THE COGNITIVE GEOMETRY OF NATURE A CONTEXTUAL
APPROACH
Roy Ellen
A published version appears in `Nature and
society: anthropological perspectives', eds. P. Descola and G. Palsson.
Routledge: London
Introduction
That conceptions of nature vary historically and ethnographically,
and are, therefore, themselves intrinsically cultural, is so widely
asserted nowadays that it is often assumed to have become a self-evident
anthropological truth. Perhaps the best example of this in popular
environmentalist discourse, as in some anthropology, is the opposition
drawn between the holistic systemic vision of 'traditional', 'tribal'
or 'archaic' societies and the dualism of the modern scientific and
dominant Judaeo-Christian tradition. How conceptions of nature vary
beyond such abstractions is well-demonstrated in individual historical
[e.g. Collingwood 1945; Horigan 1988; Thomas 1983; Torrance 1992]
and ethnographic studies. In particular, much attention has been given
to how these might arise from particular practices of environmental
interaction [e.g.Bird-David 1993; Ingold 1992], and how these in turn
might sustain, or be sustained by [e.g. Schefold 1988], particular
social ideologies.1 As Philippe Descola [1992: 110] puts it, 'each
specific form of cultural conceptualisation also introduces sets of
rules governing the use and appropriation of nature, evaluations of
technical systems, and beliefs about the structure of the cosmos,
the hierarchy of being, and the very principles by which living things
function'. But empirical demonstrations of such relativity - many
of which find their origin in the claim by Leach [Leach 1964: 34-5]
that nature is no more than some topological grid imposed upon a continuous
world - have led to an almost indignant rejection of the very
idea of nature. Indeed, it has become increasingly awkward and misleading
to carve out from these implied 'representations' or 'constructions',
a conceptual space which is linguistically, cognitively and symbolically
coherent. The new consensus has thus given rise to new problems: that
of commensurability between different conceptions of nature (including
the assumption that our nature always exists as a category
comparable to their nature); the implication that each culture
has a single ruling (and unambiguous) conception of nature, which
it is our task to locate, excavate and describe; and the problem as
to how those collective notions of nature which we can claim to exist
are 'constructed' or 'negotiated'. I shall argue that we can approach
the question of the categorical status of nature in two - superficially
antithetical - ways.
The first is a continuation of what the relativists and deconstructionists
are arguing; namely that any one population may, depending on the
circumstances, generate conceptions of nature which are fuzzy and
variable - which may indeed be inconsistent and contradictory - and
that such variability may reveal itself at the level of individual
praxis and at the level of collective representations, or in some
combination of the two. Consequentially, it is difficult to speak
of 'societies' and 'cultures' (that is, second-order constructs) as
having a single conception of nature, and an exaggeration to claim
that it is even true of empirically identifiable local populations.
Indeed, it may be claimed that some peoples have no concepts of nature
whatsoever.
The second way is to buck this trend and identify a minimum number
of underlying assumptions upon which pragmatic schemata and symbolic
representations are built, and which ultimately constrain human conceptual
permutations [c.f. Boyer 1993].2 If I interpret him correctly, this
is what Descola [Descola 1992: 110] means by 'the social objectification
of nature [being] implemented through a limited number of operative
schemes', and his acknowledgement that 'modes of representation of
relations to nature present certain similar characteristics' [ibid.
123]. Such widely-observed 'similar characteristics' may be accounted
for if we hypothesize that underlying all models of nature are three
cognitive axes or dimensions, which will, when the cultural devices
they permit are combined in different ways, generate particular representations,
all recognisably transformations of some ur- or proto-nature. The
first axis is that which allows us to construe nature inductively
in terms of the 'things' which people include within it, and the characteristics
assigned to such things. The second is that which allows us to define
nature spatially: assigning it to some realm outside humans
or their immediate living (cultural) space. The third is that which
allows us to define nature in essentialist terms; as some
force which is exogenous to human will but which can to varying degrees
be controlled. To the extent that these three cognitive axes make
an equal contribution to representations, they may be predicted to
approach that multi-faceted, ambiguous, but ultimately recognisable
idea which we in the West recognise as nature; whereas the more asymmetry
is introduced into the model the less familiar the construction becomes.
And to the degree that each of these axes dominates a conceptualisation
characteristic of a particular context, so it also becomes a 'definition'
of nature.
I focus here on examples drawn largely from my own work on the Nuaulu,
a people of Seram in eastern Indonesia whose mode of subsistence may
be summarily typified as a combination of hunting, sago extraction
and swidden cultivation. There are no new data, though the way I have
used them is different. Thus, I start by asking how we might begin
to identify cultural phenomena which best approximate each of the
three cognitive axes specified above, and by exploring the extent
to which they permit us to infer the existence of nature as a domain.
