The Death of Nature?

Science, Tradition, and Development in Indigenous Cultures

In a series of important essays, Marshall Sahlins has brought together a number of important questions for our understanding of the relationship between indigenous cosmologies, cultural change, and development. Sahlin's argument is that every culture is a global culture, and incorporates new goods into its global cosmology. I would like to argue here that this incorporation functions not just at the level of goods, but also at the level of 'the commerce of light'.  That is, in our study of indigenous cosmology, just as in our study of indigenous incoporation of imported goods, we must be careful not to insist on imagining the indigenous people in some pristine pre-contact state; we must instead think of indigenous science, even where it incorporates elements of Western science, as nonetheless 'traditional'.  The general tendency however has been to acknowledge the technological adaptability of indigenous cultures -- e.g., the ability to replace bows with rifles without thereby transforming the cosmological understanding of hunting -- while at the same time seeing the knowledge systems underlying such activities as hunting as being perfectly pristine, unchanged by contact.

I would like to focus on the question of indigenous theories of reciprocity in contrast with the Western mechanical model of nature.  What I hope to show is that Sahlins's approach to the cosmologies of capitalism needs to be extended to the comparison of cosmologies in general, that is, that any contrast between, say, 'the' Cree world-view and Western science needs to be made in the light of the long history of structural complimentarity between the two.  What we find on this approach is that the differences between the two are not nearly so great as they've been made out to be: both turn out to be adaptive.  'The' Western world-view is an adaptation to particular political and social exigencies that emerged in the 17th century, while 'the' Cree world-view is in turn an effort to absorb into a preexisting cultural schema the subsequent global impact of the world-view that had emerged in response to local European developments in the 17th century. 

According to one widespread account, modernity came into being as a consequence of the sacrifice of nature.  The scientific revolution literally killed nature by transforming it from a living and holistic system of interconnected entities, human and non-human alike, acting intentionally in accordance with their natures, into a dead system of atomic particles being moved about, without intrinsic purposes, as a simple result of extrinsic physical forces.  This new scientific cosmology would also bring with it a new philosophical anthropology, as humans came to see themselves as radically separate from, and opposed to, a natural world in which they as thinking intelligent agents could have no part.  The world, which operated according to entirely different laws than those that governed our own thinking, was now 'disenchanted', as Weber put it, literally gutted of any cosmological significance --where cosmology is understood as some model of the interrelatedness of the heavens, the earth, animals, humans, super-human spiritual entities, and perhaps God-- and reduced simply to extended particles endowed with mass, figure, and motion. It is in broad outline this transformation that Carolyn Merchant bemoaned in her influential 1980 book, The Death of Nature, and it is this transformation that much recent ecological thinking hopes to undo. 

One way out of the perceived dead-end of mechanistic thinking about nature has been to argue that it is in fact inadequate to the task of scientifically explaining the systems in question.  The study of certain implications of post-Einsteinian physics, or of certain problems in ecological systems, are examples of this.  Another way out of the dead-end has been to turn attention to models of nature generated by cultures that never explicitly adopted the basic assumptions of the scientific revolution that so transformed the West. Indigenous science, in short, has presented itself to some as a possible source of lessons for thinking about nature that may help us to correct some of the shortcomings of the mechanistic model we inherited from the 17th century.

But the legacy of the Scientific Revolution is of course, by now, everywhere, and it takes a strong and nostalgic imagination to see indigenous cultures as if they had preserved their ways intact since the pre-contact time.  And living as we are long after the initial contact, it is very difficult --even in the light of excellent recent work by historical anthropologists-- to separate the elements of an indigenous culture that pertain to it deeply, as a sort of cultural constant, from the elements of that culture that emerged adaptively in response to new, externally imposed circumstances.   There is also no shortage of compelling arguments to the effect that performing such a separation is either impossible or disrespectful to the contemporary indigenous culture's effort to carve out a place for itself in the modern world.   

Thus development, or cultural adaptation to new realities, renders the project of Western self-criticism much more difficult than it may have appeared in the days when Montaigne could call upon the 'Cannibals' to measure the degree of conventionality of his own culture's moral norms.  What thus  voften happens when lessons are sought from indigenous cultures is that the difference between world-views is grossly exaggerated, with the indigenous world-view highly romanticized as one that is fully 'in touch' with the natural world, and with the scientific world-view facilely condemned as being the opposite of this, 'out of touch'. 

These exaggerations stem, in my view, from both a failure to take the role of development into consideration in thinking about comparative cosmology, as well as a general misunderstanding, first of all, of the philosophical roots of the modern scientific or mechanistic model of nature, and, second of all, of the extent to which this model is continuous with those it follows upon in Western history, and overlapping with those in other parts of the world with which it has long co-existed.  The contrast between the West and the Rest, in sum, has generally been overstated, and yet, I would like to argue, it is not one with which we should hope to dispense altogether.