“Organic Nature: Culture and Local Knowledge” – regular-speak layman’s definition forthcoming.

Arturo Escobar brilliantly questions the relationship between local constructions of nature and our “present-day concerns, particularly sustainability, and whether there are notions akin to management or control in native representations and local models of nature”

He lists the characteristics of what he calls Organic Nature (which may or may not coincide with ideas contained within Capitalist Nature).

  1. Lack of “nature-society” dichotomy; “a complex image of social life that is not necessarily opposed to nature (in other words, one in which the natural world is integral to the social world)”
  2. “the entire universe is conceived as a living being with no strict separation between humans and nature, individual and community, community and the gods (Grillo, 1991, Apffel-Marglin and Valladolid 1999)”
  3. “Local models [of nature] may also evidence a particular attachment to a territory conceived as a multidimensional entity that results from many types of practices and relations”
  4. Specific categorizations of human, social, and biological entities (for instance, of what is human and what is not, what is planted and what is not, the domestic and the wild,m what is innate and what emerges from human action, etc.), boundary settings and systematic classifications of animals, spirits, and plants.
  5. “It may contain “mechanisms for maintaining good order and balance in the biophysical, human and spiritual circuits (Descola, 1992, 1994)”
  6. “…or a circular view of biological and socioeconomic life ultimately grounded in Providence, gods, or goddesses (Gudeman and Rivera 1990)”

Escobar, Arturo (1999). After Nature: Steps to an anti-essentialist political ecology [and comments and replies]. Current Anthropology, 40, 1-30

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Myths of Nature in post-WWII National Geographic Car Advertisements by Shwandel N. Fraser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.