I then examine how combining cultural ideas derived from each of the
axes generates intrinsic ambiguity, and how this is reflected
in the variation accompanying different practical and symbolic contexts.
Nature as kinds of 'things'
Let us first examine how far the first axis, the inductivist (nature
as 'things') model, assists us in generating an approximation, or
one dimension, of some hypothetical Nuaulu conceptualisation of nature.
In cultural modifications of this model, particular 'things', by virtue
of their resemblance to other things, are - once aggregated - seen
as part of nature. Thus, through induction, nature itself
becomes a thing which can then be the conceptual starting point of
deductive reasoning. It has been suggested [Ingold 1986: 3, 1992:
44] that the fact that we see 'things' at all is what distinguishes
Homo sapiens from other animals: birds may perceive functional
objects such as anvils or missiles, but only humans can perceive something
as abstract as 'a stone'. Hence the human environment consists of
neutral objects waiting to be ordered, an orientation which is closely
linked to the tendency to view animals and plants as physical objects,
things of nature. Such a view is - for example - implicit in Lévi-Strauss's
theory of totemism.
If nature is the sum total of its parts then we must begin by examining
what these constituents might be, and the most accessible evidence
here is ethnobiological. It is now well-established that all peoples
work with a concept of natural kind, whether as a 'common
sense kind of phenomenal substance', or as an 'ontological entity
with an underlying nature' [Atran 1990: 86, 94]. There is some dispute
as to whether basic categories always occur at a particular level
of abstraction, and concerning the detailed way they map onto phylogenetic
templates. The extent to which we can represent and account for more-
or less-inclusive categories is contested; but the fact that all human
populations engage in such activity is hardly in doubt [Ellen 1993b].
What is more controversial is the claim by Berlin [Berlin 1992] and
Boster [Boster] that natural kinds have a different perceptual character
to cultural forms, fashioned by selective pressure. As the biological
world has radiated, so the human capacity to recognise the basic order
in that radiation has co-evolved. Thus, in this view (with which I
am in basic sympathy), nature itself - or, at least, 'the biological
world' - is the product of human cognitive evolution.
A formal expression for this kind of model would be simple incremental
linear aggregation: n1 + n2 + n3 .......... = N,
where n is a culturally agreed natural kind, and N
nature as a totality. But most peoples that we know of also recognise
more inclusive conceptual domains such as 'plant', 'animal', 'rock'
and so on, such that an aggregative model of nature should intuitively
have a structure something like: animals + plants + other living things
+ non-living things = nature, which we might express formally as:
(n1 + n2 + n3....=)N + (.....)N + (.....)N + ..... = N.
In order to demonstrate the plausibility of such a model we have
to show that (a) each of these generic component parts (N)
is recognised, (b) that they share common characteristics, and (c)
that there is evidence to show that they are linked together to form
a conceptual whole (N); an over-arching category
in other words. We can explore (a) and (b) by examining the Nuaulu
category which glosses most closely with English ANIMAL. The existence
of such a category, what Brent Berlin calls a 'unique beginner', can
in principle be inferred from the presence of specific terms whose
reference can be shown to be coterminous with the semantic content
of the domain, or, where such terms are absent, from various linguistic
and cultural markers, or (up to a point) by employing sorting experiments.
There is no one commonly-used or widely-acknowledged Nuaulu term
for all animals, though there are three possible, partial and rarely-used
candidates [Ellen 1993b: 96-7]. So, in effect, we might say that the
category is, terminologically, 'covert', or at least 'semi-covert'.
But even in the absence of an unambiguous domain label we may infer
the existence of a cognitive prototype marked out from other domains,
and also from humans. Thus, when speaking of animals, their qualities
and relationships, Nuaulu employ a discourse which can be distinguished
in certain small but significant respects from other discourses. It
differs both lexically and in terms of appropriate semantic relationships.
Thus, there are different words for killing an animal (ihunui)
and for killing a human (atoria), for a human voice
(mo'nyom) and an animal call (nioke);
and for human head hair (hua) and bodily hair, animal
feathers or fur (hunue). In some cases the differences
amount only to slight phonological shifts, as in anai
(human child) and anae (animal young). There is also
a specialised lexicon for specific activities relating to animals
(e.g. atinai, 'to hunt cuscus'; asakaka,
'to call a cuscus'), and many special anatomical terms (e.g. mata
hunua, mollusc and insect antennae; kihene,
wings and fins), in addition to about 47 such terms which humans and
other animals share. That forms in core animal categories are clearly
similar in multiple respects, and often overlap; that the terms are
often expressed as contrast sets, while animal partonyms ('head',
'heart', and so on) and other linguistic usages are present, goes
some way to imply the existence of a category 'animal' [c.f. Taylor
1990: 47-51}]. Such differences not only help to locate and maintain
separate domains, in the interests of effective linguistic communion,
but also serve the purposes of symbolic contrast. The core of the
domain is clearly regarded as being bound by polythetic affinities,
such that the unique beginner is not as arbitrary as some [Hunn 1977:
44] have suggested, although its borders may occasionally be difficult
to determine.
