SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

The concept that people shape or ‘construct’ their knowledge and understanding such that it may be difficult to separate objective knowledge from subjective ideas. A useful metaphor is that of a ‘text’. It may be written in precise language and to a particular purpose but its readers will put their own social construction upon it. To each individual, it may convey different shades of meaning: it will be read, interpreted and experienced in different ways. Place, for example, has been described as a ‘multilayered’ concept and at least part of that layering of meanings comes from the ways in which ‘place’ is socially constructed. With many places, such as a heritage site, social construction is involved in both the presentation (by the developer) and the interpretation (by the consumer). There have been many examples of alternative conceptualisations of environment, nature and landscape over the span of human history. Different human groups and cultures have had sharply contrasted perspectives on the environments they occupy. Key ideas include the proposal that social constructions are time and space specific, that they offer a critical stance in relation to the ‘takenfor-granted’ world and that they are sustained by social processes. Social construction revolves around meaning and power, and there are questions on how and why realities come to be constructed in particular ways and how shared constructions emerge and are communicated.

Reconstructions of environmental change employing scientific method are, similarly, representations of events and processes. Contrary to some perspectives in the humanities, however, this does not mean that the [Page 1012]results of scientific method are representations entirely without substance: biophysical processes exhibit agency independent of humans, and humans are embedded in biophysical processes. Thus, constructed categories of human technological development (e.g. hunter-gatherer) and events such as the neolithic transition are generalisations with important limitations in understanding the interactions between human activity and the Earth. Deterministic trajectories of change can therefore be illusory, whereas contingency, defined as the historical and local specificity that has to be accounted for in understanding and effectively manipulating environmental systems, provides a counterbalancing principle.

[See alsohuman environment]