Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives

This book focuses on the nature/society interface from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives, drawing upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies - from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Mollucan Islands, rural comunities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. Among the questions posed by the authors are the following: Are the different cultural models of nature conditioned by the same set of cognitive devices? Are we to replace the historically relative nature/culture dualist category with the more general distinction between the wild and the socialized? Do non-Western cultures offer alternative models for rethinking universality and the issue of moral attitudes towards non-humans? Will the blurring of the nature/culture opposition in certain sectors of contemporary science imply a redefinition of traditional Western cosmological and ontological categories?