Week 1

Both of this week's readings (the "Nature entry from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas and "The Etiquette of Freedom" from Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild) are significantly concerned with parsing out what exactly we mean with the words nature, wild, wilderness, culture, human, unnatural, and supernatural.  In doing this, the articles present these ideas in relation to each other and in relation to a wide range of belief systems, from that of the ancient Greeks to Native Americans to contemporary capitalists.  

Snyder places great value in living harmoniously with nature, calling us to "live without causing unnecessary harm," as is traditionally associated with native or primitive cultures.  He elevates this way of living and those who live it, telling stories of lost explorers who turn to a primitive way of life and gain "a compassionate heart, a taste for self-sufficiency and simplicity, and a knack for healing."  It seems that we turn to these so-called primitive ways of living in an effort to see what we are really like, to understand "human nature."  There's this idea that, by studying people who hunt with spears and cut down trees to build canoes and wear penis-gourds, we (civilized-folk) can learn about the essence of our natures.  

More than once, I've been involved in conversations in which someone has asked whether any anthropologist has studied homosexuality in primitive cultures.  While I have no information whatsoever about the answer to this, I think the impulse to ask this question is an interesting one.  The implication is that the true nature of these people is less sullied by religion, politics, and science, as though we can determine whether homosexuality is a product of nature or nurture by understanding them.  

I have a couple of problems with all of this.  1) I'm not really convinced that there is any reason to think that a person who lives more closely with the natural world (i.e. in a "primitive" culture) is more likely to express "human nature".  2) I don't think you can separate nature and nurture entirely.  Living in some sort of contact with other people (therefore, being exposed to nurture) is part of being human; it's in our nature.  

Below is a picture by Susan Meiselas titled Robert Gardner greeted by his old friend, Aloro, 1988, 2003 from her project Encounters with the Dani.  I won't go into detail about the project or the photographer because I think this photo alone is pretty interesting with just the context of the title.

I apologize for the quality of this reproduction, I think some of the details get a little lost.  Nevertheless, we see the primitive/native/indigenous/tribal man, clothed in nothing but a gourd flanked by another man with what appears to be a spear.  He's apparently greeting the relatively enormous white man holding the video camera with a firm nut-shake.  This seems to set up a pretty stereotypical relationship between the western, civilized man with his clothed body and expensive technology and the naked primitive man with his wacky customs.  But there are a couple of interesting things. 1) The picket fence in the background.  (Those are supposed to be the epitome of civilized living!)  and 2) The native man totally gets the joke.  He knows that it makes the white man a little bit uncomfortable to have his balls greeted.  The white man knows that the native man gets it; he also thinks it is funny.  The caption tells us that they are friends, and we believe it.  

My point here is that this picture indicates a savvy and sophistication that we don't usually associate with primitive people.  There is no reason to think this close-to-nature culture can reveal human nature any more than our own.   

I also want to quickly address another related element of this broader discussion.  I think we often idealize the way nature functions.  In discussing the idea of wilderness, Snyder mentions "the web," which I take to mean an ecosystem that achieves a sort of homeostasis through the interaction and functioning of all variety of plants and animals.  He also notes, though, the "implied chaos, eros, the unknown, realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic" as another view of wilderness.  

The former idea - let's call it the web theory - is certainly popular right now.  It's very useful to the environmental movement because it implies that the natural world can right itself, despite the damage we've done to it, as if there's some gyroscopic force in the universe.  Snyder writes (pg. 15), "Wilderness will inevitably return, but it will not be as fine a world as the one that was glistening in the early morning of the Holocene.  Much life will be lost in the wake of human agency on earth..."  While, I'm happy for the environmental movement to do whatever it needs to do, I don't know that this is accurate.  We often forget the messy, unexplained, and frightening part of nature: the elephants that rape rhinos, the chimps that cannibalize their young, the suicidal penguins.  Is the world really comprehensible?  Check out this penguin clip from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World and another clip from Aguirre: Wrath of God.  Herzog has a longstanding fascination with man's manic urge to battle and conquer the natural world and nature's refusal to make sense.