IEP 426: Contested Natures

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 5. EMBODIMENT AND NATURE

Exercise
What is the role of the senses in our understanding and appreciation of the environment and the natural world?

Why has the visual come to dominate our understanding of nature and how has this become institutionalised in contemporary society?

In what ways are our different senses involved in everyday practices such as hunting, strolling, mushrooming, birding and so on.

Does an embodied account of nature ‘flesh’ out the complex ways in which nature and culture co-evolve in contemporary societies?

Embodiment

One of the most profound shifts in late modern thought concerns the questioning of the Cartesian dualism between mind and body and by extension, between mind and nature, and between culture and nature. In the words of Adrian Franklin:

Cartesian thinking provides one of the blueprints for the development of modernity: a secular, progressive, rational and controlled project, separate from but parasitic on the natural world (2002: 180).

Turner argues that modernity became predicated on Cartesian distinctions in three domains (1996). Firstly, rational thinking came to predominate in everyday thinking, banishing the magical, the superstitious, the animistic. A process of internalisation developed leaving people individualised, ‘alone in the world’, disconnected, secularised and disenchanted both from each other, from the world of animals and from nature in general. Indeed, although our bodies may tell us we are just like our fellow animals, Cartesianism preached that we were unique, exceptional and in many ways superior because we had a soul. Animals only seemed like us because they were still stuck with the mechanical body, whereas that was all they were. Second, the clear boundary between the emotional and the rational led to new and more rigorously enforced regimes aimed at the regulation and discipline of the human body (in what Elias has termed the ‘Civilising process’. And third, such Cartesian distinctions came to be rigorously imposed in ensuing colonising and globalising processes.

Through the rigorous policing of Cartesian distinctions across numerous domains of everyday life, a particular ‘mental’ understanding of nature emerged in the social sciences and humanities, predicated on scientific laws, in which values of control, simplicity and order dominated over an embodied, spiritual or sensual understanding. This led to what Franklin has termed the attempt by modernity ‘to banish the body, the grotesque and the underbelly of an ordered society from its smooth, clean surfaces’ (2002: 183).

Please now read the set chapter from my book Contested natures which is on the discussion site as week 5 reading.

An embodied account of the environment

This ‘disembodied’ view of the human – and of nature-society relations - has been subject to widespread criticism in recent years as ‘over-rationalised’, ‘over-socialised’, ‘over-cognitised’ and negating the possibility of embodied dispositions may lie out of reach of thought and reflexive control. In the social sciences of nature this view has also been subjected to criticism.

Tim Ingold provides perhaps the most sustained critique of a disembodied approach to nature and the environment (2000). In particular, he criticises the notion of landscape as a place outside the social, as an essentially visual phenomenon. Instead he prefers the Heideggarian concept of dwelling which situates people in a lived, working landscape, a landscape with their past inscribed on it through plantings, hedges, walls, paths, buildings memorials and so on.

Second, there has been a move to understand how nature is experienced, not in terms of abstract ideas, but rather through the senses. Indeed, one clear line of inquiry in our book Contested Natures was to we investigate the contributions made by different senses to our knowledge of different environments (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). This involves not simply individuals seeing, smelling, tasting, and hearing different environments, but also how such odours, sights, sounds, and flavours are discursively organised. What are the most important sensual mediators between the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ world? What are the effects of the changing importance of such senses upon ‘nature’? Is it not the case that ‘natures’ are in part constituted by the very operation of the senses? What is the role of the senses in leading people to deem certain environments as ‘unnatural’ and ‘polluted’? How do the various senses enable people to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable changes in nature? And what is the role of the senses in an age when the long-term impacts of nature increasingly transcend direct sensory experience?

In particular we addressed the role of the Enlightenment as producing a clear hierarchy of the senses, in which the visual has come to dominate the ‘sensing’ of nature in the West for a variety of reasons (see Bermingham 1986, Fabian 1992, Foucault 1970, Heidegger 1977, Jay 1992, Lefebvre 1991 and Rorty 1980, amongst others). Such reasons include: the visual bias within philosophical traditions dating back at lest as far as Aristotle; the entrenchment of the visual in scientific practices of disciplined observation; the development of Linnaean forms of classification based solely on observable structures; the popularity of travel and forms of tourism in which travellers were less encouraged to give emotional accounts of their experience than eyewitness statements and accurate descriptions of visual aesthetics; and so on.

