Nature Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The sociological analysis of nature as it is used in the modern west (by specific cultures and space(s)) is fraught with definitional problems, notably the seemingly very different and overlapping senses of the word nature.

It is relatively easy to distinguish three areas of meaning: (i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not human beings. (Williams 1983: 219)

The first sense is a specific singular and was in use in the thirteenth century. The second and third senses are abstract singulars deriving from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth centuries. Williams relates this transformation to changes in religious and scientific thought where sense one derived from a plural, pantheistic worldview of gods and forces, and where sense (ii) derived from a more omnipotent singular directing force as a universal power, while sense three emerged later to describe the unity of the material world so ordered.

While Williams was able to tease out fascinating social constructions of nature it was not equally true that sociology took much notice of nature until very recently. By the time sociology emerged western humanity was increasingly urbanized, and the city was taken to be outside the natural world. Since the city was not governed or anchored in nature, natural rhythms or cycles it was cut loose to develop in opposed ways.

Despite the early work the work of sociologists Dunlap and Catton (1979), the call for a sociology of nature dates to 1995 when two influential articles emerged. Murphy’s (1995) plea for ”a sociology where nature mattered” argued that the immanent and irrefutable environmental and ecological crisis could not be ignored any longer by sociology; that the environmental and ecological movement required collaboration with sociology because the environmental crisis was composed of two challenges: to produce the right scientific diagnoses and responses to questions of sustainability and the right social responses that would be consistent with those.

In common with realist demands for more sociological participation in environmental issues and theory, Murphy preserved the ontologically separable status of society and nature and wished only to understand (and change) the exchanges between them. Critical realist thinkers theorized a dialectical relationship between humanity and nature such that both have agency conceived very abstractly as ”causal powers.” Such objects were not constituted by and through their on-going relations with heterogenous others, an ontology now preferred by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, John Law, and others.

Macnaghten and Urry’s 1995 paper, for example, asserts a considerable social content already manifest in environmental agendas, scientific discourses, and natures and this became of interest to those working in many established fields of sociology: social movements; social justice; leisure and tourism; feminism, science and technology studies, neo-Durkheimian studies.

Since these debates, nature has become far more significant in a range of sociological work. It has moved away from a primary focus on the environment to embrace the relation between biology and society, biopolitics and ”life itself”; the implications of dissolving the nature-culture difference; the fluid and commodified nature of ”life itself” in post-genomic society and new ontological understandings of relations between humans and nonhumans.

Bibliography:

Dunlap, R. and Catton, W. (1979) Environmental sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 5: 243-73.
Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1995) Towards a sociology of nature. Sociology 29 (2): 124-37.
Murphy, R. (1995) Sociology as if nature did not matter: an ecological critique. British Journal of Sociology 46 (4): 688-707.
Williams, R. (1983) Keywords. Fontana, London.