We could undertake a similar exercise for the domain 'plant', or
indeed for any other conceptual domain which aggregates identifiable
parts of the human environment on the basis of similar characteristics
or overall form, simply by drawing inferences from linguistic utterance
and cultural practice. Once this has been done we might then order
the domains themselves into more inclusive contrastive categories,
using distinctive features such as those Paul Taylor [Taylor 1990]
has suggested for the Tobelo: living--non-living, sexual--non-sexual,
breathing--non-breathing and so on.
Such abstract distinctions, are also discernible among the Nuaulu,
but, have little practical bearing on their lived culture, are of
no prominent symbolic significance, and certainly cannot be held to
be a starting point for their classification of the natural world.
In this instance, I suspect they are examples of that genre of elicited
but quite ungeneralisable contrasts which are happily provided by
willing informants, and at which the ethnographer is tempted to grasp
in some vain attempt to impose order on what otherwise looks like
utter chaos.
In short, the hierarchic conception of nature typified by scientific
taxonomy, and its folk-semantic extension which includes at its more-inclusive
levels contrasts between unique beginners, and life and non-life,
is not one which is readily yielded from the Nuaulu data. But we do
not need to rely on such abstractions, irrespective of whether or
not they can convincingly be shown to be emically-rooted, in order
to model an aggregated or integrated concept of natural things; as
conceptual domains can also be linked through their overlap (especially
the overlap of their peripheries), by what various authors [e.g. Hays
1976: 502] have described for less inclusive categories as 'chaining',
or 'linking'. Thus, if a is linked to b, b
to c and c to d then this implies the existence
of a 'group' a-b-c-d: an instance
of polythetic resemblance. Certain Nuaulu life-forms which are regarded
as animals in phylogenetic terms have no obvious affinities with any
other category. These include sponges, which are grouped with 'fungi'.
Molluscs and starfish, however, are firmly perceived as animals for
a combination of behavioural and morphological reasons. There is no
sharp division between animals and plants and other domains, either
in linguistic or conceptual terms [Lévi-Strauss 1966: 138-9;
Morris 1976: 542]. Some invertebrates are ambiguously animals and
plants, some plants (e.g. certain fungi and lichen) are ambiguously
plant and inert material; different life-forms merging together to
strongly permit the inference of a LIFE category, which itself may
merge with non-life. Thus, despite the cognitive imperative to distinguish
domains in terms of a small number of features or cognitive prototypes,
in practice there are always going to be 'problems', some of which
may be culturally manifest as anomalies; and it is precisely these
which serve to link domains into more inclusive groupings.
If nature is an inventory of things in this sense, then this must
be linked to rules about how these things are to be identified and
related: that is order, and this order has to find some cultural
legitimation. Nuaulu acknowledge that there is (or indeed must be)
order in the world, an order which is in general terms comparable
to the pre-Darwinian 'great chain of being'. Non-directive evidence
for this might first be sought in that part of Nuaulu origin mythology
which speaks of the time when the first Matoke (Lord of the Land)
descended from the sky and walked throughout the earth where each
natural kind was represented only by a single organism - one house,
one betel palm, one hornbill, and so on. As the Matoke came by each
of these, so he named it, saying: 'This is a snake', 'This is a betel
palm', 'This is a hornbill' and so on. And as he did so, the many
emerged from the singular. But this is not to say that Nuaulu readily
expound, even less agree upon, the principles for order, and certainly
not the identification or classification of animals for pragmatic
purposes. They will simply admit to not knowing it, or at least large
parts of it [Ellen 1993b: 94]. Less modest individuals might dispute
amongst themselves, but every disputed classification itself exists
within an axiomatic field the coordinates of which are assumed to
be quite fixed. And the primus-inter-pares of axioms is that
nature itself is finite, and that all animals have names- even if
they remain unknown. In Nuaulu theory at least, names are not given
arbitrarily, for economy of thought; they reveal part of an order
which was laid down at the beginning of the world, but which is only
partially known about, and even less understood.
