms of their subjective experience. Phenomenology allows phenomena to be understood as they are without the reduction or distortion so often the result of positivist science or the many styles of structuralism (Seamon & Mugerauer, 1985). David Abram (2014) wrote,

“Phenomenology, as a style of reflection and a practice of life, invites us to drop beneath our accepted abstractions (to suspend our inherited notions and theoretical conceptions) in order to pay close attention to our directly felt experience of things. It asks us to notice the way that the surrounding world and its manifold constituents spontaneously disclose themselves to our most immediate awareness. Phenomenology invites us to trade in our concepts for fresh percepts, to trade theoretical schemata for the difficult articulation of our ongoing experience of the real in its inexhaustible strangeness.”

New phase of phenomenology and hermeneutics of embodied person and world considers the complexly integrated core of how we live (Seamon & Mugerauer, 1985). Mugerauer speaks of environmental hermeneutics -i.e., a way of interpretation which evokes “what things are and how they are related to other things in the webs of particular lives and places”. Phenomenology is also concerned about the relationship between human behavior and environment, and the most clearly emphasized areas to such research are geography, environmental psychology and architecture. A phenomenology of environment and space (place) examines three major themes: first, the essential qualities and interconnections of human environmental experience; second, essential qualities of environment, such as sound, topography, light, and spatial qualities, which promote a particular character of space and landscape; third, the larger context of societal and symbolic environments fundamental to space (Schafer, 1985). Nothnagel (1996) wrote the concept “space of negotiation” (‘espace de negotiation’) issuing from the French approach to the anthropology of sciences (e.g. Latour 1987, Callon 1991)—is especially valuable in the perspective of nature and culture distinction because it precludes any pre-established distinction between content and context by including all the various items negotiated and translated as well as the various actors negotiating and translating into a common field. Thus, a ‘space of negotiation’ is based on mediating processes and intermediaries passing between the actors and defining their relationship. These mediating links include technical artifacts, literal inscriptions, human beings, and money (Callon 1991).

Source: Nature-culture interface: ‘espace de negotiation’ [See Detlev Nothnagel,

(1996, pp. 262) in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives]

Nothnagel (1996) noted:

“We know from cultural anthropology, hunting is one of the mediating activities between nature and culture characterized by a very pronounced symbolical value. It entails not only a transformation of nature into culture—converting a wild animal into an edible prey—but also a whole set of socio-cultural values. These values include mechanisms of sharing and distribution as well as mechanisms of power differentiation (gender separation, for instance), since hunting is usually deemed more prestigious than crop cultivation.”

This marked symbolic value also reveals itself in a ‘historical’ perspective, insofar as many culture heroes are characterized as hunters (Heusch 1972, Feierman 1974). In general terms, one can say that ‘wild nature’ serves as a reservoir of socio-cultural meaning. Thus, meaning and sense, power and domination are extracted out of these transformational, mediating activities. So it can be inferred that nature is often constructed as the ‘Other’, an outside entity (Nothnagel, 1996). At the same time nature is intimately linked to culture, being characterized by a particular organizational structure and distinctive kinds of habitus (Nothnagel, 1996).

Cyclic relationship between nature and culture

4. Eco-Phenomenology to Understand Nature and Culture

Wood (2003) defined eco-phenomenology, in which both an ecological phenomenology and a phenomenological ecology are folded, that offers us a way of developing a middle ground between phenomenology and naturalism, between intentionality and causality. Eco-phenomenology is based on a double claim: firstly, that an adequate account of our ecological situation requires the methods and insights of phenomenology and secondly, that phenomenology, led by its own momentum, becomes a philosophical ecology, that is, a study of the interrelationship between organism and world in its metaphysical and axiological dimensions (Brown & Toadvine, 2003).

