Nature and Culture

Nature and culture have multiple meanings that are related to each other in complex ways. According to cultural critic Raymond Williams, they are two of the most complicated words in the English language. Major subfields and key concepts of human geography, such as cultural ecology, the landscape, environmental determinism, and human dimensions of global environmental change, focus on the intersections between these two concepts. Traditionally, geographers and others have struggled with the question of whether people are separate from nature, above and in control of nature, or subject to the rule of nature. Currently, some human geographers suggest that nature is socially constructed, so profoundly shaped by cultural perceptions, discourse, and physical manipulation that nature has no separate existence from culture. Others accept the idea that nature is partially constructed but explore ways in which to better understand the agency of nature and the materiality of culture in shaping the social and environmental conditions of our countrysides, cities, regions, and planet.

When nature and culture are understood as separate entities, there are four general meanings of nature and two main approaches to understanding culture. First, nature refers to areas and processes that are separate from culture, external to people, and unaltered by human use, occupation, or transformation. Wilderness, in this sense, is a kind of pure nature. Second, nature is the essential quality or character of something, as in the statement, “By nature, kittens are playful.” Third, it is also the whole material world and the processes that make nature function. Fourth, building on these meanings, people sometimes refer to nature as a force apart from human affairs that affects human affairs directly and that offers lessons for how people ought to behave. This is the idea in the concept of “Mother Nature.”

The two main approaches to culture stress either its material aspects or its mental aspects, although in practice these ideas overlap. According to the first approach, culture refers to a set of human skills, technologies, and social organization that groups of people use to transform nature in ways that are useful and meaningful to them. For example, the words agriculture, apiculture, and aquaculture imply the human ability to apply knowledge and technology to manipulate the natural processes of growth and reproduction of plants, bees, or fish to produce food and other useful items. In this sense, culture also means a set of nature-transforming skills or a particular way of life of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general. Hunter-gatherers, the ancient Maya, and advanced industrial peoples have different cultures, according to this meaning. By extension, culture also refers to the products of intellectual and artistic activity such as art, music, literature, and architecture.

A second view of culture is less interested in its material aspects and instead stresses the way in which culture structures thought and behavior. According to a now mostly discredited superorganic view, culture exists above the individual, operates through its own internal logic, and strongly shapes individual behavior. A more common view accepts that culture results in patterns of thought and action among the individuals governed by it but sees culture as something malleable and expressive. Individuals create culture through their behavior, for example, hip-hop culture and corporate culture. A semiotic view of culture suggests that it is a collection of signs and symbols, a kind of grammar and vocabulary that makes it possible for[Page 323] people to interpret each other's behavior and to engage in meaningful behavior themselves. In the semiotic view, culture is an acted document, a web of meaning created by people interacting with each other, and a context through which people construct their individual identities and communicate those identities to each other.

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