Nature as an inventory of things reaches its apogee in modern Western
classifications. The 'great chain of being' has already been mentioned,
but it is also there in the concept of species, in the taxonomic schemes
of Linnaeus and their Darwinian re-interpretation; it is there in
the very idea of 'natural history', embedded within the notion of
exhibitions to display nature as these emerged from cabinets of curiosity
to become museums of natural history, herbaria, botanical and zoological
gardens, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is additionally
significant here, and which comes through well in static displays,
is that these are concerned as much with minerals (which have never
lived) as with life; and equally with dead plants and animals, and
the ambiguous classificatory material presented in the form of bones,
fossils and the mineral extrusions and excretions of living things
(e.g. coral). The conceptualisation of nature as a collectivity of
things is, therefore, most obvious in the representations generated
by western science and those generated by anthropologists investigating
the folk classifications of the natural world, where the Western paradigm
is the implicit or explicit reference point. It is there also, supremely
so, commoditised in both its parts and its entirety, in the slogans
of environmentally-inspired marketing and in the politics of ecology
and biodiversity.
Nature as space which is not human
Nature is often understood less as some abstracted inventory of its
contents (in which items are cognitively detached from their habitat
and re-organised according to a limited number of morphological or
functional criteria), than in terms of its predominant spatial or
phenomenological manifestation. It is this definition which is implicit
in many ethnographically-reported instances of the semantic congruence
between forest and nature. But for different peoples, using different
subsistence strategies, living in different environments, the semantic
congruence may be with some alternative topography ('sea' or 'desert',
say, or 'mountains'); all of which have in common what is perhaps
best (provisionally) construed as the quality of 'wilderness'. But
'wilderness' is the apogee of something closer and more familiar,
though different. So, although for the Nuaulu the congruence is archetypically
exemplified by 'forest'; more routinely, perhaps, in this spatial
sense, nature is 'that which is not of the village', or 'that which
is not of the village or gardens'.
The 'natural otherness' of the Nuaulu concept of forest is encountered
in its most mundane sense in adjectival qualifiers for animals or
plants: as in the contrast between the geckoes imasasae numa
('house') and imasasae ai ukune ('tree top, tree
branches, far forest'), for Hemidactylus frenatus and Gekko
vittatus; or in the contrast between the murids mnaha
numa/niane ('house/village') and mnaha wesie
('forest'), for Mus musculus and Melomys spp. It
is also evident in the symbolic organisation of village space [Ellen
reductionist], and in the differential attitudes to language and behaviour
within and without the village. Thus you may 'joke', mock or use expletives
involving certain animals in the village, but you may not do so outside.
Among such exclamatory phrases are: ikae nawe, 'long
fish', mau (w)anae, 'kitten', asuwani anae,
'young cassowary', and hahu onate, 'large pig'. In
the village (and by extension in the gardens as well) these expletives
are used extensively in ordinary discourse; in the forest they anger
the spirits and bring on heavy rain. While an individual may try to
escape the consequences of his utterances, he runs the risk of being
swallowed up by the earth [Ellen 1993b: 175-6]. Interestingly, the
oath masimokota, 'let the earth
open up', is subject to the same taboo. The same - village (permissible)
: forest (prohibited) - rule applies to a wide range of other expressions,
among which are included expletives derived from the names of spirits
(e.g. painakiteraia). This is significant
given the classificatory similarities between animals and spirits,
which I shall turn to shortly.
But it is insufficient to contrast forest and village in the abstract,
since the usual personal experience is that forest, bush, or whatever
its semantic approximation might be, surrounds, or encompasses
the village, and ultimately the self; and it is in this sense that
nature comes closest to what in the western scientific tradition has
become 'environment'. Thus, nature is always constructed by reference
to the human domain, and is in the last instance informed by ideas
and practices concerning 'self' and 'otherness'. This is not merely
symbolic analogy, but an homology of experience. This should
not worry us since it is a matter of fact that what is experienced
and represented around us homologously is at key moments, in significant
contexts, symbolically transformed into abstract binary oppositions
which permit more formal analogy. Thus the Nuaulu experience
of living within houses which are located within village spaces which
are in turn located within forest, is easily transformed into various
abstract linear oppositions between, say, house and forest or village
and forest; which in turn may be drawn into more complex symbolic
linkages through analogy [Ellen 1986].
Nature as inner essence
The third dimension of the concept of nature is its sensation as
an inner essence or vital energy or force, outside human control.
This is the most intangible of the three. We can perceive and touch
'things' and walk through 'spaces', but inner essence is usually only
experienced in terms of its sensate consequences, usually through
some combination of the first two axes. However, the best physical
manifestations of inner essence are those fluids and pulses associated
with living things, with bodily function: blood, sweat and tears,
semen, breast milk; heart beat, breath, excretion, movement; or more
generally in the environment: flow of water, heat and cold, wind,
noise, growth. And this is not confined to life narrowly-construed.