Eco-phenomenology focuses on the cultural and symbolic dimensions of environment and place. For example the essays by Walter Brenneman and David G. Saile give attention to the spiritual qualities of environment and place. Brenneman (1985) examined Ireland’s holy springs, more commonly called “wells.” He argued that these wells consolidate two different forces: the sacred and loric. Brenneman pointed out that the former, is a centrifugal force and underlies all universal religions, patterns and structures – for example, myths and rituals are repeated in the same way and times throughout a sacred world, as, for instance, the Catholic Mass. In contrast, loric power is centripetal, drawing towards a center. In terms of a sense of sacred place, Brenneman argued, the loric power is crucial because it endows a particular site with uniqueness, as with the Irish holy wells. Only much later, once Catholicism had gained power in Ireland, the wells became a symbol of the sacred. For a phenomenology of place, Brenneman’s most intriguing point is that loric power generates a sense of intimacy, yet that intimacy is “completely hidden to those who possess it”.

Saile’s (1985) essay on Pueblo dwelling in the southwestern United States echoes several of Brenneman’s themes effectively; demonstrating the juncture of sacred and loric powers at a community and regional scale. Focusing on insiders and outsiders’ sense of Pueblo dwelling and place, Saile describes the elaborate way in which environmental elements such as mountains, lakes, caves, springs, shrines, village layout and buildings fit together to provide a landscape fostering and reflecting a profound sacred meaning. He further suggested that each particular place and site possesses its own special loric quality, yet underlying the uniqueness are sacred themes and patterns more or less common to all Pueblo groups. Through his discussion of outsiders’ views of the Pueblo world, Saile also demonstrated how readily descriptions of that world can be distorted.

In the essay “The dwelling door: Towards a phenomenology of transition” Richard Lang (1985) considers dwelling as an embodied inhabit. Lang considers the home as an extension of bodily existence; he looks at one aspect of the home -the door – as a phrasing for access and disclosure. He argued that the door concretizes and reflects the experience of transition, “animating in a visible manner the dialectic of inside and outside”. In a similar way, Jager (1985) examines the relationship among body, house and city. Like Lang, Jager emphasizes the significance of physical embodiment, particularly through architectural expression, in establishing a sense of familiarity and dwelling. Both body and built environment, says Jager, are visible and at the same time they foster vision. In this portrayal, Jager points to a useful new way of phrasing the intimate relationship and immersion between person and world: the physical world is what one sees, but it is also the foundation and context for that seeing. The embodied world, therefore, has a primary role in sustaining particular modes of human being and becoming. The designer has the responsibility to create a built environment which projects and supports a civilized seeing and a humane inhabitation.

5. Summary

   In the phenomenologists’ quest, specific environmental elements or experiences are the basis for wider generalizations about behavior, landscape, meaning, and so forth. The search is for underlying structures-networks of relationships marking out essential dimensions of the thing, event or experience. These structures incorporate a series of intra-structural connections and tensions which in their various combinations generate particular modes and contexts of meanings, behaviors and experiences. A central aspect of phenomenology is the identification and description of wholes –i.e., complexes of pattern and meaning which outline the underlying, continuing order of things, processes and experiences. Bortoft (1985) argues that a science of authentic wholeness would not only promote a clearer seeing of phenomena but also generate a deeper compassion and reverence for nature and the environment.

References

• Anthropology.ua.edu/../coganth.htm. retrieved on 1-9-2016
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• Dobzhansky, Theodosius G.( 1972) On the Evolutionary Uniqueness of Man. Evolutionary Biology 6:415–430.
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    Suggested Readings

• Adaptation. Lucas Hilderbrand. Film Quarterly, Vol. 58
• Archaeology Cultural Ecology Reconsidered. Richard E. Blanton .American Antiquity.
• Biology, Society, and Culture in Human Ecology. Frederick Sargent, II and Demitri B. Shimkin. Bio-Science, Vol. 15
• Horigan, S. (1988). Nature and Culture in Western Discourses. London: Routledge
• Keulartz, J. (1998). Struggle for Nature: A Critique of Radical Ecology. London: Routledge
• Kuper, A. (1999). Culture. The Anthropologist’s Account. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Soper, K. (1995). What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Strathren,  M.  (1995b).  “The  nice  thing  about  culture  is  that  everyone  has  it”.  In  M.
• Strathern (ed.). Shifting Contexts. Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 153–176.