Nature and Human: An Intricate Mutuality 9783110579765, 9783110577105

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Nature and Human

Challenges of Life

Essays on philosophical and cultural anthropology Edited by Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta

Volume 5

Nature and Human

An Intricate Mutuality Edited by Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta Editorial Manager Laura S. Carugati

ISBN 978-3-11-057710-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-057976-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057730-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955973 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta VII Preface

Basic Aspects Gert Melville Human and Nature – Transcendence versus Immanence Some Introductory Observations 3 Karl-Siegbert Rehberg Nature and Life as Challenges and Chances

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Cristina López About the Biopolitical Character of the Nature of Life and Death Considerations about Michel Foucault’s Political Ontology 31 Dardo Scavino This Denatured Ape

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Art and Poetry Carlos Rafael Ruta The Nature of Poetry. Poetry and Nature Jorge Eduardo Fernández The Threshold of Nature An Approach through Poetry

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Silvia del Luján Di Sanza The Concept of “Technique of Nature” The Originality of an Inevitable Ambiguity

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Historical Framework Rudolf Kilian Weigand Man or the Human Being – End or Culmination of Creation? Scientific Systems of Order on ‘Nature’ in the Middle Ages

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Nicolangelo D’Acunto Resilience as an Interpretative Key to the Relationship between Man and 107 Nature in the Middle Ages Guillermo Wilde Taming Nature Early Modern Variations on the Human-Animal Relationship Matthias Heymann Investigating Environmental Coherence Concepts for the Study of Society-Environment Relations

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Cultural Spaces Ana María Vara Nature, Inequality and Protest A Latin American Discourse on Natural Resources and its Dialogue with Social Theory 153 Barbara Göbel Contested Natures Cultural Valuations of Nature and Environmental Practices in the Puna de Atacama (Northwestern Argentina) 169 Pablo Wright “Hi, My Little Grandson, What’re You Looking for?” Close Encounters with the Owners of Nature in the Argentine Chaco Qom/Toba World 189 Rolando Silla The Jealous Mountain Range About the Authors

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Preface This volume harkens back to a symposium that took place in Buenos Aires from 5 to 8 September in 2017 under the academic supervision of Carlos Ruta, at that time president of the National University of San Martín (Argentina), now director of the Centro de Estudios de Hermenéutica, and of Gert Melville, director of the FOVOG at the University of Dresden (Germany). Following upon its predecessors dedicated to the topics of “Life Configurations”, “Thinking the Body as Basis, Provocation, and Burden of Life”, “Potency of the Common”, and “Experiencing the Beyond” this symposium was the fifth in a series of international meetings with the title “Challenges of Life”. Throughout these meetings, specialists with different scientific horizons have been invited from all over the world to reflect upon problems and topics considered essential for a manifold understanding of the human being, of its place in the world, and of the fundamental challenges that life presents in various forms. It lies in the nature of the human being to be aware of his or her existential limitations, to recognize him or herself as a deficient being. Of course, one instinctively senses that life holds many challenges. Yet, more importantly, one also reflectively accepts one’s life as a challenge in itself, seeking to discern the conditions and to devise the means with which to tackle it. The spirit of the meetings is decidedly interdisciplinary und cross-cultural. The topics will be approached from different perspectives of knowledge such as, among others, anthropological, philosophical, historical, sociological, politological, legal, medical, and biological ones. The core topics will be examined by looking at different civilizations, which will make it possible to achieve results by means of a comparison and to become receptive to the diversity of world cultures. At the same time, the lack of chronological limits should also allow access to a range The symposium of 2017 attempted to determine more closely the phenomen of “nature” as a challenge of life. The concept of “nature” has a highly complex field of meaning. For a conference that is part of the “Challenges of Life” series it seems important to make a basic exclusion. We are not concerned with “nature” as a concept, which seeks to express the “essence” or the “substance” of something that exists – such as for instance the “nature of law”, the “nature of love”, or the “nature of God.” Rather, it is a matter of the concept “nature” only to the extent that it constitutes a component of life that shows itself to be opposed to mankind (including the fact that the human being is also a part of nature in an ontic sense). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-001

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The conference will thus take an anthropocentric perspective, whereby it will not be a question of the “nature of nature”, but of nature as a challenge to human life – a challenge, which is posed to a human as a “deficient being” who must come to terms with nature in a constructive and creative manner. Among other things, the following aspects or bullet points may contribute to an analysis of nature as a challenge for human life in a philosophical, anthropological, ethnological, sociological, and not least historical way – and that in cultural and epochal comparison: – The precedence of nature regarding humankind. – In the cultural diversity, nature can appear as the product of a creation (for instance, as a six-days work, on the final day (!) of which man was created), as a cosmological emanation, as a “primordial mother”, as a basis of life. – Nature (physis) and the supernatural (metaphysis) – Theophany; nature gods, nature spirits (goblins, trolls, etc.) as symbolic personifications of nature; miracles of nature; nature as an instrument of divine punishment (e. g. the seven plagues). – Nature as a resource (a supplier of nutrition and raw material) or/and as a threat to life (natural catastrophes, illnesses). – Nature as an opposition to culture (e. g. forest and city as metaphors in the Middle Ages) – Nature vs. technology as a conflict or complement; all of nature as an evolving system and humankind as an active member of the system. – Nature as an object of the domestication, of the domination, of the utilization, of the formation of an anthropogenic environment – by way of magic (e.g. rain magic; expulsion and warding off of the winter spirits), science (capturing and handling natural laws), technology (practical artefact usage of natural laws), infrastructural measures (e. g. reclamation), art (the capturing of nature via mimesis). – Nature as the untouched – Deserts or primeval forests as symbols of the threatening; nature as a refuge of the (still) ‘natural‘ (romanticism; youth movement) or of the so-called primitive peoples; nature as a place of possibility and challenge for ascesis; modern man’s normative vanishing point. – Nature not only ‘is‘; rather, it also carries assignments of meaning – it symbolizes certain values, emotions, or even norms (e. g. the modern tendency toward organic products, to esoteric); it is a claimed source of a universally valid law (the law of nature). This concerns a list which exhibits nature in its multidimensionality. The contributions should carve out thematic focal points and thus create a network of sufficiently analytical density.

Basic Aspects

Gert Melville

Human and Nature – Transcendence versus Immanence Some Introductory Observations Nothing could be further from my intentions than to give you a philosophical definition of “nature” in my introductory remarks for our conference. Such an endeavor would result in me giving you a rushed historical overview of these sort of definitions from Antiquity up to today – and this would be somewhat tedious and ultimately boring. Most importantly, it is not at all necessary to approach our intended topic of “nature” in this manner. Do not let us forget that our topic is another, namely: “Nature as Challenge of Life”, by which we of course mean human life. With such an angle of approach it is not a matter of nature as such, but of the relationship of humanity to nature and vice-versa – or more precisely formulated: a particularly qualified relationship that can be a frightening or horrible one and is in any case one that is charged with tension and which affects the existence of man at its deepest core. In order to find an analytical foundation, we would benefit from making recourse to a hoary text, which was written approximately 550 before Christ. At first glance, this text appears completely obsolete, as its contents deliver the narrative of an archaic myth. In only following its exact wording, we can no longer give it credence today. Yet within it, a great wisdom is concealed, which reveals a structure that is timelessly current with regard for the relation between the human being and the being of nature. We can only read the narrative of this text as a symbolic parable, but we gain remarkable insight for our topic. I cite in excerpts: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. – God said, “let there be light”, and there was light. – And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. – And God said: “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowls fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” – And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after its kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts.” – And finally God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” – God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. [https://www.mechonmamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm]

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One surely recognizes this text as that of the beginning of Bereshit, the first book of the Torah, which came via the Greek text of the so-called Septuaginta and under the name “Genesis” to Jerome’s Latin version of the Bible, the so-called Vulgata, as the beginning of the Old Testament. If we now lend our attention not to the religious or theological dimension of the text, then an astonishing glance at the concept of a consistent and universal ontology arises.¹ Depicted as the products of divine creation, everything is of the same sort of being: Earth and heaven, waters and dry land, inanimate und animate entities, plants and animals, and also the human being. All of these together are components of that which we can characterize as nature, and beyond them there is no ulterior form of being in this cosmos. It is a system of immanence, which obeys its inherent laws and is created both to regenerate itself and to hold itself in balance. The human being is a part of this system, but it was the last to be incorporated. That is to say, nature is preexistent to human beings in its legality, such that they have no choice but to live according to these laws. This would be the case if there were not a factor, which allows us to structure everything otherwise. As we learn, the human being was created in the image of God. In other words, and following the thought of the Hellenistic Judaism and later of the Christendom, the human being breaks with the system of immanence, transcending it by means of its participation in a dimension, which enacted the laws of nature due to the Logos as the effluence of perfect reason and – reigns over it. In accordance with our text, the human being is Janus-faced: as a material creature, it belongs in the immanent system of nature, as a participant in the dimension of reason and thereby as a being equipped with human intellect, it also transcends this system. From this endowment derives the authority to subdue all creatures, all beings in this world and to multiply and fill the earth. It treats nature as a dimension that is different in relation to it, although it is a component of nature due to its corporality. Thus, we are able to differentiate with Aristotle that nature is all that which is not created by man.² This is a rather useable proposition, as it implies that among the living beings in this world, the human being alone is creative. The result of the respective activity is of course referred to as “culture.” Yet it is also a quite ambiguous proposition, in that the human being does not possess the capacity of creatio ex nihilo – a capacity attributed only to God – and must avail himself of the modules of nature in everything he creates. As already indicated,  Ein Überblick über weitere kosmologische Entwürfe findet sich bei Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos.  Cf. Robert Spaemann, Natur, 957 sq. For an extensive historic overview also cf. the article “Nature” in the encyclopedia Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 6, 421– 478.

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it follows that nature is also preexistent in everything the human being has created. This is also valid in the area of ideas or melodies, as they must be formed in the neural circuit of the brain and then necessarily communicated – an act which does not function without material instruments or the use of human biology. This may all sound rather banal. It necessitates, however, complicated presuppositions, has highly complex consequences, and is linked with the most diverse objectives, endowments with meaning, and interpretations. In this relationship, it is always a matter of the dynamics between human transcendence and natural immanence – a challenging dynamic, which is determined by defense, psychological repression, domestication, utilization, but also by sublimation, worship, and sanctification, and a dynamic that – aside from a scientific point of view – in most cases occurred and occurs under hypostatizing auspices.

1 Nature, Violent and Generous Vincent of Beauvais, the most significant encyclopedist of the Middle Ages, devotes large swaths of his work to the adversities, to which the human being is subject on earth and recognizes the non-human-induced atrocities, above all the habitat as a fearful setting. He was quite unable to delineate entirely the innumerable incidents that threaten the human body outdoors: “Heat and cold, storms, downpours, floods, lightning, thunder, hail, earthquakes, and faults.” “Also for the body itself”, he continues, “there are so many illnesses and ailments that afflict it and, for which not even the books of doctors can account.”³ The hostility of nature was seen as a consequence of the Fall of Man, after God used nature to punish the human being time and again: the Flood or the seven plagues of Egypt are the most well-known examples in the Bible. Nature acted not only in a damaging and even destructive manner in the technically and medically primitive Middle Ages, but also caused for instance the death of 25 million by way of the Great Plague within the span of seven years, a third of the population in Europe. The helplessness in relation to such a power is experienced by each individual, who is affected by a natural catastrophe, today no less than in those times, when someone loses all their possessions in an earthquake or hurricane, or when their children die due to a present hunger epidemic in the rainless Sahel zone as have done millions of others there. The individual is always faced with the unpredictability, the inscrutability of a numinous power, which

 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale, 5 sq.

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can show no sorrow and thus is inconceivably removed and occlusive. In the event of physical or physiological sequences of natural incidents, the human being does not take on a particular role. Inanimate nature does not act as the human being does, in accordance with willful planning and decision-making; it knows no responsibility, no morals, only the physical laws. In inanimate nature, only the fight for survival counts, for the place in the sun or a water pool, and for nutrition, even if this is linked with the death of another living being. And here, the human being, insofar as it is a biological entity, participates to a great deal as the most ravenous predator and is a total threat to nature. Yet nature also has two faces – though in a completely different manner than the human being. Nature destroys – as we have seen – and takes. Nature also gives, as well – it is the only basis and resource of human life. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth”, is the paradigmatic phrase in Genesis. As the lord over the world, the human being might have the authority and the capacity to make use of nature, but this signifies only a potential, a chance, not certainty. Polytheistic religions without a creator God attribute to nature a reliable embodiment in the form of an all bearing and nurturing Goddess of earth or of the cosmos – be she Gaia of the Ancient Greeks, Prithvi of the Hindus, the Sudanese Onile, or Pachamama of indigenous groups in the Andes. All of these religious myths⁴ are forms of expression with regard for the feeling of being absolutely dependent upon nature and on the necessity to hope that it is merciful and strong. Today, we examine climatological data sheets. Worried about further progressions of climate change, we check seismographic deflection in order to be able to assess whether the volcano takes back the soil that it gave the human being with great fruitfulness. Technology has created the possibility of objective analysis. The reverential marvel before the power of nature, which by way of such technical observations is by no means broken, however, should not dwindle.

2 Magical Nature The human being as an entity that transcends nature by means of its understanding, has always sought possibilities to incorporate nature in such a way into its cultural system, that it claimed to get a hold of it. A purely magical un-

 For further examples see Patricia Monaghan, The new book of goddesses.

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derstanding was formed in various ways over time. It began with the first cave paintings circa 40.000 years ago, when we took possession of hunting animals by creating their portrayal. Such an understanding also accompanied the agrarian cultures over the centuries in ritual forms of rain magic, for instance, and this still takes place today in many valleys of the Alps where between Christmas and New Years in old, pre-Christian tradition, moves with scary and spooky masks called “perchtas” are staged, which were meant to daunt the demons of winter. Innumerable holy places in nature are found all across the world. As mountains, they give entire ethnicities their identity – such as for instance that of the “Ausangate” in Peru. Animistic religions would have us believe that nearly every object in nature received a “personal” soul. They thus ascribe a transcendence to nature, such as the one only the human being has. They exceed this status, however, even still by means of attribution of divineness. A divinized nature is not alone the object of so-called primitive cultures; rather, it provides meaning, likewise a place of yearning and of flight in our current high culture. The intimacy of God in the wild, which is pervaded by him – this was long sought by ascetical hermits. The “sacrality” of nature itself was sought time and again by people in modern times by means of emigration facing the compulsion of a civilization that was seen to be degenerate – thus for instance at the beginning of the 20th century on Monte Verità in the Swiss Lago Maggiore; where it was claimed that: “In reformist clothes and with long hair, they perform hard garden and field work, erect homespun huts, relax with eurythmia and nude bathing, live near to the elements of light, air, water, sun, eat in avoidance of all animal nutrition only plants, vegetables, and fruits. They revere nature, preach its purity, and interpret it symbolically in the sense of a romantic synthesis of art.” [https://www.monteverita.org/de/monte-verita/ geschichte]. Such a “holiness” regards nature in the depiction that it embodies originality and purity and that it may transmit this with a magical power onto man. In a somewhat prosaic form, we experience today this aspect in the shape of wellness centers and especially of the wide-spread propensity for organic products and in vegetarian and vegan food. Similarly, people also believe from the time of the Middle Ages up to today in the miraculous power of stones, which emit secret waves and supposedly possess certain healing properties.