Thus, Tournefort could identify the act of creation in both seeds
and mineral crystals [Atran 1990: 230]. In certain clearly defined
circumstances the generic cultural character of essence or energy
will be clear; thus with respect to human passion, we often speak
of it as 'animal nature'. This is embedded in the Western notion of
natural instinct, nature as opposed to nurture; Islamic 'hawa nafsu'
as opposed to 'akal' (reason), and the widespread Indonesian idea
that the process of socialisation is the progressive controlling of
natural forces. But nature within need not primarily be an allusion
to animality; the dynamic properties may rather be experienced as
consubstantial in any number of different 'kinds of' nature. It need
not be a metaphor for the social, and sometimes it might be better
to speak of both natural and social phenomena - as say reflected in
physical maturation - as wholly comparable outcomes of similar processes
[Bloch 1992].
The idea of nature as an essence or force within may everywhere have
associations of uncontrollability, but we cannot prescribe in advance
whether its cultural expression will be positive, negative or neutral.
This will very much depend on the cultural metaphors which draw upon
the imagery, and one set of metaphors which do so, and which have
been extensively examined in the literature, are those linked to gender
[Atkinson and Errington (ed.) 1990; MacCormack and Strathern (eds.)
1980; Valeri 1990]. As it happens, the Nuaulu data fit well with the
male is to female as culture is to nature motif, females treated as
representing a danger to the male order, the intrusion of nature into
culture often physicalised with reference to menstrual blood and the
act of childbirth.
Boundary problems and contradictions
Each of the three axes outlined, or if you will dimensions, or definitions,
is insufficient in itself to generate or define any one cultural construction
of nature: all three are necessary to even begin to map out its underlying
geometry. Moreover, my presentation so far has been fundamentally
artificial in that I have ignored boundary problems and inner contradictions
which arise once we juxtapose two or more of the axes, which is of
course how we culturally experience nature. It is true that I have
had to anticipate some of these, as no ethnographic data known to
me present the conditions in any other way; but I have tried to limit
these in the interests of clarity of exposition. It may help in reviewing
these issues to imagine the three axes as related in three-dimensional
space. I shall first consider the conflation of the first axis (nature
as an aggregation of things) with the second (nature as an other space);
I shall then consider the conflation of the first with the third (nature
as inner essence); and finally, conflation of the second with the
third. The justification for this order will, I hope, become apparent.
Of course, there are some contexts in which all three axes have a
direct bearing on what is going on.
The conflation between 1 and 2 (things and the
spatial other) is best exemplified by the universal cultural recognition
that humans themselves might possibly be 'things' of nature, comparable
to other natural things, that the inventory of nature is not confined
to the other (a version of the so-called subject-object problem);
and by the recognition that humans physically intrude into the space
of nature. We can explore this idea in relation to Nuaulu animal classification.
In general terms, people are regarded by the Nuaulu as being in many
respects like animals. People share anatomical and physiological similarities
with animals, but more than this myths inform us that animals, like
their human counterparts, have societies. In the case of some species,
they are represented as reflecting basically human organisation and
values [e.g. Ellen 1972: 233]; they are spoken of in the idiom of
kinship. Animal societies too are bound by the Patalima-Patasiwa,
'Five group'-'Nine group', division of Seramese peoples (the Nuaulu
themselves being Patalima), whilst totemic traditions and a rich mythology
underscore the idea that animals may change into humans, and vice
versa [Ellen 1993b: 163-76]. In short, humans impose a social classification
on the world of animals. Many terms referring to behaviour and appearance
which are used for humans are also used for animals. In some instances
shared terms may be understood as consubstantial, while in others
the allusion - at least - is to a metaphorical extension from humans.
The exceptions occur - and we have examined some of these already
- where there is no human model, as with 'wing', 'beak', 'tail' and
so on. And, of course, none of this prevents Nuaulu from defining
the domain of animals essentially in contrast to humans. Taylor [1990:
51] reports that in Tobelorese language and concepts humans are treated
quite differently from 'animals'. He regards this as problematic,
since 'humans' meet the defining features of the Tobelo category 'fauna'.
Rather than being problematic this seems to me to be an understandable
feature of all people's conceptual universes. We might ask if humans
are 'animals' in British or French folk classification. The answer,
of course, is that .I it depends, .R and in this respect Nuaulu beliefs
are like those of many other peoples. An extension of the same problem
is encountered when we consider the place in any inventory of natural
things of domesticated species, or any humanly-modified part of nature
[Descola 1992: 111].
The conflation between 1 and 3 (things and essences)
is best exemplified in the attribution of essence to particular parts
of nature. A widespread version of this idea is associated with animism
- a kind of 'social objectification of nature' [Descola 1992: 114],
and I have shown elsewhere [Ellen 1988] that the attribution of life
to the inanimate (most commonly through anthropomorphism) is basic
to all human conceptualisations of the world. It is the continuity
of natural kinds, as discussed above, which must, in all cultures,
give plausibility to the idea that all nature is animate:
animal, vegetable and mineral; the humanly-modified and the humanly-unmodified.
