language, identity, and the creation of wilderness
In my own research, I’ve tried to uncover (among many things) how and why culture and nature came to exist in dichotomies. Intuitively, the culture/nature dichotomy doesn’t make sense. I may go up to Snowbowl and believe that I am “in nature,” but when I come back down to Flagstaff I, quite suddenly, find myself “in culture,” which somehow has been defined in opposition to culture. How did this happen? Does my affect on the natural world not have the same impact when I’m in my backyard? Does my communication, my responsibility, my interaction with the natural world cease to exist simply because the concrete I walk on stands between me and the real world?
I’ve come to understand that dichotomies are, by and large, social and cultural creations that come as a result of the meaning we assign to language, to words. This isn’t to say that all dichotomies are fiction; opposites after all do exist in nature. I’m skeptical, however, when it comes to relegating meaning to words that are, in actuality, not opposites, but appendages, or merely categorically different, which is to say they could more adequately be internalized as “side by side” instead of polar opposites. Take the classic dualism, masculine and feminine, for example: the meanings our culture has created renders each of these poles in direct opposition to each other, and our understanding of what is masculine and what is feminine is dependent on differences instead of similarities. Like culture and nature, we might better understand masculinity and femininity not in opposition to each other, but as working together.
I’ve read in the text, Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash, that the dichotomy that exists between culture and nature first appeared with the advent of herding, farming, corrals, and the development of towns…in short agriculture and industrial civilization. Because these spaces were defined as under the control of men, spaces that existed outside of this control (i.e. nature) became defined in opposition. Once this is understood, we could easily have discussions regarding how this mindset has transformed into a justification to assert control over these uncontrolled spaces (i.e. the ongoing destruction of the environment) and those “savages” who identify and embody these uncontrolled spaces (i.e. the genocide of the Native American), but that’s not the point of this particular analysis.
The point is, as Donal Carbaugh points out in his essay, “Naturalizing Communication and Culture,” “human linguistic constructions shape meanings about natural space” and, as we have seen, these constructions have consequences “upon the local and natural world.” In fact, the very idea that “cultural meanings,” as Carbaugh goes on to say “occur in natural spaces” and are constructed along side our understanding of the natural world in the first place is proof that culture and nature cannot realistically be placed in opposition to each other.
It all comes back to language; specifically, the ways in which language is formed and how it functions within a particular culture dictates how that culture understands their place within the natural world. Traditionally, as Carbaugh points out during his explanation of the function of language among the Western Apache of south central Arizona, “Naming places, and using such names in order to say various things [or think about various things], is a practice in all known languages, among all peoples.” I’d like to continue quoting Carbaugh here, because it begins to explain how our language shapes our understanding of our environment. “Through such a communication practice, people learn particular ways of identifying with their natural place, what specific spaces mean, vantage points from which to view these places or spaces, and ways of living (speaking, feeling) with them.”
Therefore, through the use of language, the way in which our culture has come to identify with food, for example, has drastic impacts on how the natural world is internalized and, therefore, treated. If a culture identifies with the reality of obtaining food from the natural world—from forests, from rivers, from uncontrolled spaces—that culture will treat the natural world in a much different way than the culture that identifies the source of their food as coming from livestock in well-controlled pastures and corrals as well as agricultural land—all of which lies outside of the natural, uncontrolled world.
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