3 Explored Nature A magical nature may reveal itself to man by way of rituals as a communication partner. A so to speak divinized nature may act as a theophany and become a moral standard of life. As it is provided with meaning, nature is within the

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grasp of the human being in its various cultural systems of thought and action. But the human may not analyze it objectively and with respect to its own laws. Such an analysis presupposes distance and precisely not elementary incorporation of natural phenomena into the cultural system. It is the demystification of nature – and indeed it was there due to the pragmatic compulsion to survive even quite early. As an astronomical calendar, Stonehenge was erected circa 4,000 years ago and most likely served the agrarian society in the exact determination of the times of the year; the only slightly younger “Nebra sky disk” likely fulfilled the same purpose. The progress of human civilization is at the same time the way of continually improved technology with the developing and evaluation of natural resources. By way of example, the chain leads from the symbolic key of a Noah’s ark, to the Roman aqueducts, and up to the modern-day power stations in the Emirates that yield an unbelievable 2 billion liters of water from the ocean per day. The breakthrough of the empirical and experimental natural sciences from the time of the 18th century (with precursors such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler in the 16th and 17th centuries) delineated foundations and areas of nature, the existence of which is normally completely concealed from the natural senses of man and were taken to task for instance in the fight against harmful bacteria and viruses, later in the development of human DNA, in the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle (also referred to as the The God Particle ⁵), and so on. A new relationship of the human being to nature thus emerged that appears to have been shaped by subjugation, manipulability, and the total subdual of nature.

4 Cultivated Nature This phenomenon of forced nature can be observed in things, which have become completely quotidian, as they can be traced back to age-old traditions. Nowadays, they appear to have gained a whole other quality entirely. It is a matter of a cultivation of nature – at work for millennia in the conditioning of agricultural soil, in the raising of appropriate animals and plants, in the preparation of foodstuffs. Yet recently – at least in Europe – a new trend has arisen: in most cases, animals are disappearing from the pastures, agricultural land is covered for kilometers with greenhouses, as it is more economical to keep livestock in the stalls and to grow crops with fertilizers in an optimal microclimate. In highly civilized countries, but also in touristic areas, we create more and more artificial

 Cf. Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi, The God Particle.

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natural landscapes, which are completely shielded from the real, wild nature. Only vaguely linked to the tradition of the ancient thermal baths of the Romans, today so-called swimming paradises host virtual jungle landscapes, savannahs, and sandy beaches without rain, without storms, and without colds under a glass dome of giant proportions. Modern Shopping Malls contest with them. For instance, the Eaton Centre in downtown Montréal sports a complex spanning 290,000 sq ft, where one can feel free from the moods of nature both in winter and summer – the crest of an excluded real nature, as has become standard in many countries with the help of countless millions of air conditioning units. Yet we subjugate nature not only in isolated spaces, rather also in the free landscape. Modern ski resorts with a series of snow machines and networks of lifts shape the appearance of great swaths of the Alps, which are positively modeled according to the needs of the sport of skiing by means of the formation of the relief. A massive fun park for potentially 200 million neighboring Europeans is made out of a wild, misanthropic landscape. On a smaller scale, there are of course already paragons: the configuration of gardens was one of the most beautiful forms of expression of culture since the time of the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon”, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the creators of the park of Versailles or of Hyde Park in London sought to realize this in their own way. This was, however, something special only in epochs where the majority of the world was wilderness, and the gardens were oases. Today there are – at least in the industrial countries of the Northern hemisphere – so-called nature reserves, which are conversely oases of wilderness, given that there are only cultural landscapes otherwise. Departing from here, the step to the manipulation of nature by means of instruments of science is a small one. If one seeks, for instance, in the desire to find the purity embodied by nature under relative offers of the food industries, one thus comes to the designation of “natural flavors”. The only thing that is truly “natural” is the fact that the taste must be biomass-derived. Thus we can for instance fabricate the tastes of raspberries, peaches, or coconut out of mold fungi by means of physical procedures and do so quite inexpensively. The scale of such manipulation has no upper limit. Such a procedure may perhaps have no greater effect than to feel disappointment concerning a lost naturalness because the meaning appropriated to nature has been painfully derided. In this regard, a further sort of manipulation points in another direction. The decoding of the genomes of any organism allows for the identification of interesting genes that can be fabricated with molecular biological methods and used to transform host cells such as plants or yeasts. The respective transformants can be employed e. g. as biological sensors of toxic substances (“Biological Sensor Systems”), eventually combined with the ability to

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form enzymes to eliminate the toxins (“Biological Sensor- Actor Systems”). This approach does not constitute a “raping” of nature, as this sort of transformation can principally occur at any time spontaneously in nature.⁶

5 Maltreated Nature The mistreatment of nature is a coined key phrase for our standards today, which glaringly brings to light the savageness which persists despite the progressing civilization of the human being which continues to act in an obviously unreasonable fashion. Such a key phrase may be right in a certain regard – and is yet mistaken. It focuses on the wrong emphasis. What is right is that today the greatest natural catastrophe that the human being ever witnessed has been initiated: climate change, the consequences of which will revolutionize all institution in the world. Also, in our time the greatest thinkable catastrophe for all of nature on this planet and which is in human hands is being threatening in permanent latency: nuclear war, the consequences of which would eliminate all life. What is incorrect is that such apocalyptic calamity appears realizable “despite the progressive civilization” of man. It is much worse: the abuse of nature to the point of potential oblivion is occuring precisely because of the progressive civilization of human beings. One of the earliest natural catastrophes, which the human being caused in central Europe, took place e. g. in the 5th millennium before Christ, when the Neolithic humans developed in the region of the upper Danube from hunter-gatherers into farmers and drove their livestock to eat in the forest. The consequence was a total desertification of huge swaths of land. When seafare bourgeoned in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, the forests – wherever they were found – were cut down in order to construct ships. As a result, the karstification of entire regions ensued (for instance, in the Dalmatian territorial dominion of Venice). Both of these examples from the past are, nevertheless, harmless in comparison to the present mistreatment of nature. We may also think of the broad destruction of rain forests and their replacement with mono-cropping of oil palms. We may also think of the exhaustion of fossil drinking water with the legacy of completely dried-out zones, or oil drilling, by which entire seas are contaminated (as was the case in the Gulf of Mexico recently). Not to mention the massive quantities of trash – in particular of plastic, which pollutes the

 Cf. Wolfgang Pompe, Gerhard Rödel, Hans-Jürgen Weiss, Bio-Nanomaterials. I thank professor Rödel (Chair of General Genetics, TU Dresden) for valuable advices.

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oceans with a yearly amount of 12 million tons over thousands of kilometers – or exhaust fumes, which poison the area with nitrogen oxides. The reason for this decidedly greater impact is the fact that on the one hand the present degree of technical possibilities is capable of reaching much deeper intrusions into nature and on the other hand the potential for exploiting nature can be remarkably more efficiently utilized. But this structure results from the mechanisms of progressive civilizations, which clearly has by no means gone with the advancement of reason; rather, it has only followed the path of constancy of animalistic greed.

Conclusions To what extent does nature actually challenge the human being? Or is the contrary the case? Does the human being, though he is also part of nature, represent the greatest challenge for nature? Our introductory remarks may have shown that both are indeed the case. Precisely because the human being is also nature, he can only offer a reciprocal relationship. This is, however, a relationship fraught with tension from the beginning. Given that the human being also transcends nature by means of reason, he is not completely bound up in the laws of nature like all other living beings; rather, he also stands over them. He can bend, twist, and interpret them – or he can also attempt to deny them in order to survive. Until they re-assume him – ultimately at his death. Arnold Gehlen spoke in this context of the human being as a “weltoffenes Wesen”⁷ – a “being open to the world” –, that is: “A world-open, that is, unspecialized, being who must depend on his own initiative and intelligence in order to survive, a being who is vulnerable to the external world in every respect but yet must maintain an existence within it by assimilating it, working through it, becoming familiar with, and gaining control over it – such a being would be doomed if it had only a few rigid instincts such as an animal has, even if these instincts could be tempered by experience.”⁸ In his view, nature does indeed present a challenge to the human being as it is the basis of life, which the human being is not fully aligned with. He is both directly dependent upon the violence and the generosity of nature at once as well as consequently having to strive to arrange himself by means of intellectdriven actions with the help of the offerings of nature in this world that is open to him. That is the first fundamental challenge that he is faced with.

 Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch, 401.  English translation cited from Arnold Gehlen, Man, 334.

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This can be successful, in that he likewise comes to mental peace with nature. He can attribute nature with the magic of numinous divinity, with which he can meaningfully communicate and can even unite. He can attempt to calculate it as well as to invent tools and aids, which give access to concealed resources and unveil what is hidden to the corporal sense. If he is successful, he can endeavor to establish nature in accordance with his will – be it that he keeps it out of his live to the greatest possible extent and builds up an actual opposition between nature and culture, be it that he cultivates nature, sublimates it, or beats it at its own game by outwitting it. A problem always appears in this context: All of these efforts are predicated on the limits of nature’s controllability. Despite the human intellect, which transcends nature and allows one to treat it as an object, the human continues to make nature useful to him, but drawing the usefulness out of nature always only means a potential, a chance, and not a certainty of perfect execution. And precisely here a second fundamental challenge presents itself: The will of man, to make this “open” world into his world (as occurs today with a force never before seen in human history) and to this end to limitlessly mistreat nature, is coming up against limits set by nature (as we recognize more and more nowadays). That means that the nature is in danger of generating a world with a reshaped nature which is no longer “open” for the human being. The second fundamental challenge is thus to protect nature from human beings.

Bibliography Gehlen, Arnold, Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (= Arnold Gehlen-Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3, edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg). Frankfurt a. M., Klostermann,1993. English Edition: Gehlen, Arnold, Man. His Nature and Place in the World, translated by Clare McMillan and Carl Pillimer, introduction by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. New York, Columbia Univ. Pr., 1988. Kragh, Helge, Conceptions of Cosmos – from Myths to the Accelerating Universe. A History of Cosmology. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. Lederman, Leon M., Teresi, Dick, The God Particle. If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question? Boston, Mass., Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Monaghan, Patricia, The new book of goddesses and heroines. St. Paul, Minn, Llewllyn Publ., 1997 (3rd edition). “Natur”. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6, edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984, 421 – 478. Pompe, Wolfgang, Rödel, Gerhard, Weiss, Hans-Jürgen, Bio-Nanomaterials. Designing Materials Inspired by Nature. Weinheim, Wiley-VCH, 2013.

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Spaemann, Robert, “Natur”. In Handbuch philosophischer Grundbegriffe, vol 4, edited by Hermann Krings, Hans Michael Baumgärtner, and Christoph Wild. Munich, Kösel, 1973, p. 956 – 969. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale. Douai, Collegium Vedastinum, 1624 (reprinted Graz, Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1965).

Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

Nature and Life as Challenges and Chances

Myths of Origin and Visions of ‘Eschaton’ In the numerous creation-myths and cosmological or evolutionary grounded theories about the origins of the world and mankind, ‘external nature’ appears as most initial condition of human existence. Therefore it is always playing a constitutive role in man’s self-perception. A very interesting and mysterious fact is that the Jewish Tora’s or Christian Old Testament’s Genesis is sharing most of its basic assumptions with the mythical explanations from various cultures throughout different ages all around the world, so e. g. with the Sumerian, Babylonian, Chinese or ancient Greek. Even Indian and African tribes describe the creation of the world in similar ways, always being shaped as the result of a distinctive act. It constitutes over partings and differences like up and down or day and night. The water is being divided from the soil and species are being created, manifested and defined by being differentiated. All of those myths tell that man was build out of clay or mud and receives his soul and spirit as given by some kind of divine being, may it be in form of a monotheistic god, an universal law or the bare Logos itself. In most cases the soul is being breathed into man’s body, turnig him into something different from what he grew out of. Nevertheless mankind regards itself consistently as a part of nature, and on the other side, nature in early societies was conceptually perceived as containing a divine spark or some sort of spirit and soul within itself. If, according to the motto of this conference series, nature is seen not only as the foundation of life, which developed under the very unlikely conditions at this certain position within our solar system, but also as a ‘challenge of life’, we have to open up a distinction between animated and inanimated nature as well, although such distinctions between external nature, man and animal seem to be hard to maintain in our days. Even the earliest testimonies of a self-interpretation of the human species prove what is equally true in the scientific age, that dualism and unilateral causal chains do not contribute to our task. They always stay inadequate because we are facing a field of interdependencies and interrelations. This does not mean to dispense all ontological distinctions, which, maybe singularly doubted only by religious fundamentalists, seems just as self-evident My sincere thanks go to my sophisticated collaboraters Garrit Morrin and Martin Siebert. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-003

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for the formation of the human kind out of an animalistic development lineage. It became as obvious as the characteristic differences between the living creatures. Therefore it is a nature-nature-relationship between man and the world into which he is born, and which he must simultaneously create by himself. If we proceed from man as being an “animal symbolicum” (like it has been proposed by Ernst Cassirer)¹ and refer to Arnold Gehlen’s analysis of ritual, then magical ways of dealing with the “other”² (often also assumed as animated nature) and finally its on passing in mythical narratives, we can see that the people living in social relations with each other (and against each other) need a “third” in order to understand themselves as well as their tribal structures (masterfully elaborated by Claude Lévi-Strauss). That is the external nature, which might be filled with other animated beings and – as in totemism – can be in close contact with one’s own group, but always stays being the ‘other’. Taking a look on the relation between external and internal nature of man you have to divide the inner one in three different parts, as it combines the body (Körper), the psyche and the subjective body (Leib).³ So it can be done with outer nature as well. It appears as a ‘giving’ nature, a ‘threatening’ nature and a ‘threatened’ nature. Although all of those variations existed in ‘every’ era, they have often been perceived differently and gained different weights and forms of cultural importance. Giving nature tends to appear like a paradise, transporting ideas of a passed by Golden Age. Threatening nature became uncontrollable and after the loss of an archaic fear-attached ‘intimacy’ it has often been interpreted as divine punishment. Today the disasters caused by earthquakes or hurricanes are being accepted in a fearful-fatalistic manner: Threatening nature stays ubiquitous. After a heavy earthquake struck the small community of Amatrice in the Italian Abruzzi. on August 24th in 2016 (as already four times before in the 17th and 18th century), its mayor said it best when stating that apart from all the problems caused by the insufficiency of the Italian administration structures and the corrupt misdirection of helping funds, he had learned about one thing: “that man will never be able to overcome nature, which is simply stronger and therefore always will be victorious”.⁴ In man’s history, nature underwent a mythical, philosophical or theological initiated and carried transformation from formerly being perceived as framework  Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 24– 26.  Cf. on Arnold Gehlen’s reception of the interaction theory: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “The Theory of Intersubjektivity”, 92– 114.  Cf. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Self-reference and Sociality”,  Cf. Sergio Pirozzi, La scossa dello scarpone, 23.