A particular aspect of this continuity is evident in my Nuaulu data
dealing with the consubstantiality of spirits and animals. Nuaulu
recognise spirit categories in much the same way as they recognise
categories of animal; indeed spirits are treated as natural
kinds, as equally significant parts of their environment [Ellen 1993b:
176-9]. People claim to hear and 'see' spirits all the time and I
have on occasions been present when the alleged discovery of a particular
spirit in a tree, or in a bush, has created scenes of some excitement.
Some Nuaulu spirit forms appear to describe real animals; for example
sinne inae (certain scarab and long-horned beetles,
including Oryctes rhinoceros and Mulciper linnaei),
(kau) kama nahune (edible long-horned beetles such
as Gnoma giraffa and Glenea corona - kamanahune being the spirit of a person killed by falling
from a tree in the throes of hunting cuscus), inararai
(the frog Litoria amboinensis), and rikune
(various kinds of bugs and beetles, including Mictis, Oncomeris
and Euphanta). Perhaps we should not be surprised if it is
insects which are most likely to be redefined as spirits [c.f. Dentan
1968: 26-7]. Other categories, such as naka which
refers to those mythical creatures we call dragons, are used by the
Nuaulu to label certain real world animals which they have heard of
but never seen, in this case the Komodo 'dragon'. Domains become even
more blurred when spirits enter the bodies of animals influencing
their behaviour, as when a sakahatene enters the
jaws of the death adder nanate (Acanthophis antarcticus).
Other spirits are modelled on particular animal prototypes to the
extent that experiences of paired entities seem at times to be conflated.
Thus, masenu are compared with tukutuku (prob. Otus magicus), and ahone
with sakoa (Ninox squamipila) in their vocalisations.
These are both owls and consequently nocturnal, which is itself significant.
Some animals are held to be derived from spirits, such as isanone
ants from isanonenanie. So not
only are there sometimes no simple breaks at domain boundaries in
what we might construe as the 'real' world, there are even areas of
overlap between the objectively visible and invisible.
The conflation between 2 and 3 (space and essence)
is no better summed-up than in the notion of 'the wild', and its cognates.
The natural other is not always chaotic or malign and for some peoples
it might most faithfully be expressed as some kind of 'culture of
the beyond' [Schefold 1988]. However, as far as the Nuaulu are concerned,
it is unpredictable, difficult to control and with an fundamentally
moral character; there are right and wrong ways in which to engage
with forest, which arise in part from the specific social histories
of parts of it, but also from its intrinsic mystical properties. This
natural 'other' is reflected in the inferential symbolic opposition
between 'nature' and 'culture' evident in most ritual, in the specific
rituals conducted prior to cultivating forest, in the charms which
are used to protect travellers in the forest, in the prohibitions
on certain behaviours and utterances while in the forest, in the correct
ritual disposal of its products. When humans enter the forest they
carry with them what amounts to an 'aura' of culture, and when ritual
is conducted in the forest, it is as if islands of culture are created
to ensure its efficaciousness. Thus, in Nuaulu male initiation ceremonies
platforms are erected which mimic that entity which most epitomizes
(indeed physicalizes) culture, namely the house. Individual neophytes
at this ceremony are required to stand upon blocks made of five logs
as if preventing contamination from the forest. Similar structures
are used when performing land-clearing and other routine rituals.
The same meeting of nature as inner force and as outer space is reflected
through the prism of gender concepts in the symbolic layout of Nuaulu
villages. Here, females are associated - through the location of their
menstruation and birthing huts - with the outer rim of the village
(nearest the forest). What is, therefore, universally significant
about this conflationary aspect of nature is that it becomes a condition
for knowledge, by controlling the relation between what is taken as
internal nature and what is taken as external nature [Strathern 1992:
194], that which is natural and that which is of nature.
Contextual variation
We can see, therefore, that logically the functional association
of any two, or all three, of the cognitive axes specified results
in conceptual complications which greatly extend and enhance the richness
of the symbolic imagery of nature. But what is intriguing about human
cognitive and social behaviour generally is that logical inconsistencies
can be suppressed in particular circumstances, and different aspects
of a multi-dimensional idea privileged at the expense of other aspects
in any one context. Let us take a few rather different Nuaulu examples
of these: forest, animal spirits and ritual killing.
As we have seen, the archetypal Nuaulu representation of the collective
natural other is wesie, uncut primary forest [Ellen
1993a: 138-40]. However, this contrasts in different ways with other
land types depending on context. It may contrast with wasi
(owned land, which may sometimes display very mature forest growth),
emphasising a jural distinction; with nisi (garden
land), emphasising human physical interference; or with niane
(village), emphasising landforms: empty as opposed to well-timbered
space, inhabited (dwelt) as opposed to uninhabited space, untamed
as opposed to tamed space, all with various symbolic associations
and practical consequences for Nuaulu consumers. Although there are
no Nuaulu words for either 'nature' or 'culture', it is in the various
and aggregated senses of wesie that the Nuaulu come
closest to having such a term, and from which the existence of an
abstract covert notion of 'nature' can reasonably be infered [cf e.g.
