After Nature

TLDR

Resources for inventing natures and cultures are unevenly distributed across contexts, from tropical rain forests to biotech labs, and the proposal builds on trends in ecological anthropology, political ecology, and science‑technology studies. The paper outlines an anthropological political ecology that acknowledges the constructedness of nature and proposes an antiessentialist framework to investigate its manifold forms. The authors propose an antiessentialist, constructivist framework that integrates cultural and biological dimensions to analyze nature. The framework identifies three interrelated nature regimes—organic, capitalist, and techno—and discusses the political implications of hybrid nature strategies that groups employ to address environmental crises.

Abstract

This paper presents the outline of an anthropological political ecology that fully acknowledges the constructedness of nature while suggesting steps to weave together the cultural and the biological on constructivist grounds. From tropical rain forests to advanced biotechnology laboratories, the resources for inventing natures and cultures are unevenly distributed. The paper proposes an antiessentialist framework for investigating the manifold forms that the natural takes in today's world. This proposal builds on current trends in ecological anthropology, political ecology, and social and cultural studies of science and technology. The resulting framework identifies and conceptualizes three distinct but interrelated nature regimes—organic, capitalist, and techno—and sketches their characteristics, their articulations, and their contradictions. The political implications of the analysis are discussed in terms of the strategies of hybrid natures that most social groups seem to be faced with as they encounter, and try to stem, particular manifestations of the environmental crisis.