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of life to being seen and used as bare resource. This development already began in Roman ancient times and established itself in the most radical forms in Europe when being compared to other regions of the world. The Reformation-ethics might be considered as an ideological climax – just think of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, in which the dignity that lies in the momentum of recreating a godgiven world through one’s own work might result in an even more perfect world than that mankind was exiled from as everlasting punishment for the Original Sin.⁵ Martin Luther’s (according to the Medieval Vulgata) subicere, is to understand in the same way when Luther translated it into gods order to man “to subdue the world” and turn it into his subject (Gen. 1,28).⁶ It was Francis Bacon who later describes this submission as a key moment within the principles of the scientific experiment stating that: “Nature is being tortured until it reveals its innermost secrets”.⁷ In our times threatened nature became dominant even though it was not that long ago that the dangerous harsh and fear-evoking mountains have been perceived as majestic and beautiful, an imagination that was widely in effect after Petrarca’s ascend of the “Mount Ventoux” in 1336. Apart from all everyday life’s expediency and suppression the horizon of the great cataclysm is increasingly claiming space in our common consciousness today, as being displayed by the headlines about the overacidification of the seas, the climate crisis, rapid extinction of species or multiresistant germs – it seems more than just possible that the victoriously lasting forms of life on the blue Planet might be bacteria in the very end. Life as outstanding natural form of existence seems to increasingly evolve into bare surviving which even replaces or covers the imaginations of an eternal life.⁸ We seem to be confronted with a scientifically predictable Apocalypse like in John’s book of revelation but without having the savior of the world on our side. The equally grandious and pusillanimously seeming promises about colonizing another Planets or moons with a small community of chosen ones do not really work as a replacement for the world-saving return of Christ, even in our highly secularized times.

 Cf. the citation of John Milton in: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 46.  Cf also Gert Melville’s contribution in this volume.  Peter Pesic, “Proteus Rebound”, 305, who neglects Bacon’s authorship of this famous sentence.  Cf. Stephan Schaede, Reiner Anselm and Kristian Köchy (eds.), Das Leben, XI-XII. speak “von einem heilsgeschichtlichen Metaphernhaushalt, mit dem die ökologischen Überlebensfragen institutionen- und gesellschaftspolitisch traktiert” werden.

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Three Stages of Biological Dominance In modern times you could distinguish three different eras of dominance in the reflection about the relation of nature and culture. At first there was the establishment of the theory of evolution by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin with its lineage out of animal development lines (as their popularisation and spreading has been prepared e. g. through the works of Georges-Louis Leclerc and the Comte de Buffon in the 18th century). It inspired the hope for a unified science in the 19th century even though we have to recognize a development of highly specialized disciplines at the same time. The second stage of important innovations began with the 20th century. Amongst vitalism like e. g. displayed in the works of the world in his time famous biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch (whose interpretations later became verified through Humberto Maturana’s und Francisco Varela’s “Autopoiesis-Modell” of cell-development⁹), it happened mainly through laboratory-research in the fields of biochemistry and ecological systems. At third, we witness today’s bio-medicinal, neuro- and information-technological-phase of production of knowledge and the attached possibilities to influence processes of life. This implies and catalyses the rise of bioscience containing a new availability of live and even painting dystopia of a “post-human status” that is coming with the effects of “human enhancement”.¹⁰ You have to recognise the huge progress of scientific research in genetics that seems to be combined with a radical de-socialisation and de-culturalisation of all life processes. This turned out to be a pretty helpless reaction of researchers in humanities an social science. In the meantime laboratory science is deconstructing the idea of determined genetic programs and came to the conclusion that very different contexts play a crucial role when you want to understand genetic influence on development. How else could you e. g. explain the incredible rate of 98,7 percent accordance between mans genetic code and the ones of chimpanzees and bonobos, when both of them obviously live a very different life and carry very different abilities? We increasingly see bio-factual hybrid-forms like “natural and artificial”, “alive and dead” or “biotoc and antibiotic”, which are crossing each other while developing distinct stages of bio-facticity: imitation, automatisation, simulation and fusion. Out of this emerge imaginations of a hybrid man, which nev-

 Cf. Hans Driesch, Die Geschichte des Vitalismus; and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge.  Cf. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Menschliche Plastizität”.

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ertheless cannot hide the fact that vital growth-processes can’t be manufactured in laboratories. All those astounding enlargements of knowledge are also causing problems like e. g. the conflict about which kind of science can claim to be the supreme discipline in researching life.¹¹ Such competitiveness bares the risk to turn into barricades, hindering true interdisciplinarity that is obviously necessary, even when it is about asking the right questions or setting the right perspectives. Sociology as empirical “science of reality” got every chance to avoid pure naturalism as well as the euphoric virtuality. The reason for this lies not so much in “theories”, but rather in the thematic challenges which demand to be analysed in reference to the objects and based on a factual ground. Nonetheless, sociologist share an unreasonable mistrust against natural sciences and its possibilities to be translated into common knowledge, like you have to notice the same even more radical in the other way round. In contrary to those distinctions it becomes more and more obvious that sciences and humanities (that according to C. P. Snow have lodged themselves in “two cultures”¹²) have to cooperate and react interactively more than ever, in order to be able to deal with the changed relations of nature and society. If the newest debates about genetics and brain research gave the impression that sociology couldn’t contribute to the understanding of the formation of the subject any more it became clear that this isn’t the truth and even many of the natural scientist tend to see it that way. Nevertheless you have to notice a translation barrier between social science, natural science and humanities, that is mainly accountable to a lack of information and communication on all sides. Mutual enlightenment often has been prevented by a number of pseudo problems like the straight ‚determinism‘ of genes (just to name the most crucial one) that recently (according to Richard Dawkin) have been defined as purely selfish.¹³ In addition to that, there have been wrong dichotomics build up and we are facing unrightful distinctions of natural and cultural factors. In many cases this happens through the intention to promote the supremacy of certain disciplines and not in reaction to the objective state of knowledge. When e. g. considering the meaning and importance of socialisation-processes in shaping man’s behavior, you cannot necessarily conclude that they are not depending on biological programming and the so attached set of abilities. On the

 Cf. Stephan Schaede, Reiner Anselm and Kristian Köchy (eds.), Das Leben, XI.  Cf. Charles P. Snow, The two cultures.  Cf. Richard Dawkin, The Selfish Gene.

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other hand, it is obviously wrong to think that educational processes do not have to be taken into account. The whole subject highly recommends a tighter cooperation between biologists, social-biologists and representatives of evolutionary learning theories. That doesn’t simply mean to implement their criteria and (pre‐) judgments but to elevate oneselves on the actual level of the other’s scientific knowledge as it has been done by the authors of Philosophical Anthropology. As all researcher in the fields of humanities are operating over the basic assumption that man’s liguistic abilities are transferring and transcending its relation to the world, you might find it motivating to discover a physician’s thesis, that the old “nature versus culture” must be replaced by a new kind of “nature via culture”. Here the reference to the zoologist Hubert Markl is welcomed, who just repeated what Arnold Gehlen und Helmut Plessner stated already half a century earlier by claiming that: “culture is the true nature of man”.¹⁴

Interpretations of Life in Empirical-Orientated Philosophies Philosophy of Life The entaglement of nature in general and its specific form of life was a central idea in the Philosophy of Life, that has been spread with wide effects through the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, including a theory of some elan vital, that is the core of every energetic an dynamical movement of life. Bodies get vital only after an initiating flow of energy passing through them, always parallel to a “stream of consciousness”¹⁵, as you can imagine by the example of the continuous processes taking place while sleeping and dreaming. Every perception is based upon dynamic processes and you cannot understand behavior and acting when only considering the rational dimensions of it. It is always being determined by half-consciously and half-known aspects as well. Nonetheless, explicit action is always influenced by situational adaption and highly selective mechanisms. Here I might mention an undiscussed aspect that is overseen in the most important contributions to a Philosophy of Life. That means that not only life-forms are characterizable by the category of “movement”, but that beyond that there is

 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man, 72.  Cf. Henri Bergson,Time and Free Will; Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World.

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a ‘meta-principle’ of motion in the universe, not necessarily connected with organic forms of life. But for the discussion about inseparable differences between the animated and inanimated nature in our world, the biologically based forms of motion might be enough for the discussion, represented in this book. At the same time, the philosophy of life was characterized by the contrast of the vital force of reproduction of life by motion and its quiences through the creation of forms, although life impulses could not find an anchor in material reality without them. This is true for natural forms as well as for human thoughts, aspirations, and actions: all formed life is mortal. And from this contradiction, also shared by the early Georg Lukács, there was an emphasis on the anti-life effects of manifestation, without which nothing would be, not only as if it was a concretisation that is limiting the possibilities of what could be and therefore a reduction of the seemingly endless plentitude of life. But also an inevitable path leading to death, as it was most radically conceived this way by the members of the “Schwabingen Cosmic Circle” around Ludwig Klages.¹⁶ Such a “tragic consciousness” as we find it in a less radical variation also in Georgs Simmel’s socio-philosophical analyses of modern culture was far removed from American pragmatism. That is why George Herbert Mead, with his reception of a “philosophy of life,” was closer to the concept of “Geisteswissenschaften” by Wilhelm Dilthey. Here, “life” means the physically underlying (yet cultural) shaping of living worlds, from which Dilthey developed his own methodology of understanding, continued by Max Weber, although he always denied Dilthey as his source in a akward way.¹⁷ During the horrendous political experiences of the first half of the 20th century, life philosophical positions were closely linked to the ideal of an increase of life – even to the “superhuman” effort of a “will to power” (as it had been constructed by Friedrich Nietzsche) later putted together into a compilation by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche¹⁸, which made the philosopher appear like some kind of “house god” of the Nazis – what truly went against most of his thoughts. Nietzsche’s risky philosophising can not be reduced to his moral critique and was every time oriented on the “guide of the subjective body” (Leib). Yet he had an influence on a rhetoric of the upsurge and phantasms of an increase in life on the one hand, and, on the other, an existentialism of killing

 Cf. Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele.  Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the human sciences; and on the relation between Weber and Dilthey: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Geschichte als Quelle des Verstehens”.  Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

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and dying as he propelled the “men’s fantasies”¹⁹ (not only Ernst Jünger’s during and after First World War²⁰). These phantasy-filled mythologisations were also the sources from which a further life-philosophy approached in France. Attempting to re-sacralize modernity as expressed in the 1930s through the Collège de Sociologie especially by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, it was conceptualized as a link between sociological, philosophical and artistic tendencies. Here “life” was seen as surplus as well. From the expenditure of energy and resources an increased sociality should arise, the principle of which is called “energy waste”²¹ (so to speak, offering a correspondence with the sexual metaphysics of Wilhelm Reich²²). But the depths of the myth, the archaic rituals, the tortured and lustful body, the excess for torture and the “feast of the dead”, also mark dangerous zones of human existence and open up problematic neighbourhoods, such as to the futuristic fascist acceleration of the technical war, especially through warplanes.²³ On both sides, it was thought that it could be possible to counteract the ubiquitous extremes of the use-focussed rationality in capitalism: ultimately by transgressing it through sexual violence and death.

Philosophical Anthropology In a less poeticable way and more oriented on the impressive progress of biological sciences, the authors of Philosophical Anthropology found basic categories for man’s position in the world as a creature in nature.²⁴ Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen were inspired by a special a German “understanding biology”, e. g. by main authors like Jakob von Uexküll²⁵ and the recently mentioned Hans Driesch. The till this day fiercly argued “Theory of Retardation” belongs also in this context. It was elaborated by the dutch physiologist Louis Bolk, a disciple of Driesch (and will be discussed in our conference as well by Dardo Scavino).²⁶

 Cf. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies.  Cf. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel.  Cf. Stephan Moebius, Die Zauberlehrlinge.  Cf. Wilhelm Reich, The sexual revolution.  Cf. Enrico Crispolti, Futurismo 1909 – 1944.  Cf. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “’Philosophical Anthropology’”.  Cf. Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology.  Cf. Louis Bolk, Das Problem der Menschwerdung; and the explanation of this paleontological theses: cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man, 93 – 109.

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Especially Plessner described the position of man in the context of the “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch”, defining them throuh certain different boundaries. At first, there are less differentiated life forms like protozoons, then the more or less stationary fixed plants, followed by the mobile but instinctively guided animals, and finally man as a part of nature with a special “excentricity”²⁷, which means a position that necessarily implies an external perspective of selfperception. By taking boundaries as central functions of different life forms Plessner designed a system theory similar to the later developed Cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and the concept of a “circle of action”, as it was described by Arnold Gehlen shortly before Wiener’s work was published. It was also Plessner who said that every period finds it “redemdting word”, which for the 18th century e. g. was “reason”, in the 19th century “development” and “life” as the key word for the 20th century, that cannot be argued over, whether out of the perspective of ideologies nor in terms of God, state or history, because it is the source for those itself.²⁸ It were those authors of Philosophical Anthropology who found their categories for the definition of man by comparising him with the animals. In contrary to this, today’s biologically dominated perspective underlines graduality, meaning that there is no principle barrier between man and animal but an “existential equality” instead. However you might judge this, you cannot deny the hypothesis that only man is a cultural being by nature.