Third, it is important to ‘view’ such an emphasis on the visual – and the spectacular – a one only one of many ‘embodied’ approaches to nature. It can be typified, for example, in Elizabeth Bennett tour in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, to the UK Peak District rather than her everyday rambles in the immediate countryside of her home. For many modern hunters and anglers, dog walkers, birders, food gatherers, lovers and strollers, the nature of everyday environments are not mundane, sullied or reduced but fully formed around the practices of people in specific environments and communities of their own. As Adrian Franklin acknowledges, ‘theirs is a nature in which humanity is included’ (2002: 189). It is to these natures which we will now look in the specific case of hunting and fishing.

Hunting and Fishing

Hunters and anglers loom large in the landscapes of Western cultures and continue to engage with the modern world in a manner which in most respects is pre-modern. Fundamentally, this has to do with their sensual and proximate elation to nature, their lack of repugnance at killing, handling and ‘dressing’ the bodies of fish and game, and their self-assertion as active members of a natural environment.

All around the Western world hunting, particularly shooting, is a robust outdoor activity with a growing (particularly urban) following. In 1991, for example, over 35 million Americans went fishing over the previous year (19% of the population), and over 14 million went fishing (7.4% of the population). While in Britain there were 3.3 million anglers amounting to 7.2% of the population. In general, according to Franklin (2001) ‘there is no Western or former European colonial nation that does not have a robust contemporary hunting and angling tradition’.

How should one understand this dynamic of social and cultural change? Critics of such practices persistently understand hunting and angling as anachronistic activities in which violence and pleasure masquerade as narratives of ancient rural practice (traditional pest control; traditional food provision; traditional community life, etc.). And scholarly attempts traditionally tended to adopt a ‘social constructivist’ approach in which hunting practices are understood in discursive terms (Tester [1989, 1992], for example, explains animal rights as simply an extension of a human rights discourse applied to the natural world.

By contrast, Franklin (2001) seeks out to adopt a more embodied approach, focusing on the sensed, emotional and dwelt-in relations encapsulated in hunting practices. His main argument, based on ethnographic research with hunters, is that the underlying attraction of hunting lies in the possibility of a ‘highly sensualised, intimate and exciting relation to the natural world’. His key findings include the following.

First, hunting and fishing are often experienced in terms of a sensory encounter in which nature provides a necessary counterbalance to the noise, strife and stresses of the modern capitalist city. This point is best elaborated in a 17th century book by Walton, The Compleat Angler (1962) in which angling provides a fitting opportunity to reintegrate the humbled body into the purifying materiality and rhythms of creation through the virtues of fresh air, quiet contemplation and meditation, intensely engaged patience and concentration, fresh fish, pure water and outdoor companionship. The fact that this book has been in publication since 1653, providing a template for numerous books ever since, and is testament to its enduring appeal of such a rural idyll.

Second, Franklin finds that despite the murderous blood-lust attributed to hunting by its critics, hunters tend to emphasise the embodied and aestheticised experiences of nature, rather than the pleasures of the kill. In particular, here, the attraction of hunting appears to lie in the sensual depth, complexity and integration of this natural relation. And while smell, touch and hearing have been sidelined in modernity, particularly in the sensing of nature, (due to the dominance of ‘visualism’, as set out above), Franklin argues that, in conjunction with sight, that these other senses are honed and integrated in the development of angling and hunting skills. It is argued that the thrill and pleasure which hunters and anglers often find difficult to express adequately in words derive from the purposive exercise of a fully sensed engagement with he natural world.

Third, in opposition to so much of the ‘civilised body’, hunting and angling remain popular precisely because they involve an earthy, sensual and intimate relation to nature. Hunting is not merely exciting in itself, it takes place in exciting landscapes. In late modernity we commonly perceive the forest, outback or bush to be fragile or delicate, but in the hunting literature those who stray off trails or tracks perceive it very differently. These areas are exciting precisely because they are dangerous, scary and unpredictable. When combined with quarry that are naturally geared to avoiding predators, hunting produces a tension balance between the safety of the hunter and the safety of the quarry.

Think

How do you think about hunting?

Does an embodied account, such as the one outlined above, make you better empathise why hunting is so popular in contemporary late-modern society?

Can you imagine ways in which one would go about researching hunting practices?

What other everyday embodied practices are also growing in popularity and how might one go about researching their significance?

Please send your response to at least one of these questions in the form of a draft research proposal to the discussion site.

Key Readings
Franklin, A., (2001), ‘Neo-Darwinian leisures, the body and nature: hunting and angling in modernity’, Body and Society, 7 (4): 57-76.
Franklin, A., (2002), Nature and Social Theory. London: Sage
Milton, K. (2002) Loving Nature. London: Routledge
Tester, K. (1992) Animals and Society. London: Routledge

Web notes by Phil Macnaghten May 2005