Valeri 1990].
Thus, in particular contexts the meaning of wesie
as a natural other may be sharply dichotomized, only to appear in
a different guise elsewhere. As Croll and Parkin [1992: 3] argue,
most peoples ascribe a somewhat capricious agency to their environment
which they are obliged to interpret and negotiate, and which they
commonly regard themselves as inseparably part of. In some contexts,
even for the Nuaulu, the forest is the people, in the same
way as the ancestors are, in a sense extensions of the living. Negotiations
and renegotiations take place regarding the meanings of forest and
village, cleared and uncleared, cultivated and uncultivated, wild
and tame [Croll Parkin 1992: 16]. Oppositions are set up only to be
transcended or merged; sometimes forest in male, sometimes female;
sometimes portrayed as antagonistic, sometimes life-nurturing. These
all provide alternative modes of identification [ibid., 16].
Similarly, the juxtaposition of classifications of spirits and animals
not only serves to show the structural similarities and the conceptual
bases of categories and their relationship to each other, but also
reminds us of an important difference: that spirits are in the normal
way experientially incorporeal while animals are first experienced
as things, even though the Nuaulu 'know' that spirits have bodies
and bodies have spirits. The logic of this in one direction is that
the Nuaulu must claim to see spirits for them to exist, and in the
other that animals must have spirits because of the prohibitions and
beliefs surrounding them. But the notion that animals have spirits
is problematic if you have to kill them, and Nuaulu culture provides
a very practical response to this, in rituals connected with wooden
meat skewers or asumate. When an animal is butchered
it is generally skewered on a sharpened wooden stake, and a chip from
the pointed end kept and afterwards tied to the pole. This piece is
traditionally employed to butcher the killed animal, and represents
its spirit; the re-tying to the pole is thus supposed to represent
the re-uniting of the soul and body of the animal killed. The purposes
of the asumate are: to inform the ancestors that
meat has been killed and that they should come and partake of it;
to confer prestige, the asumate being placed where
everyone can see it; to return the spirit to the cosmos, and to therefore
ensure that finite stocks are not depleted and that hunting prospects
remain good. Every time a hunter fails to plant an asumate
the wild stock of that species is thought to be depleted by a factor
of one. Such practical steps, however, if taken to their logical extreme
become highly inconvenient in the normal daily round. Far better to
rely upon periodic strategic amnesia and operate with two contradictory
conceptions of the animal world: one which stresses unity with humankind
(and the privilege of taking life for food) and another which stresses
the fundamental differences between humans and animals and which legitimates
and makes easier their exploitation as food [cf. Wazir-Jahan Karim
1981: 188]. Of course, any cosmology motivated by animism must generate
respect for other species, a respect often reinforced by prohibitions
of various kinds. But this need not be inconsistent with hunting,
and I suspect that there may long have been a contradiction between
the doctrine of infinite renewal and the recognition that hunters
could exterminate animals locally [Brightman 1987: 137].
My final example conveniently follows on from our consideration of
asumate. All Nuaulu killing in the course of hunting
takes place outside the village, in the natural other. That killing
which takes place as a culmination of hunting not only takes place
in nature, it involves a part of nature, and exemplifies
the control of natural forces: the domination of culture over nature
in nature. By contrast, animal sacrifice takes place in the village
(is therefore controlled, cultural, killing), the domination of nature
in culture. In the first, the offering is a consequence of a killing
for some other purpose (usually for food); in the second the food
(where it is consumed) is a consequence of the offering. But meat
killed outside the village is not just any kind of meat, it belongs
to recognised animal categories, specific natural things. The most
important of these are peni (the collective term
for pig, deer and cassowary), which is simultaneously natural and
cultural. Peni (creatures of the forest) pass, therefore,
from a natural (un-controlled) condition into a cultural (controlled)
condition, and in an important dual sense sustain the possibility
of 'culture', being identified with the descent group and house in
which their accumulated mandibles have been stored (culture-within-nature).
Animals of sacrifice, by contrast, are of domestic stock (chickens
- preferably cockerels) or of the village realm by metaphoric association,
as in the case of the cuscus (phalangers), which resemble humans and
which, through historical convenience have become a substitute for
human heads. Such animals are, therefore, nature-within-culture [Ellen
in press a].