Strategies of Naturalisation and De-naturalisation The perception (and therefore always self-perception) of man as a natural being is deeply connected with two extremes: On the one hand, a lot of realities of social life are interpreted as forced up on by nature, and on the other hand, we might say that nature hasn’t got any serious influence on them at all. In this Dualism, it are the often dangerous naturalisations who are easily accepted. They are claiming that every important charakteristics of man are naturally determined, even if they descent out of very different, e. g. genetic, physical, psychich or cultural causes. So it is a reason for popular stereotypes to believe that one knows how men in contrast to women, members of different races or physically different equipped people usually feel and act. Especially common  Cf. Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen, 360 – 365.  Ibid., 37– 38.

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prejudices about collectives tend to provide easily acceptable assumptive patterns. To realise this doesn’t necessarily mean to abandon physical causalities totally and to culturalise everything. That man has to create his own world is crucial for his artificialness, even “counter-naturalness”, as Arnold Gehlen often loved to say. But man‘s “world-openness” is closely attached to his natural conditions. To say that shouldn’t lead to blame it as any form of “biologism”. Towards both, naturalisation and de-naturalisation, it would be important to avoid any kind of unilateral determinism. Sure there are visible differences inbetween different races (which became tabooed in Germany after the racisticly motivated crimes of the Nazi-regime, nevertheless it is a commonly used term in English). But the genetic codes of different races give us no real clue about the high complexity of the single member‘s outward appearances or abilities, because they are interdependent with a huge number of other influencing factors. In his critique of ideologies, Karl Marx named it “primordialism” (Naturwüchsigkeit), when manmade realities are suggested as given by nature. It is also wrong, to think that every action or attitude is only based upon social or historical circumstances, as it often appeares in revolutionary rethoric. So e. g. in “1968” anthropological questions have not seldom been blamed as purely “reactionary”.

New Ontologies Newer Forms of connecting theories with a double-incorporation of nature as well as of society are – especially in sociology – mirrored by a thematic conjuncture of “the body”. This is true for Pierre Bordieu’s theory of habitus and Michel Foucault’s thesises about the disciplination of man’s body not only by physical punishment or drill, but by new strategies of bio-politics.²⁹ Here, nature becomes a political subject of collective ordering. For him power ist not located in the external world but – as it is also true for the concept of culture of Sigmund Freud or Norbert Elias – inscripted into the bodies.³⁰ Those are also vulnerable zones, appearing like “writings on the wall” in seemingly trouble-free societies in so far there is a connection to categories of nature like those dramaticly painted by Giorgio Agamben, pointing out a correspondance between a powerful souver-

 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction; Michel Foucault, Security, territory, population; Id., The Birth of Biopolitics.  Cf. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process.

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eignity and the “bare life”³¹ in the greyzones of concentration camps, areas suffering under famines or the destiny of refugees. No doubt that we are confronted with this every day – mostly only through mass media’s news. However you might judge this, you cannot deny the hypothesis that only man is a cultural being by nature.³² It was the French sociologist Bruno Latour who dismisses this “Great Dividation”, this construction of “two totally devided ontological zones” by a form of radical “cleaning” between man’s realm and all the other natural forms, may they be animated or not, as a dangerous heritage of “The Modern”, in which two modes of existence would be exclused: God (after Nietzsche’s announcement about his death) and the aninmals. That means people who still believe in alternativeless way in a progressive exploitation of nature. That shall offer nothing less than a new ontology, concretisised in “symmetric anthropology”³³ (which raises the question, why this title of a ‚science of man’ still is in usage as a crucial term in Latour’s writings?). I want shortly mention that paradicmatic turns like the “linguistic” or nowadays “material turn” got the advantage to bring the forgotten or neglected back into consciousness and can provoke beneficial reflexions. But that alone does not legitimatise the whole new thesis. With the recent millennium, the term “Anthropocene” became fashionable to use to describe our time period of the world’s and the history of mankind. This has not been particularly surprising but it fits pretty well since the emergence of the high civilizations with their sovereignity-over-shaped political structures, at least since the Industrial Revolution. This has been linked in some concepts to the programmatic, fundamental-conceptual shift “from the world as a sense-horizon to the earth as a geo-biophysical complex”, at the end of which all the distinctions between the “world-forming” humans, the “poor” animals and “worldly” entities should be repealed. The political geology of the Anthropocene is aimed not only at the attribution of responsibility by the identification of anthropogenic damage balances, but is also a place of departure for possible interventions in the “planetary metabolism”. The latest books of the already mentioned Bruno Latour and his “school” point in this direction. For instance, Lars Gertenbach’s “Culture Without Meaning”³⁴ is one paradoxical title for a new view of the world’s material matters, supported by the pathos of overcoming the so felt arrogance of the hierarchic dif-

   

Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man. Cf. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Cf. Lars Gertenbach, Entgrenzungen der Soziologie.

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ference between “culture” and “nature” as dominant in Western thought. The Suggestion to rethink this relationship is also within the just mentioned gradualism that has been prevalent in biology. And then we also wonder whether this is just as valid for meaningful action, and whether a “capacity for action” or an action-like, if not an actor, at least the role of an “actant” is to consider not only in case of animals and plants, but even for the non-living, inanimated things?³⁵ My skepticism toward suggestions like these and the assumption of an ‘indispensability’ of the concept of culture is also based on the fact that the power of the world’s objects has never been seriously questioned from a cultural-scientific perspective. So e. g. Arnold Gehlen, who, without any diffuse fusion metaphysics, has shown how a “lonely” piece of work can induce a “habitualization of motive groups and actions”, as well as a “shifting of driving moments into the subject of behaviour”³⁶. All this could be applied to “actants” and “quasi-objects”. But Latour’s phrase “The problem with machines is that they are never [?] means”³⁷, can hardly be surpassed in implausibility. In any case, the quantity of suggestive-intended words or, as Vilfredo Pareto would have said, “mere verbal evidence” sometimes mere word cascades, is overwhelming. For instance, the description of a multiplication of “quasi-objects”, by which the “modern temporality and constitution fell out of joint”, is staged as follows: First of all were the skyscrapers of postmodern architecture […] then the Islamic revolution of Khomeini, of which no one could say whether it was ahead of or behind the times. […] Nobody can categorize the actors who belong to the same time in a single coherent group. No one knows whether the resettled bear in the Pyrenees, whether the collective farms, the spray cans, the green revolution, the smallpox vaccination, the war of stars, the Muslim religion, the partridge, the French revolution, the company of the third kind, the workers unions, Slovenian nationalism, Bolschevism, relativity or sailing ships are modern, actual, futuristic, timeless, non-existent or permanent any more.³⁸

Or when asked about how to imagine the “common space” in which “all collectives are placed on the same level as producers of natures and cultures”, you read of a world full of nuances, mediators, delegates, fetishes, machines, figurines, instruments, representatives, angels, deputies, advocates, and cherobims.³⁹ Such politically perhaps shattering but intellectually disturbing phrases are

    

Cf. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, 38. Bruno Latour, Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft, 135. Id., We Have Never Been Modern, 99. Ibid., 169 and 171.

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found in his more recent book “Existenzweisen”.⁴⁰ With Latour the loss of good intentions in the Anthropocene becomes also clear: “There is no God, there is only one earth”, and then “If Gaia is against us, then there is not much allowed”.⁴¹ Against these pseudo proofs, I would like to assume that speaking of the authority of objects is in no way “more immediate nor sensory” than any cultural setting – because it is one itself. But what is to be learned from such word-magic is a novel understanding of a threatened nature which is based on serious problems, and is therefore presented dramatically, because it means the end of human life. Translation by Martin Siebert

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, Cal., Stanford Univ. Pr., 1998. Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London, Allen & Unwin, 1950. Bolk, Louis, Das Problem der Menschwerdung. Jena, Fischer, 1926. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Pr., 1984. Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New York, Doubeday, 1944. Crispolti, Enrico (ed.), Futurismo 1909 – 1944. Arte, Architettura, Spettacolo, Letteratura, Pubblicità. Milano, Mazotta, 2001. Dawkin, Richard, The Selfish Gene. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Pr., 32006. Dilthey, Wilhelm, Introduction to the human sciences. An attempt to lay a foundation for the study of society and history. London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Driesch, Hans, Die Geschichte des Vitalismus. Leipzig, Barth, 1922. Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process. 2 vols., Oxford, Blackwell, 1982/1983. Foucault, Michel, Security, territory, population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977 – 1978, edited by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978/79, edited by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gehlen, Arnold, Man. His Nature and Place in the World, translated by Clare McMillan and Carl Pillimer, introduction by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. New York, Columbia Univ. Pr., 1988. Gehlen, Arnold, Urmensch und Spätkultur. Philosphische Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen. Frankfurt am Main, Athenaum, 82018.

 Cf. Id., An inquiry into modes of existence.  Formulation Latour’s during a lecture at the Humboldt-University at Berlin; Cf. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia.

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Gertenbach, Lars, Entgrenzungen der Soziologie. Bruno Latour und der Konstruktivismus. Weilerswist, Velbrück, 2015. Jünger, Ernst, Storm of Steel, translated by Michael Hofmann. London, Allen Lane, 2003. Klages, Ludwig, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 3 vols.. Leipzig, Barth, 1929 – 32. Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambrdige, Mass., Harvard Univ. Pr., 1993. Latour, Bruno, Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft: Einführung in die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, translated by Gustav Roßler. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2010. Latour, Bruno, An inquiry into modes of existence. An anthropology of the moderns. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Pr., 2013. Latour, Bruno, Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Polity, 2017. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge. The biological roots of human understanding. Boston, Mass., Shambhala, 1998. Moebius, Stephan, Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie (1937 – 1939). Konstanz, UVK, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufmann. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Pesic, Peter, “Proteus Rebound. Reconsidering the ‘Torture of Nature’”, Isis 99, 2, 2008, 304 – 317. Plessner, Helmuth, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4: Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1981. Pirozzi, Sergio, La scossa dello scarpone: Anatomia di una passione sociale. Roma, Armando, 2017. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, “Menschliche Plastizität versus gesteuerte ‘perfectibilité’? Philosophische Anthropologie und Human Enhancement”. In Der Mensch der Zukunft. Hintegründe, Ziele und Probleme des Human Enhancement, edited by Udo Ebert, Ortrun Riha and Lutz Zerling. Stuttgart/Leipzig, Hirzel, 2013, 46 – 61. Rehberg Karl-Siegbert, “‘Philosophical Anthropology’ as an interpretation of Human Life Forms”. In Life Configuartions, edited by Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (Challenges of Life, 1). Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2014, 25 – 45. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, “Self-reference and Sociality. The differentiation between ‘perceived body’ and ‘corpus’ in Philosophical Anthropology”. In Thinking the Body as a Basis Provocation and Burden of Life. Studies in Intercultural and Historical Contexts, edited by Gert Melville and Carlos Ruta (Challenges of Life, 2). Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2015, 19 – 32. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, “The Theory of Intersubjektivity as a Theory of the Human Being. George Herbert Mead and the German Tradition of Philosophical Anthropology”. In The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner. Chicago/London, Univ. of Chicago Pr., 2016, 92 – 114. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, “Geschichte als Quelle des Verstehens. Anmerkungen zu Differenzen und Übereinstimmungen zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und Max Weber”. In Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht. Wolfgang Schluchters ‘Grundlegungen der

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Soziologie’ in der Diskussion, edited by Hans-Peter Müller and Steffen Sigmund. Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2017, 89 – 102. Reich, Wilhelm, The Sexual Revolution. Toward a self-regulating character structure, translated by Therese Pol. New York, Pocket Books, 1975. Schaede, Stephan, Reiner Anselm and Kristian Köchy (eds.), Das Leben, vol. 3. (Religion und Aufklärung, 27). Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Schutz, Alfred, The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, Ill., Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1967. Snow, Charles P., The two cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, Univ. Pr., 1959. Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, floods, bodies, history, translated by Stephen Conway (Theory and history of literature, 22). Minneapolis, Regents oft he Univ. of Minnesota, 1987. Uexküll, Jakob von, Theoretical Biology. New York, K. Paul, 1926. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Talcott Parsons translation interpretation, edited by Richard Swedberg. New York/London, Norton, 2009.

Cristina López

About the Biopolitical Character of the Nature of Life and Death Considerations about Michel Foucault’s Political Ontology

Introduction What is left of nature in our time? Is there anything that might be considered as completely natural? Isn’t life and death still the only phenomena whose ultimate nature yet remains at safeguard of technological intervention? In the late 1970’s, while studying at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault tackled the study of a device he called biopolitics and described it as a format of power which is exerted positively ‘to make live and let die’. The formula coined by the thinker is most eloquent on its own as regards the device’s scope: Natural phenomena of the likes of life and death would have been taken for the first time, as an object of political strategies. Neither sovereignty nor discipline had dared much, according to his analyses. As a matter of fact, if sovereignty had set its eye on them at the time, it was as legal objects safeguarded by the law. In turn, discipline would have arranged a series of specific exercises to carve the body and subordinate the individual’s will. Biopolitics, instead, would manage to intervene on life and death’s very nature. Thus understood, biopolitics would then constitute a form of power capable of intervening and shaping nature at its own will. The formula, taken literally, gives an account of the ontological power that the French thinker attributed in general to the various knowledge-power devices. This is why we have assigned the first section of our presentation to explain the implications that follow this ontological approach in which in not question of a pre-existing and un-modifiable essence or nature. In this context, one might ask about the meaning and constitution – onotogically speaking – of the phrase ‘to make live and let die’. Which expressed more specifically is the equivalent of inquiring whether biopolitics is capable or not of producing, giving entity and consistency to life and death. This question will be addressed during the second section of our presentation attempting to describe both the device’s singularities as well as its ontic effects. Al last, seen that in a Foucault key it is not about abiding what the device imposes, I will try to dilucidate if resistance to the device leads

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us to a kind of primitive state of nature or, on the contrary, takes us to a policy of life.

1 About a Historic and Critical Ontology In several of his latest work of the 80s decade¹, Michel Foucault reinterpreted his entire trajectory encoding it ontologically. This was a true surprise for those who had been following his line of thought. As a matter of fact, the ontological question did not seem to be found among the records of interest of the thinker, who was at that time compelled to trace, on the one hand, an archaeology of knowledge and, on the other, a genealogy of power. And even though his works since the beginning of the decade accounted for the emergence of a shift in his investigations towards inquiries more linked to the ethical interrogation, an interpretation in ontological terms was thought of incompatible with the un-reification character of his analyses. However controversial it may seem, the appreciation of the thinker about his own journey was not disregarded. Far from it, it opened a new and extremely fruitful approach to read and understand his work, since in addition to corroborating the ontological orientation of Foucault’s analyses, it allowed us to measure the scopes and effects of different practices and to warn the historically constituted character of the different figures of the subject. As an example to show the constituent potential of discursive practices, it is good enough to be faced with a re-reading of the beginning of one of the central chapters of his History of madness. I am referring specifically to the chapter destined to describe the strategies of confinement put into practice during the classical period to exclude the madman² from society. Curiously, our thinker dedicated the beginning of that chapter to formulate a critical analysis of Descartes’ Meditations on first philosophy. Read in the light of his belated reinterpretation, his considerations as regards the lack of balance in the application of the doubt between madness on one side, and the dream and the mistake on the other, might be comprehended as a contribution to establish the birth certificate of the thinking subject. Hence, with declared purpose of uncovering Descartes’ intention of keeping madness out of the radius of impact, of the Ratio that he himself was founding, Foucault also exposed the effects of a discursive practice such

 Cf. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”, 679 – 688.  Cf. Michel Foucault, “La grand renfermement”, 56 – 59.

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as philosophy, which was able to outline both the figure of the thinking subject and place that of his flamboyant opponent. A similar ontological path may be read in works such as Discipline and punish, which was read at the time exclusively within the framework of a genealogy of power. However, the author’s remarks were enough. Without producing any strain on the text one could realize that the objective of that book was to trace “a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge”³ According to this statement, Foucault conceived his history of the microphysics of the punitive power as “a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern ‘soul’”.⁴ One of this element was the criminal reform. According to his analyses, at the time of raising the reform, which at the end of the eighteenth century would abolish the torment, the jurists posed two questions, namely: What are the ambitions, the proclivities, the inclinations, the dispositions that lead individuals to crime? What are the fears, inhibitions, threats that might discourage crime-prone individuals? Directed to the heart of the individual, both questions inquired about his will, his desire, his thought until proceeding to endow his soul of historical reality, so that “[…] unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint”.⁵ Although Foucault did not deny the historical reality of the soul, he did question its substantial character. To the best of his knowledge “[…] it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge […]”.⁶ Strictly speaking, the text can be interpreted both in terms of a genealogy of the modern soul and of a political anatomy. The answer to this second objective is the description of torment during the old regime with which the text starts. Indeed, out of the meticulous analysis of the record of Damiens’ process, dated 1757, and that of the journalistic chronicle of the ceremony of the process of torment published on April of the same year, the body of the condemned emerges with an undeniable visibility: His nipples, his thorax, his arms, his thighs, his calves, claim an unusual entity. It so happens that through this discursive re-

 “[…] une histoire corrélative de l’âme moderne et d’un nouveau pouvoir de juger […]” see Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 27.  “[…] une généalogie ou une pièce pour une généalogie de l’âme’ moderne.” see Ibid., 34.  “[…] qui à la différence de l’âme représentée par la théologie chrétienne, ne naît pas fautive et punissable, mais naît plutôt de procédures de punition, de surveillance, de châtiment et de contrainte.” see Ibid., 34.  “[…] elle est l’élément où s’articulent les effets d’un certain type de pouvoir et la référence d’un savoir […]” see Ibid., 34.

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source our thinker was trying to show how, paradoxically, at the very moment when the torment began to destroy the condemned man, it gave birth to his body. These were not his only approaches to the matter. Years later, in his courses during the 1980s, he faced the study of a series of techniques put into practice in the classical Greece through which the individuals themselves elaborated their subjectivity. It was a genealogical finding that led him to consider the workability of a series of reflective, voluntary and singular procedures for the subject’s configuration. This did not imply frailty of his previous position but an extension of his historically inquired record, which allowed him to study other conditions and thus, other constitutional practices of the subjects, such as those appointed in order to achieve the government of self as a requirement to rule others. In view of the above, it may be said that for the French thinker, there is no substantial body or soul, universal and invariable. On the contrary, according to his analyses, through the intervention of their knowledge and their relations of power constitutes and configures certain bodies, certain souls, in sum, different subjects at different periods. Hence, his ontological approach requires a previous genealogy to clarify the wording of the discursive and strategic practices operating at each time considered. As a matter of fact, far from being constituent, the subject is historically constituted each time in different ways.

2 About the Biopolitical Device Meanwhile, what happens in the context of a device such as the biopolitical one which at least in the first characterizations of our author seemed to confront phenomena such as life and death? Would it be an exception that could question its ontological approach? Are life and death not natural instances that, as such, are not subject to the ups and downs of history? In any case, what does ‘to live and let die’ entail? In fact, in order to differentiate this device from sovereignty, he himself was responsible for emphasizing the natural character of the phenomena with which biopolitics must be measured.⁷ For that matter, and amongst his explanations he argued that, in the case of this device “[…] the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a

 Cf Michel Foucault, “Cours du 17 mars 1976”, 213 – 235.

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population”.⁸ He even declared that “[…] a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies […]”.⁹ According to these observations, then, the conformation of the biopolitical device would have involved the entry of nature into politics. Yet our thinker did not escape this ambiguity of which, in his understanding, […] the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode of relation between history and life: in this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power.¹⁰

But, as he proceeded in his presentations, it was becoming clear that, in his opinion, it is not the power of life to place oneself outside or within history. In any case, it is history itself or maybe the device knowledge/power that came into operation in the eighteenth century that would set life up as object of its strategies. Moreover, according to our thinker, it is the conjunction of discursive practices and power technologies, that give consistency of epistemological and political objects to life and death. From an archaeological point of view Foucault had focused the topic of life in “The order of things”, where he placed in modernity the threshold of correlative appearance of life and of biology. Subsequently, the inquiry of the question was taken up by him in the third class of the course of 1978: From a genealogical perspective, the emergence of biology occurred when the population or, rather, the population’s life became the most important political problem in the early eighteenth century. The emergence of other disciplines such as the political economy that date to that time too, and even the clinical medicine from which Foucault held that it became “[…] a political intervention-technique with specific power-effects”.¹¹ In any case, all these disciplines registered in the biopolitical framework had to confront

 “[…] l’existence en question n’est plus celle, juridique, de la souveraineté, c’est celle, biologique, d’une population […]” see Michel Foucault, “Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie”, 180.  “[…] le ‘seuil de modernité biologique’ d’une société se situe au moment où l’espèce entre comme enjeu dans ses propres stratégies politiques.” see Ibid., 188.  “[…] la raison en est à chercher dans le nouveau mode de rapport de l’histoire et de la vie: dans cette position double de la vie qui la met à la fois à l’extérieur de l’histoire comme son entour biologique et à l’intérieur de l’historicité humaine, pénétrée par ses techniques de savoir et de pouvoir.” see Ibid., 189.  “[…] une technique politique d’intervention, avec des effets de pouvoir propres.” see Michel Foucault, “Cours du 17 mars 1976”, 225.

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[…] a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth […].¹²

As regards the conception of death from the eighteenth century, Foucault identified the differences that distinguish it from the medieval experience, in the course of 1976. During the Middle Ages, and because of the epidemics, the men went through the multiplied death experience, of the death conceived as an imminent threat, of the unexpected death and ready to brutally stoop down on life. In the biopolitical context, the problem is the endemic diseases, that is, the way in which nature, the extent, the duration and the intensity of the diseases undermine the health of the population. Therefore, it is no longer a matter of mass, indistinct and abrupt death, but “[…] Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it”.¹³ Foucault had already stated from an archaeological point of view the appearance of this conception of death in the birth of the clinic. In that text, he devoted a whole chapter to expose the epistemological novelties that produced a discipline such as pathological anatomy when, at the end of the eighteenth century, he began to explore through corpses looking to shed light on the mysteries that housed life. In fact, it was the findings of X. Bichat that laid down the fact that death does not happen in a unique and privileged moment but it scatters and distributes itself throughout life. These findings, far from diminishing the importance of death, strengthen its power over life, whose continuity and truth depend on the way it opposes and exposes itself to death. Hence, he defined life as a set of functions that resist death. We must add the relations of power to these epistemological developments. In this regard, Foucault’s inquiries demonstrate that the emergence of the population’s life as an object of political interest produced the unlocking of the art of governing. To govern is not to rule through laws or norms through an unyielding discipline. To govern, according to his analyses, is to balance through regulations. It so happens that this is the only way to influence life and death. Neither one nor the other can be governed by law or be balanced through discipline. Using resources that provide discursive practices such as statistics -in the case of the economy- or hygiene- in the case of medicine, the normalization has

 “[…] à la multiplicité des hommes, mais non pas en tant qu’ils se résument en des corps, mais en tant qu’elle forme, au contraire, une masse globale, affectée de processus d’ensemble qui sont propres à la vie […]” see Ibid., 216.  “[…] la mort permanente, qui glisse dans la vie, la ronge perpétuellement, la diminue et l’affaiblit.” see Ibid. 217.

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the power to influence both supported by the same thing that it wants to govern: its alleged nature. To normalize means to intervene on the both necessary and random phenomena that concern life and death. Foucault lists once and again these phenomena, among which we can find birth, production, health, disease, old age, morbidity. Nowadays, with the possibility of generating life in laboratories and administering death at hospitals, we could add several other phenomena. Nevertheless, we might understand that in this biopolitical time we are not born, we do not reproduce, age, or die naturally. As a matter of fact, ‘to let live’ implies both to give unavoidable relevance and the quality of epistemological and political object to the biological life of the population, and intervening on it to normalize it, that is to say, to regulate and to homogenize all the phenomena that concern it including both the purely biological aspects and the social ones. This reveals the permeability of both aspects and the enormous power of penetration biopolitics has. It might be argued that biopolitics cannot completely pierce the biological threshold. Hence, in the case of death, the device must settle only with ‘let die’. Foucault himself understood, in his first approaches to the issue, the standpoint of the device as regards death, in terms of indifference or resignation. He even suggested that death would constitute a sort of limit or vanishing point of the device. In his own words “[…] death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too”.¹⁴ This would explain the disqualification of death ever since the end of the eighteenth century, which was reflected in the progressive disappearance of the public rituals. While death served to reflect the power of the sovereign, the public character of the ceremonies was not forbidden. But, from the moment death was regarded as an affront to power, those ceremonies began to lose their old splendour. According to this assessment, “[…] death now becomes, in contrast, the moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy”.¹⁵ However, as he advanced in his research, Foucault seemed to dismiss this diagnosis that gave biopolitics a passive role in the face of death. And even when he wanted to exemplify about it, he inadvertently stumbled upon the counter-evidence as was the case of Franco’s death: Although he analysed facts to prove that biopolitics can only ‘allow death to fall’, his remarks show that med “[…] du coup la mort, comme terme de la vie, est évidemment le terme, la limite, le bout du pouvoir […]” see Ibid., 221.  “[…] la mort va être, au contraire, maintenant, le moment où l’individu échappe à tout pouvoir, retombe sur lui-même et se replie, en quelque sorte, sur sa part la plus privée.” see Ibid., 221.

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ical technology managed to delay the moment of death until the political problem of succession was solved. With that in mind, there was no “allowing death to fall” but a capability of administering it, when death was appropriate to happen. Luckily, examining closely the device’s scopes, Foucault realized that biopolitics exerts its deadly function in a both quiet and loud fashion. It does so quietly, when it chooses to abandon large sectors of the population to their own fate. Is does so loudly, when using resources such as racism which introduced a rupture in the biological continuum that allowed it to exert its deadly power on that part of the population that was considered impure. This is not the only example. On the contrary, the inquiries of our thinker detected an increase in bloody wars and genocides. Within this framework, he even listed the threat of atomic warfare with which the world’s population was frightened during the decade of 1960. He concluded that […] this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits – now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life […]¹⁶

‘Let die’, then, does not only imply ‘allowing death to fall’ but also ‘exposing’ and even ‘casting to death’. In any case, in this framework, it is important to stress the following: Out of so many diverse ways which range from regulation to producing death, biopolitics exerts a deadly power that reveals its ability to influence its nature.

3 About the Resistance Now, what can be done in the face of the enormous power of penetration of the nature of life and death, that biopolitics has demonstrated? Is it about settling for a normalized life? Is it about giving up and allowing our deaths to be administered to us? Or in the other side, is it about to return to a state of nature? In order to address these issues with Foucault on our minds it is necessary to observe that, within each device, certain knowledge/power technologies are being articulated, and that at the same time, specific points of resistance are

 “[…] ce formidable pouvoir de mort – et c’est peut-être ce qui lui donne une part de sa force et du cynisme avec lequel il a repoussé si loin ses propres limites – se donne maintenant, comme le complémentaire d’un pouvoir qui s’exerce positivement sur la vie […]” see Michel Foucault, “Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie”, 179.

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being concocted. This means that resistance is not outside the device. They are not, however, unproductive or irrelevant. On the contrary, their effectiveness is such that the author states “[‘power relationships’] existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations”.¹⁷ This is to say that just as power relationships “are everywhere”, so are the resistances, which penetrate the whole device. Hence, they do not answer or concentrate on a specific plan or field. That’s why these are not definite or un-modifiable, but are summoned to mutate together with the device’s own mutation. They might be described as “[…] possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial […]”.¹⁸ According to this, for our French thinker, it was not a question of proposing an agenda of transformations but of investigating with the same thoroughness the resistances that involve the actual device. In the case of biopolitics he pointed out that “against this power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being”.¹⁹ This assertion on life is still standing nowadays. Assertion that manifests itself in various ways, or through different struggles. In any case, the prevailing record is the resistance to homogenization, that is, the struggle for the singularity. In addition to specifying the way of the resistances, the French thinker realized of a character of his ontological conception: It is not a matter of making do with rejecting that which the device tries to determine us to be, but of promoting a singular transformation in line with what each one can and wants to do with oneself. Thus, one cannot circumscribe the multiplicity of resistances to a kind of struggle for a hard and pure comeback to the state of nature of life and death. It is not a question of fighting the assumption of “nationalization of the biolog-

 “Ils ne peuvent exister qu’en fonction d’une multiplicité de points de résistance: ceux-ci jouent, dans les relations de pouvoir, le rôle d’adversaire, de cible, d’appui, de saillie pour une prise.” see Michel foucault, “Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie”, 126.  “[…] possibles, nécessaire, improbables, spontanées, sauvages, solitaires, concertées, rampantes, violentes, irréconciliables, promptes à la transaction, intéressées, ou sacrificielles […]”see Ibid., 126.  “Et contre ce pouvoir encore nouveau au XIX siècle, les forces qui résistent ont pris appui sur cela même qu’il investit, -c’est-à-dire sur la vie et l’homme en tant qu’il est vivant.” see Ibid., 190.