Conclusion
Nature is definitely not a basic category. It is more a
'higher order' category in Rappaport's [Rappaport 1971: 33-4] sense,
and for many peoples it would appear to have no clearly bounded categorical
status at all. As with more inclusive units in the Linnaean hierarchy,
non-basic folk categories cannot be objectively defined, and no firm
distinction between perceptual and social can be sustained. Indeed,
it is inconceivable that classification might proceed in ways which,
to follow Geertz, 'externalise culture'. Conceptualisations of nature
are not the inventions of individuals (in which case they would more
closely reflect cognitive process), but arise through historical contingency,
linguistic constraints, metaphorical extension, ritual prohibitions
and so on. As parts of belief systems, they are the productions of
interactions, accretions, elaborations and condensations. That contradictions
and inconsistencies exist is because nature is simultaneously an abstract
symbolic and a non-basic cognitive category, variously a model 'of'
the world (a representation) and a model 'for' (a plan for action)
[Geertz 1966]; and it is precisely this ability to switch between
one and the other, to engage with the environment and disengage from
it which distinguishes us from non-human primates.
Our understandings of nature are rooted in particular situations
which when their common meanings are distilled provide us with something
which has a provisional, abstract and emergent quality. Such notions
of nature are the consequence of what I have elsewhere [Ellen, 1993:
chapter 8) called .I prehension: .R those processes which through
various cultural and other constraints give rise to particular classifications,
designations and representations. People bring to situations in which
classifying activity takes place, and from which verbal statements
about classifying behaviour result, information of diverse kinds acquired
through both informal and formal socialisation experience, of the
world in general and of earlier classifying situations. How they then
classify depends upon the interplay of this past knowledge (including
prescriptions and preferences with regard to particular cognitive
and linguistic idioms) with the material constraints of the classifying
situation, the purposes of the classifying act, and upon the inputs
of others. inter-penetrating ones.
In addition, it is important to recognise that the processing and
storage of information in the brain is imperfect, and communication
of that information less perfect still. Paradoxically, there is a
connection between this shortcoming and the considerable capacity
of the human mind to re-order information in different ways, replacing
irrelevant information with that of greater and more immediate utility.
As Sperber [Sperber 1985: 31] has remarked, 'mental representations
have a basically unstable structure: the normal fate of an idea is
to become altered or to merge with other ideas; what is exceptional
is the reproduction of an idea'. Following Lévi-Strauss, he
insists that any epidemiology of idea
s is, therefore, as much concerned with transformation as persistence.
That understandings of nature are messy, cross-cutting and changing
is a reflection of this. Concepts are often used, operationalised,
without defining them. The efficient practice which precedes theory
does not require self-reflection on the operation while performing
it, and much of what we learn, in fact, is learning not to
think about operations that once needed to be thought about [Medawar
1957: 138].
All of this is to emphasise the contextual, variable and contingent
way in which we use those cultural abstractions which in terms of
our own emic conventions we find convenient to represent as 'nature'.
But, of course, in order for communication to take place classification
must have at least some intersubjective structure, agreed cultural
rules, some 'doxa' [Bourdieu 1977]. Much of this is possible simply
because there is sufficient agreement about cultural conventions,
but this is not to endorse a 'a grammar of the variety of
ways in which nature is socialised' [Descola, ibid]. Everything
I have said here suggests that a grammatical analogy would be quite
false, as would be any attempt to confine discussion to a linguistic
level of expression. Very few languages have words which easily translate
as 'nature', yet some focal notion in terms of the three cognitive
dimensions examined here is always present. Sometimes, as in the Nuaulu
case, the resemblance to global etic nature is sufficiently close
for it to be recognisable; in other cases - as among many hunter-gatherers
- the resemblance is much weaker. Language only mediates - and then
rather inadequately - between the many cultural appearances and the
three underlying cognitive axes which generate the possible coordinates:
the objectification of the world, the spatial other and inner essence.
And such a model of the cognitive geometry of nature as I have offered
here is consistent with recent attempts - such as those of Bloch and
Ingold - to go beyond linguistic representation and to situate perception
within actions on the world (non-mediated forms of knowledge), and
to - paradoxically - resist the imposition of our own nature-culture
dualisms on data.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented to a seminar at the
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, sponsored jointly
by the CNRS and the Laboratoire d'Ethnobiologie-Biogéographie,
and as a Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh. I would like
to thank Claudine Friedberg, Cecile Barraud and Anthony Cohen for
the opportunity to explore the ideas presented here in a revised and
shortened form. All of the Nuaulu data referred to has been published
before in the works cited, where full acknowledgement of permissions
and funding bodies may be found.
Notes
I provide here only a few indicative references. Further examples,
together with a more extensive discussion of the 'cultural construction
of nature' are to be found in Ellen [Ellen in press b].
In a sense, my aim is to examine the extent to which it is possible
to identify a category innocent of morality at a time when the prevailing
inclination is to emphasize the intrinsically moral character of nature.
One might, of course, demur that ultimately all categories imply rules,
and all rules the moral force of 'right' and 'wrong'. In this I would
agree.
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