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ical” with the return to nature. There is no such state. In any case, it is a matter of striving to give our lives and our deaths our own individual trait. In Foucault’s terms, the bet for political struggles aims to claim that “[…] beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations’, the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be […]”.²⁰ This time of history seems to find us in this quest, where our challenge is to live and die in accordance with what we want, being sensitive enough so as not to answer to the smarter and more refined ways of normalization.

Bibliography Foucault, Michel, “Cours du 17 mars 1976”. In ‘Il faut défendre la société’. Cours au Collège de France (1975 – 1976), edited by François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. Paris. Gallimard, 1997, 213 – 244. Foucault, Michel, “Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie”. In Histoire de la sexualité 1. La volonté de savoir (Collectiom Tel, 248). Paris, Gallimard, 1976, 175 – 211. Foucault, Michel, “La grand renfermement”. In Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Collectiom Tel, 9). Paris, Gallimard, 1972, 56 – 92. Foucault, Michel, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”. In Dits et écrits, vol. 4. Paris, Gallimard, 1994, 679 – 688. Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris, Gallimard, 1975.

 “[…] le droit, par-delà toutes les oppressions ou ‘aliénations’, à retrouver ce qu’on est et tout ce qu’on peut être […]”see Ibid., 151.

Dardo Scavino

This Denatured Ape This ape, this – denatured ape, this – citizen Robinson Jeffers¹

The modern turn in philosophic thought coincides with a critique of the concept of human nature: that a natus, innate or congenital human being does not exist. Otherwise put, when humans are born, they are just hominids. As such human beings are denatured apes, and it is this denaturalization that has made radical thinking about human historicity possible or even the search for the roots of human nature in strictly human worlds, rather than in biological factors. Homo sapiens are the product of a series of genetic mutations; human beings result from a series of historical mutations. This concept of human nature stems from a rupture with the Aristotelian views that for centuries ruled western philosophy. Aristotle had devoted the fourth book of Generation of Animals to the birth of monsters. The beginning of the book was an attempt to define who were monsters, or rather, who were not, as they were defined in contrast to individuals considered to be normal. Aristotle wrote that children often look totally or partially like their parents. And even when they might not resemble anyone in the family (sun-genōn), at least they look human. Monsters (térati), on the other hand, would be those individuals with no aspect of human appearance even if their parents are human. There may be various degrees of monstrosity depending on the individual’s resemblance to, or dissimilarity from, its ancestors: not looking like one’s parents, as Aristotle put it, is already a form of monstrosity.² Aristotle’s zoology was not different from his ontology. When the Stagirite wanted to know what something was, what gender (génos) of beings it belonged to, when he inquired about the nature or essence (phúsis) of something, he responded by placing the thing in a more general group (genikós), like when we say “this is a lemon”, “all lemons are citrus fruits”, “all citrus are fruits”, and so on. When asking about the nature of something, Aristotle responded by naming the family (sun-génos) it came from, that is to say, its lineage or ancestors. This ancestry is expressed by the Greek noun sun-génos (family): it comprises individuals with a common (sun‐) origin (génos), that is, with the same ancestor.

 Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry 3 (1938 – 1962), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 282.  Cf. Aristotle, Peri zōiōn géneseōs. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-005

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There was supposedly one first lemon which all other lemons derived from, one citrus fruit which all the rest originated from, one first fruit, etc. Monsters, on the other hand, belong to their family, as they are born (phúsei) into it, but do not resemble their relatives. But that does not matter: the essence of a monstrous man will still be human even if his appearance is not. Socrates belongs to the human race and, since men in turn are part of the lineage of mortals, it may be inferred that Socrates is mortal too: this syllogism traces a genealogy. To define the essence of an individual requires placing it in that essence, in the same way as when myths recounted the origin (génesis) of heroes by recalling who their parents or their grandparents were and distinguishing them from their siblings. Defining the nature of somebody or something consists in establishing which generation of the family tree they are on, a definition that the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition would end up calling “Genus–differentia definition”. This is why, for Aristotle, the question about generation, genesis and genealogy is inseparable from the question about the phúsis of things. Translating phúsis by natura is not surprising at all. Natura comes from the verb nascor, a term which had lost a /g-/ that persisted in such expressions as cognatus or agnatus. (G)nascor is related to geno and gigno (to engender). Thus, the question about nature coincides with a search for genitors (genesiourgoi), as we are constantly reminded in Generation of Animals. Science was substituting genealogy, that is, myth. There can only be a science of phúsis because only general things can be subjected to science, to the extent that things are born (phúsei, gígnetai) within a lineage (génos). In Aristotle’s terms, natural science was a science of general things, so there could only be a science of phúsis. Science is only possible, therefore, when dealing with universal necessary judgments such as “all birds have wings”. However, Aristotle’s theory had encountered difficulties. If the wings of any particular bird did not grow, did this mean it would have to be excluded from the bird category? Aristotle was forced to introduce a difference between potency and act: birds naturally tend to have wings, but this tendency does not necessarily actualize, which means a bird may not reach its ideal form, its télos or its entelechy. An individual is therefore not defined by what it did not manage to become but by its origin, by the family into which it was born, because its origin determines that it should resemble its progenitors even if this destiny might never be fulfilled. For Aristotle, as well as Western culture in general, nature is natus, what someone is by birth, congenitally, even if a subsequent accident might impede that natural fulfillment. The modern or anti-Aristotelian turn in Western philosophy coincides with a critique of societies where destiny depended on origin, family or nature. This rupture can be illustrated with an example from a book by Judith Butler: Gender

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trouble. When we wonder what womanhood is, we expect to reach a universal and necessary definition. According to Butler, the question itself presupposes that there is something like a feminine essence or nature independent of societies where women live and work: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being”³. The essential property of women, should this exist, would necessarily be natural, because if it were historical or cultural, it would not be universal but particular, and its attributes would vary with each society and each age. In Aristotle’s terms, this would not be women’s essence but their appearance, and therefore we would not be referring to their essential attributes but to accidental features. From an Aristotelian perspective, the essence of womanhood would be innate, not acquired. Butler, however, suggests that each society and each age “produce” or “generate” their own women, and it is no longer possible to wonder what womanhood is but what kind of women are generated by different societies. Like Simone de Beauvoir used to say, “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” (“One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”)⁴. Gender studies do not focus on being a woman but on becoming one, which would have appeared to be senseless to an Aristotelian. Let us recall the debate Butler had with Julia Kristeva in her book Gender trouble. In the 1960’s the French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst had claimed the existence of a feminine “libidinal economy” linked with maternity, desire to procreate and creative activity, an economy that was probably still being repressed by a patriarchal order. Judith Butler replied that “this very economy is understood instead as a reification that both extends and conceals the institution of motherhood as compulsory for women”⁵. Women’s supposedly pre-cultural nature, which is presumed to have been there since birth, and is prior to their access to any social order, is according to Butler a retrospective effect of the role or destiny assigned to them by a patriarchal power in the division of activities: perform as mothers. Women’s so-called maternal instinct is in fact the interiorization of a norm in the form of a “natural” desire, supposedly linked to their physiological constitution. In Butler’s view, of course there is a natural body, even a sexed natural body –male, female, hermaphrodite–, but gender is what culture does to that body. This action to a living body enables Butler to understand gender as a matter

 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, 33.  Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, 13.  Judith Butler, Gender trouble, 324.

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of biopower. However, we should be aware that this operation of biopower is hidden by the appearance of gender as a universal genus. Females are generated by nature; women, by society. Only, this social or cultural generation is forgotten about or naturalized. And this naturalization of culture is a typical ideological mechanism: it turns what is particular into universal, what is contingent into necessary, what is historical into natural, what is acquired into innate, and what is becoming into being. In this sense, ideology would have the same function as a myth. The latter places society’s historical norms in a time outside history while attributing them to immortal beings. Yet in modern societies, the place occupied by the gods in pre-modern societies is taken by nature. Some societies over-naturalize norms, others just naturalize them. Naturalization of historic norms is a similar mechanism to sacralization of human norms. In this way, discourses that try to explain human behavior through some supposedly natural tendency of the species would be merely constructing a myth of the origins which attributes societyinstituted patterns of behavior to neurons or hormones. It is as if, in the dominion of human sciences, the opposition between science and myth was inverted: those who study nature, or universal laws, resort to myth; and those who study history, or particular norms, resort to science. If ideology and myth turn what is particular into universal, what is contingent into necessary, what is cultural into natural and what is acquired into innate, critical thinking does the opposite. It does not look for what is essential beyond appearance or what is universal rather than particular. Instead, it intends to show the cultural origins of a naturalized concept or practice as well as the historical status of any presumably universal norm. Critical thinking understands that what was supposedly generated by the gods or genes is only a product of human collectivities. Even if women have often had a subordinate place through different ages and societies, critical thinking does not put it down to an alleged genetic or hormonal inferiority but to a generalization of patriarchal cultures, hence looking for causes for this pattern not in innate but in acquired characteristics. From the perspective of critical thinking, there is no difference between human and social sciences because human patterns of behavior might be explained by social causes. If someone explains human behavior taking into account natural causes, they can neglect the role of society and concentrate on the study of individuals, or of the brains of these Robinsons, even if the focus of study might be their social behavior. As Aristotle stated, man is sociable or political by nature does not mean explaining human behavior from social causes. The difference between innate and acquired characteristics, or in Simone de Beauvoir’s terms, between being and becoming, is just the difference between

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natural and social sciences. To explain human beings from social causes is to denature them. But the question of human denaturalization has also been dealt with in natural sciences. Zoologists have indeed observed that human beings lack many innate abilities: they have to learn to get food, to find shelter and even to walk. It is as if the human species was the only one incapable of surviving in a natural environment with its innate abilities and resources. This would explain why humans go through a longer prematurity period than other animal species: they have to learn all the abilities that other animals have instinctively or naturally. In his neoteny theory, Dutch biologist Louis Bolk argued that, far from being the most evolved primate, man was an immature -a perpetually immatureape, and consequently devoid of the most elemental instincts and organs to insure its survival.⁶ Taking this into Aristotle’s terms, humans are potential apes, primates that have never reached their ideal complete form – their entelechy –, and do not succeed in developing either the instincts or the strength or the organs, not even the necessary hairiness to survive in any natural environment. Primates whose natural destiny was inevitably truncated. Humans may therefore have been forced to compensate for the lack of innate, natural or inherited knowledge with an acquired knowledge. In the same way as a physical disability compels us to use an artificial prosthesis, homo sapiens were forced to replace their biological memory with a cultural one, that is, with traditions and libraries. This acquired knowledge no doubt calls for a learning effort, but at the same time is subject to frequent mutations, as opposed to innate knowledge. Human beings are not adapted to live in any specific natural environment, unlike the other apes, but this inadaptability along with the prosthesis put in place have stimulated them to live anywhere and spread out over the whole planet. Nevertheless the species does have a natural history too, otherwise hominids would not have come into being in Africa. But mutations are very sporadic. Instead, mutations in acquired knowledge or habits happen at a very quick pace, which explains why this same species has so many socio-cultural versions. This potential ape succeeded in replacing its natural destiny -suspended sine die – with its socio-historical destinies. Therefore, substitution of natural sciences for cultural sciences, of studies into genetic inheritance for studies of symbolic inheritance may also have, as far as humans are concerned, a natural explanation. Translation: Cecilia Beaudoin

 Cf. Dany-Robert Dufour, “Une raison dans le réel”; Giorgio Agamben, L’Ouvert. De l’homme à l’animal.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, L’Ouvert. De l’homme à l’animal. Paris, Rivages, 2002. Aristotle, Peri zōiōn géneseōs biblia V. Fünf Bücher von der Zeugung und Entwicklung der Tiere, translated and edited by Hermann Aubert and Friedrich Wimmer (Aristoteles Werke, 3). Aalen, Scientia, 1978. Butler, Judith, Gender trouble: feminism as subversion of identity. New York, Routledge, 1990. Beauvoir, Simone de, Le deuxième sexe. Paris, Gallimard, 1949. Dufour, Dany-Robert, “Une raison dans le réel: le corps néoténique”, Journal français de psychiatrie 24, 2006, 49 sq.

Art and Poetry

Carlos Rafael Ruta

The Nature of Poetry. Poetry and Nature Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses fading, And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away. Walt Whitman¹ je vois des lettres sur cette table sauvage André du Bouchet² […] poetry, which is almost the ultimate shelter for poetry. Giacomo Leopardi³

1 Introduction The topic of Poetry and Nature falls within a range of complex coverage in terms of the ample space of time involved, the consistency of its thickness, and finally in the sense that it can be classed within the conjunction that binds poetic language and natural phenomena together. A review of Terry Eagleton’s analyses of the Nature poems, as he so-called them, written by William Collins, William Wordsworth, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Edward Thomas in his work entitled “How to Read a Poem” should prove enough to discover the vastness and complexity of the topic and the nuances implied therein, in a historical context which, in turn, exceeds by far our time.⁴ What is more, it is through such connection with history that we recall the fact that this subject belongs, in its own and always unresolved tension, to a long-standing tradition within which it falls and under the sign of which it establishes a creative dialog, of essential and inevitable hermeneutic resonances, even beyond any of its explicit appropriations. The poetics emerging therefrom and co-occurring with such phenomenon accounts for said domain. However, it appears that, in that same tradition, speaking about nature has always been, for poetry, much more than just speak-

   

See Donald Hall, The Unsayable Said, 1. André du Bouchet, “Relief”, 41. Giacomo Leopardi, Discurso de un italiano, 126. Cf. Terry Eagleton, Cómo leer un poema.

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ing about nature. In the same vein, and with regard to the poems by Edward Thomas that he analyzed, T. Eagleton himself noted that: “If these works of Thomas are not ‘just’ Nature poems, it is because there is no such thing.”.⁵ In the very materiality of the text, Eagleton was able to recognize the “modernist sense” present as to “the extreme elusiveness of truth”. Anchored to the backdrop to such poem was the landscape shaped by the experience of “the deeper upheaval which was the war in which Thomas fought and died”. In all Nature poems, the nature of poetry breaks the boundaries of its subject matter. It should be noted, as an example, that neither in the strictest precepts of imitation of nature (Charles Batteaux) nor in a purportedly new poetry for which “poetic pleasure” should provide a way to see into the life of things and thus establish a dialog with nature in order to make its truth accessible (William Wordsworth) does nature come to the poem, at least, without being socially mediated.⁶ Therefore, even when poetry seems to be the literary genre which is the “most sequestered from the winds of history,” resistant to social analysis, it is always possible and inevitable to discern therein the features of its own historical phenomenality. It is precisely the way in which poetry cuts itself loose from conventional perceptions in the modernist epoch that raises the question as to what kind of society is that on which poetry feels it has to turn its back.⁷ Indeed, and for the same reason, closer to our time we observe that such tradition casts its shadow over the present, carrying with it the challenges currently posed within the Nature, Civilization, and Culture framework. Poetry has not been alien to such challenges and has found itself inevitably racked with their lights and shadows. This is why it has historically established a growing and provoking dialog with both the environmental issue⁸ dilemmas and the incitements arising from the several disciplines born in the field of natural sciences.⁹ However, the surplus of meaning of poetry neither comes to an end within the historical framework of its time nor within the boundaries of its own motifs or topics; its blurred limits extend to all the dimensions of its own phenomenon. Poetry always appears to be inhabited by a beyond itself which, as it is conceived, only takes it to its most genuine being. To be itself, it seems compelling that poetry be filled with cracks in turn giving way to perspectives beyond its

 Ibid., 201.  It should prove enough to consider the examples of Charles Batteaux, Cours de belles lettres; and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads.  Cf. Terry Eagleton, Cómo leer un poema, 201 sq.  Cf. John Felstiner, Can Poetry save the Earth.  Cf. Georg Braungart, Poetik der Natur, 55 – 77; cf. Aura Heydenreich and Klaus Mecke (eds.), Physik und Poetik.

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words, its present, its subject matter, in a manner that is categorical. The reasons therefor are intertwined in a root plexus which might prove difficult to elucidate if one has any aspiration to exhaustiveness. But the phenomenon of poetry reveals the essential presence and different faces of a surplus of meaning which is a part of and dwells in it. Perhaps through this prism it is worth rereading Nietzsche’s suggestions about a “poetry of the future,” which through power not used up can be dedicated to opening up the future, to “signposting the future”.¹⁰ Without a doubt, that is where the most genuine poetic work takes roots. Its work with the language. Its efforts to create a “poetic world,” a poetic experience of the world, for the purposes of which the task of transforming the language becomes interwoven. The creation of language variations such that they turn it into “tout autre.”¹¹ Constructing a language within the language, as Valery would put it.¹² Such transformation gives life to a time that is its own, but as a memory of the future. The folds of this writing arena reveal different aspects which are nonetheless always linked to the same phenomenon of surplus of meaning.¹³ In our case, we know there is a poetic experience challenged by an experience of the landscape in which the world offers itself to its words… the world offered itself in the air, in my hands.¹⁴

We know as well that this entails the risk of poetry becoming opaque, unclear words blemishing it all. Poet César Simón (whose work is quoted above) puts it as follows: “[…] name, but do not make obscure”¹⁵. This involves the risk poetry must run to be itself, a risk that challenges poetry upon addressing its subject matter, its topics, its themes, its own affairs. Because what comes into play

 See Nietzsches “The wanderer and his shadow” quoated by Friedrich Nietzsche, Erster Band, No. 99, 919.  Cf. Paul Valery, Œuvres, 1290.  Cf. ibid., 611.  To foreshorten the issue, we can take into account: That presence that embraces the infiniteness of matter in Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, L’extase materielle; The path to the roots of the poetic word in a rough experience of “sound”, as analyzed by V. Vitiello in the poetry of Rilke, Celan, Montale, and Zanzotto; in Vincenzo Vitiello, Una filosofía errante; The roots of “poetic reason” in immediate reality as stated by Zambrano; in María Zambrano, Obras completes I, 655 – 777; Delay as the listening of the unsayable’s musicality in the dialectal language of Giotti’s poetry, see Virgilio Giotti, Colores.  César Simón, Poesía Completa,119.  Ibid., 120.

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there is much more than that. The fidelity to its own topics is at stake when faced with its fidelity to this surplus of meaning that dwells in it, which is a part of it, which shapes it. This is why, in the end, the essential question about the connection with its topics, with its subject matters, can only be answered from an open plane in the backdrop to such writing. A plane to which a philosophy which has now become hermeneutics has also been summoned. A gesture of and vocation for listening to get to the back room of the poetic experience, to the transformation of its words, to the genesis and transparency of its possible truth.¹⁶ Therefore, the questions at the base of the inquiry into the connection between Poetry and Nature are interlaced such that they asymptotically approach the same surplus of meaning making up poetic writing. If a catalogue thereof proves as unfeasible as senseless, it might seem pertinent, however, to address the issues we believe should be inevitably dealt with here. What do we speak about when we speak about poetry? Paul Valery asked himself.¹⁷ Perhaps we should, in line with the interests of the issue under analysis, push the matter further and ask: What do we speak about when we speak about Nature? And to be more precise, we might wonder: What does poetry speak about when it says it speaks about Nature? Does it jump over its own fence, beyond itself, or does it lead itself back to its own essence? Have we perhaps come to deal with, among other things, the very object of poetry? Is there anything in perception and intuition which conjecture that which is elusive, inexpressible, and ineffable so that just a specific form of the language or way of saying can attempt to capture as the aftertaste of their shadow? Will that mean to approach or come into the caesura (the crack) which dwells in and is a part of us? And would the connection between nature and language not be called to engage in reflection in that? In any case, as to poetic experience and poetic pieces, their roots or works are repeatedly interwoven with natural phenomena or the natural order or anything making up their own landscape, the earth as origin or reference, or finally, in hermeneutic terms, their world of life. This referentiality which in many cases becomes inevitable must be considered from its genesis, phenomenology, and linguistic expression. To translate it into hermeneutic parameters: How does the poetic word that names the experience of that which we might agree to call “nature” come to light? How much of that determines or reveals the very essence of the poetic word and through it makes it possible to glimpse a language bias which is also essential? In such poetic game in which tonalities and meanings, rhythms and ideas, are combined, is poetry ca-

 Cf. Günter Figal, Der Sinn des Verstehens, 11 sq.  Cf. Paul Valery, Œuvres, 1282.

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pable of hermeneutically opening the horizon revealing a new and genuine meaning in the experience of nature? What does poetry say when it says Nature?

2 The Initial Philosophical Question about Poetry The original corpus of philosophical works was built around topics which defined the arena of philosophy’s inquisitive and argumentative development. Both Nature and Poetry, as phenomena to which the inquisitive efforts of reason should be directed, have been present from the start, providing the increasingly genuine and original philosophical question with both content and form.¹⁸ The development of such philosophical reflection rapidly and inevitably met with the phenomenon of poetry, perhaps on account of the role (as we know) poetry played in the evolution of Greek “paideia” and thus in the ubiquity of such phenomenon in its experience as a whole. A preliminary inquiry into the interest in nature shown by ancient philosophers already suggests that a look into the question about the demarcation and conceptual articulation of the poetic phenomenon may reveal the origin of the connection with the question about nature. Therefore, it is possible to observe there a first outline of the connections between Nature and Poetry even in view of the historical diversity of poetry itself, not only with regard to its central motifs, but also to formal differences. We are well aware that any first steps in the research in such directions must be based on the study of the determinations formed by the different lexical and semantic fields underpinning the development of Greek poetic as it was emerging. Thanks to such emerging poetry, the western world inherited (at least) a linguistic exercise in and a reflection on the variations in the meaning of the verb “poiein” and its abstract and adjectival extensions. The crux became denser as it was interwoven into a weft which defines “poiesis” as “creation,” as the act of doing, initially, with the hands, until the act is one of doing with “logos,” in a turn of fruitful consequences in the echoes of reappropriation which are to be caused with the passage of time. However, almost as if geometrically squaring the germinal semantic circle, there is another group of terms that go beyond and complete the warp of meaning revealing and in turn shaping the Greek poetic experience: mimesis, techne, logos, enthousiasmos, cromata… are some of the signifiers that consolidate a vital historical flow for the formation of the com With regard to this entire section, see Emilio Lledó Iñigo, El concepto de “Poíesis”.

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plex semantics of poetry. At least in the beginning, from the Pre-Socratic philosophers to Plato, the process of semantic formation and lematic plurality became richer and richer, fueling a philosophical reflection that was necessary, inescapable, and crucial. Even when the Sophists pioneered a novel approach, swimming against the tide with immensely fruitful ramifications, it may be said that the most prevailing setting for the initial connection between Philosophy and Poetry reveals a tension whose aspect is often that of rivalry and hounding. Nevertheless, knots are, at the same time, being tied therein interlacing experience and language and giving rise to a variety of meanings with regard to poetry which in their transparency make it possible to reinterpret the diversity of the poetic phenomenon including, indubitably, our own experience, born out of the twists of modern poetry. Such reinterpretation against the light reveals that many of the concerns or worries of contemporary poetry find their roots in the Greek experience, in whose resonance they may be reconsidered without lapsing into hermeneutic anachronisms. Because there is a backdrop, a substratum, some essential ground perhaps common to the entire poetic experience which dynamically concerns the nature of language and thus the language of nature, particularly the poetry which speaks about nature. Although the intersections of “poiesis” and “physis” at the time of emergence of Greek poetry do not exhaust, by any means, all of their options, they make it possible, however, to catch an early glimpse of some keys to reinterpreting our own experience within the framework of the increasingly conflictive crisis that depicts the relationship between contemporary man and the natural environment, his own ecosystem. We could take note of at least three aspects in which verse and nature intersect each other in the context of ancient Greek poetry, to wit: a) The doing of poiesis appears on numerous occasions, from Heraclitus to Plato, and is defined as a “cata fusin” creation, based on nature, making reference to the several determinations hovering above poetic work on account of the nature of the poet himself. It is within this semantic and argumentative vein that every consideration of allegedly irrationalist features with which the work of the poet is burdened falls. But behind this disdainful mask we can appreciate some of the substantial characteristics of poetic work as a part (for different reasons beyond the first presentations of early Greek philosophy) of certain magnetization, to refer to the Platonic metaphor used in the first text in which this doctrine is introduced as a whole in ancient times, that is to say, Plato’s dialogue “Ion”. Such magnetization indirectly foretells the hermeneutic power exercised by the source and matter

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from which, and on the basis of which, the entire poetic deployment is articulated, to wit: Logos. b) Nature and Poiesis not only share the fact that they are creative forces in whose dynamics both the world of phenomena and the discourse on them come into play. In this regard, poetry also shapes its object in Nature itself through a process of mimesis, the complex semantics of which finally becomes condensed in a recreational doing of reality which slowly directs its movement and meaning to focus on its own logos as its most genuine content. In this manner, poetic words come to reveal appearance, carrying within themselves the power to let us see a chromatism of the world which only emerges from the opening-up attributable to poetic creation. Therefore, poetry (even as pejoratively considered) is regarded as a mirror of the world, of nature, an opening-up of meaning of the materialization of reality displaying its colors in the chromatism of language itself. c) If every doing of man is doing with Logos within the meaning attributed to it by Heraclitus (fragment 26), the creative doing referred to by poiesis undoubtedly fully addresses its subject matter in the deployment of logos and gains its transforming power from the power of Logos itself (“logos dunastis megas estín”, in terms of Gorgias). Even when contexts are different, it is possible to observe, in the Greek experience, the essential connections between Nature and Logos in themselves, the irrigation of which reaches the creative power of poetry.

3 An Unavoidable and Relentless Provocation How essential is a poem’s motif to its own structure? How essential is poetic form to the development of a poem’s theme? Even though these inquiries call into question any careless remarks with regard to poetry and its motifs, there is no doubt as to their legitimacy both in reference to many of their past historical materializations and the consideration of the manner in which modern poetry is essentially shaped. These precautions prove, of course, valid for the analysis of and search for a meaning of a poetry that seems to address natural phenomena. In this regard, I would like to mention two paradigmatic examples. Among Empedocles’s fragments we find no text on “poiesis” and the verb “poiein” does not even appear. We do find, however, an indirect reference in Aristotle’s Poetry in accordance with which Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except for “meter”. This is why the former is more aptly called a poet as opposed to the lat-

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ter, who, rather than a poet, is a physiologist. Contrary to the distinction drawn by Gorgias, who argues that poetry is simply a Logos with “metron”, Aristotle claims that poetry belongs to a deeper dimension and thus may not be limited to a simple formal consideration of “meter” or of a poem’s lines. Even though it would not be pertinent to dwell on the analysis of the reasons possibly leading to the choice of the metrical pattern in Empedocles’s fragments, we know that this is not in the least the only case which, for us —contemporary readers—, raises questions which, on the other hand, may help us (however) understand our own poetic experience. Lucretius chooses metrical verse for his “De rerum natura”, in which case and for didactic purposes, it is the author himself that expounds some of the reasons therefor.¹⁹ Perhaps today nobody would be able to write didactic poetry intending it to have the poetic veracity which can be ascribed, from their very core, to the best exponents of modern and/or contemporary poetry. In no way does this entail leaving out the question about the meaning of a poem that arises, at least, from a contemplative stance with regard to natural phenomena. A first answer should perhaps consider the roots of such encounters. Something which for a poet has been claimed from the very presence of the world. In “Fields of Castile,” A. Machado, in the presence of the ilex forests, asks himself: Castilian ilex forests on slopes and hillsides, mountain chains and hills, full of dark thickets, ilexes, brown ilexes, humility and fortitude! While the axe continues to fill you with clearings, will no one have the power to sing of you, ilex forests?²⁰

Machado’s question is made, as in so many of his texts, on the basis of a claim, a demand imposed as a requirement towards the presence of the world in its entire phenomenality. The experience of this “being” of the world (in its natural phenomena) requires words that may take no form, as they are called, other than that of poetry. Such essential demand may appear to be determined by a variety of roots which cannot be exhaustively classified.

 Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum Natura, 15 sq.  Antonio Machado, Campos de castilla, 9.

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There might be the features of a return to one’s hometown, the search for the word that comes from one’s native land, as may be the case of the texts by Yves Bonnefoy analyzed by Michel Collot²¹, or even the privileged occasion of one’s encounter with oneself depicted by Petrarch in the texts written during his retreat in Vaucluse²², the emergence of grandeur of the landscape in authors such as Jorge Leónidas Escudero²³, or the tension between the drama of human existence and the search for an answer to it in nature, as in Louise Glück’s work.²⁴ In all of them (cited as a meager example) and under different veils, camouflaged, is a fate which is a provocation of freedom in the writer’s strokes. However, the “unavoidable and provoking” nature of such link between poetry and nature, which on many occasions shows the folds and frankness of the trap, brings behind itself yet another question, perhaps more fundamental, which inverts the terms of Valery’s question at the start of this work: the question is no longer about what we speak about when we speak about poetry but, rather, what poetry speaks about (when poetry speaks).

4 The Truth of Poetry The aforementioned question would unveil all its banality, or even its futile emptiness, if it self-referentially hinted at a possible catalog of subject matters, motifs, affairs, subjects. What calibrates poetic speech in its substance and character is ultimately the measure of its veracity. What counts is not so much the subject matter of a poem but the fidelity to its poetic statutes (to its code). In such a way that this amalgamation between form and content only acquires meaning and substance in symmetry with its veracity, with its proximity —or essential availability— to the power of “truth” that prints its own sign on the fullest poetry. However, the contribution of poetry to the truth, even to the truth of the world, requires in itself a hermeneutic reflection on the truth in poetry. An issue that inevitably overlaps with the question about the nature of poetry, at least with regard to the shape of poetry since the nineteenth century. On its root reverse, poetry is nothing but language. Without a doubt, a peculiar form of language. But is this a truism or does it conceal a deeper, more real meaning? Here it is worth remembering the question that Gadamer asked him-

   

Cf. Michel Collot, “Yves Bonnefoy et l’arriere-pays”, 137– 178. Cf. Carlos Ruta, “Audeo te tibi credere”, 213 – 224. Cf. Jorge L. Escudero, Poesía Completa. In particular, see Louise Glück, Las siete edades, 172– 174.

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self when trying to give some thought to poetic truth: “What about the language that is the language of poetry?”²⁵ Before moving forward with the answer that Gadamer attempts to interweave, it would be perhaps pertinent to make a brief reference to the poetic quality ascribed by Humboldt to such language. In order to perceive the roots (the root system) from which poetic work draws all of its power and potentiality. All the determinations of language (speech as a general human activity, language as the historical form of speech of a linguistic community, discourse traditions) are found in the speech of each individual, in which all the historical and universal dimensions of language converge. And the speaker who expresses that which is universal and at the same time addresses historical peculiarities creates, at all times, something new and unrepeatable, even in the most banal of its expressions. An entirely new and individual event (Ereignis) always takes place there. It is individual creativity that engages in combat with group standards or universal language conditions. This is certainly neither a creation from nothingness nor a summit of creativity; however, this activity leaves traces in the language: Keiner denkt bei dem Wort gerade und genau das, was der andre, un die noch so kleine Verschiedenheit zittert, wie ein Kreis im Wasser, durch die ganze Sprache fort.²⁶

And, of course, such creative combat is waged in a particularly intense way in Literature in a broad sense and even more fully in Poetry. There appears what Humboldt calls “Arbeit des Geistes” (work of the spirit). A task that completes or deepens the work of “speech” (Rede) while it deploys its own creative potential. These considerations finally enable us to glimpse a “quality of the linguistic”: its “poetic” nature, as Humbodt himself called it. Beyond any cliché in this regard, this poetic quality of language refers to the fact that every manifestation of speech is always an expression of surplus human creativity, which comes into play in the differentiation between man and other living beings. There is a remnant of shadow that makes human beings different and in whose crux appears the phenomenon of language. Precisely that inexplicable zone is the “poetic” side of language, as Humboldt liked to call it, in line with his consideration of man as a living being who is essentially a creature that sings (ein singendes Geschöpf), like so many others, but that, in his own specificity, unites song pitch with meanings, the world of meanings.²⁷ That is why in

 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Über den Beitrag der Dichtkunst”, 73.  Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawiwerk, 64.  Cf. Id., 1827 – 1835, 156.

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this tradition —in which we could also include Noam Chomsky himself—, Poetry is not the other issue about language but language itself. In this regard, as Jürgend Trabant recalls, in Poetry, man as “Thiergattung” (animal species) returns to himself speaking, singing, that is to say, articulating Meanings (Ideen) with Tones, and this occurs in each expression of the individual man as well as in the freedom of Poetry.²⁸ From this horizon we can now reconsider the question raised by Gadamer about the language that is the language of poetry. How does truth, its own truth, come to this language? In this regard, Gadamer implies that the question about the truth of poetry becomes the question about true poetry, as if only such true poetry were capable of containing truth. Only secondly will it be possible to inquire into what kind of truth is the truth of poetry. In explicit reference to Heidegger, Gadamer contends that the kind of truth that pertains to poetry is that which bears one of the senses of the Greek expression “Aletheia”. Namely, the true is that which is shown as it is. Therefore, the question is “What is it that comes to light in poetry? What is a poetic word in its truth? How does it pertain to the concept of word?”²⁹ The last question hints at or refers to the underlying matter: What kind of word is the poetic word or, perhaps better, in which sense is the poetic word word and how does it match what the word (in itself) fundamentally determines? There are at least two defining features pointed out by Gadamer which constitute speech. On the one hand, the result, the general achievement of speech is to “make manifest” (Offenbarmachens – deloun). On the other hand, a common feature to speech is that what has been evoked by the word is there. But in this vein, the decisive thing is that the word calls (beschwören) the beingthere (Dasein) in such a way that it leaves it at hand. In the arch made up of these two points we shall find the features defining the poetic word so that we can, from then onwards, approach a sense of the truth in itself. This word which also carries the full weight of being a written word is, for Gadamer, a word in an eminent sense; it constitutes an eminent experience of the language insofar as a poem is not before us as something whereby someone would like to say something. Poetry is there in itself (Es steht in sich da), and it is in itself before the person who writes it and before that who receives it. Devoid of all reference (Meinen), it is a full word (ganz Wort). This is why, for Gadamer, poetry or the poetic text could be called “Aussage”, a statement. This is intended to express a claim to completeness, aiming to fully say what the state of affairs is.

 Cf. Jürgen Trabant, Die Sprache; cf. Id., Weltansichten.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Über den Beitrag der Dichtkunst”, 73.

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Poetry is a completely self-declared saying, such that nothing other than that said in it should be added to its reception or linguistic reality. It is an autonomous saying in the sense of self-fulfillment. It attests to itself and does not consent to anything else that verifies it. In short, it is poetry, the work of a poet, that succeeds in producing the self-fulfillment of language itself. There we build, within the poem, the world of the poem. In other words, poetry is (the Dasein) the existence of everything to which it makes reference. Therefore, the truth of poetry consists in creating a “hold” upon nearness that results from every experience of speaking. A true poem makes us experience such nearness in such a manner that it is held by the poem and its linguistic configuration. Thus, before everything that escapes us, before everything that pales, before the elusiveness of time, poetry stands as a saying that plays its own present retaining in its own language, in its own “saying,” the nearness to the world. Moreover, it faces the challenge of transforming into words something that seems to be completely alien to the sphere of the word.

5 Stimmungslos ist seit Langem der Mensch For a long time, man has been out of tune.³⁰ Discordant, “Stimmungslos”, as Heidegger said, amidst a reflection on the “Stimmung”, the emotional tone that governs our being in the world.³¹ It is not necessary to insist on how much such ideas may guide us towards considering the irreversible wound (at least, that is what it would seem) we have inflicted on the planet. A break in tune with the “physical” roots of our world of life. We know that for Heidegger himself, poetry was the comprehensive mode of expression of our Stimmung, of our emotional tone facing the world.³² This should be the context for the question about poetry, especially the poetry (in our case) that names the physis, the natural phenomena. We could return to our initial question: What does poetry speak about when it says it speaks about Nature? And on the basis of what has been expounded above, I would like to propose four final considerations: 1) Poetic forms, in their own materiality, venture into metaphorical resources. This is particularly distinctive of those poems based on an intense, albeit diverse, link with nature. Such recourse to metaphor, to the enigma of meta-

 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, § 71.  Cf. Id, Sein und Zeit, § 29.  Cf. ibid., §5.

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phor (as studied by Hans Blumenberg) must be read as a path towards underlying connections, those that hold us from behind, with the world of life.³³ In it not only words and signs have meaning, but things themselves as well. As is the human face. That is why Montaigne offered the metaphor of this substantive meaning of metaphor: les visage du monde. There are relations of retroversion of the intuition whereby the engraving of the conscience achieved through metaphor can be supported. This is why metaphors retain the richness of their own origin. 2) The experience of nature that we have in nature poetry is the experience of language. In this regard, it is the reappropriation of language from its own sustenance in the world of life and it is, at the same time, necessarily the reappropriation of nature. Of our vital link with it. And this occurs precisely through the linguistic experience of poetry. In a way, it is what Yves Bonnefoy claimed: summer is language. 3) Here as in all poetry, in standing upright, in the being of the word that happens in it, that fundamental task of man to create, in the flow of the impressions of our life experience, a home, a habitat, also seems to be fulfilled. Man’s first realization is the immersion and learning of his mother tongue: there the world approaches us, and in the words that name it together with the understanding that we discover, we build a familiarity of the world that is never alien to mutual speaking. The poetic word, as Gadamer suggests, continues this process of making ourselves at home (Einhausung) but it does so in a particular way: what appears in it is nearness itself, the intimacy in which we find ourselves at times. And there, in the poem, nearness gains permanence: the poetic word is testimony of our existence (Dasein), insofar as the poetic word itself is existence, (Dasein) being there. 4) The experience of the language present in the poetic experience of the natural world, as a foundation for the nearness to things, does not leave out but delves into the experience and lucidity of the crack, the split, the tearing that dwells in us, in which we dwell, and from which we make a home possible. It inhabits that world of life from which it draws on the poetic experience as a reappropriation of language at its root, in its own land. And there we experience that light in which things reveal that nothingness in which they flow, in whose distance they prolong the fleeting moment, show their truth, and thus gift us with the deep value of their pleasure:

 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie; cf. Id., Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit; cf. Id., Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer.

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In the words of another poet, Mark Strand: To have loved the way it happens in the empty hours of late afternoon; to lean back and conceive of a journey leaving behind no trace of itself […]. All this in the vague, yellowing light that lowers itself in the hour before dark; none of it of value except for the pleasure it gives, enlarging an instant and finally making it seem as if were true.³⁴

Bibliography Batteaux, Charles, Cours de belles lettres ou príncipes de la literature. Paris, Desaint & Saillant/Durant, 1753. Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1999. Blumenberg, Hans, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinmetapher. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1997. Blumenberg, Hans, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2007. Braungart, Georg, “Poetik der Natur. Literatur und Geologie”. In Natur – Kultur. Zur Antropologie von Sprache und Literatur, edited by Thomas Anz, Paderborn. Mentis, 2009. Le Clézio, Jean-Marie G., L’Extase matérielle. Paris, Gallimard, 1967. Collot, Michel, “Yves Bonnefoy et l’arriere-pays”. In L’Horizont Fabuleux, vol. 2, edited by Michel Collot. Paris, José Corti,1988, 137 – 178. Eagleton, Terry, Cómo leer un poema. Akal, Madrid, 2010. Escudero, Jorge L., Poesía Completa. Buenos Aires, Ediciones en Danza, 2011. Felstiner, John, Can Poetry save the Earth? A field guide to nature poems. New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2009. Figal, Günter, Der Sinn des Verstehens. Stuttgart, Reclam, 1996. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, “Über den Beitrag der Dichtkunst bei der Suche nach der Wahrheit (1971)”. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8: Ästhetik und Poetik I. Kunst als Aussage, edited by Id. Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 1993, 70 – 80. Giotti, Virgilio, Colores (Antología bilingüe 1909 – 1955). Valencia, Pre-textos, 2010. Glück, Louise, Las siete edades. Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2011. Hall, Donald, Poetry: The unsayable said: an essay. Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 1993. Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe. III. Abteilung: Unveröffentlichte Abhandlungen/Vorträge – Gedachtes, vol. 66: Besinnung (1938/39), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1997. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit. Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1984. Heydenreich, Aura and Klaus Mecke, eds., Physik und Poetik. Produktionsästhetik und Werkgenese. Autorinnen und Autoren im Dialog. Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2015. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7,1: Erste Hälfte. Einleitung zum Kawiwerk, edited by Albert Leitzmann. Berlin, Behr, 1907.

 Mark Strand, Almost Invisible, 7.

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Humboldt, Wilhelm von, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,1: Erste Hälfte. 1827 – 1835, edited by Albert Leitzmann. Berlin, Behr, 1907, Leopardi, Giacomo, Discurso de un italiano en torno a la Poesía Romántica. Valencia, Pre-Textos, 1998. Lledó Iñigo, Emilio, El concepto de¨Poíesis¨ en la filosofía griega. Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1961. Machado, Antonio, Campos de castilla, Madrid, Editorial Cátedra, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 1, Erster Band, edited by Karl Schlechta. München, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954 (Lizenzausgabe WBG, 1997). Ruta, Carlos: “Audeo te tibi credere:cura vitae en la obra de Petrarca”.In El cuidado de la vida. Del Medioevo al Renacimiento, edited by Carlos Ruta. Buenos Aires, UNSAM Edita, 2014. Simón, César, Poesía Completa. Valencia, Pre-textos, 2016. Strand, Mark, Almost Invisible. Madrid, Visor, 2012. Titus Lucretivs Carus, De rerum natura, 3 vols, edited by Enrico Flores.Napoli, Bibliopolis, 2002 – 2004. Trabant, Jürgen, Die Sprache. München, C.H.Beck, 2009. Trabant, Jürgen, Weltansichten. Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachprojekt. C.H.Beck. München. 2012. Valery, Paul, Œuvres. vol. I, edited by Jean Hytier (Bibliothéque de la Pléiade, 127). Paris, Gallimard, 1957. Vitiello, Vincenzo, Una filosofía errante. Topología, Religione, Arte. Verona, Anterem, 2012. Wordsworth, William, Lyrical ballads, with other poems. 2 vols., London, Biggs and Co. Bristol, 1800. Zambrano, María, Obras completes I, edited by Jesùs Moreno Sanz. Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015.

Jorge Eduardo Fernández

The Threshold of Nature An Approach through Poetry The issue that I’m proposing to put into dialogue is to know in what extent it is possible to understand “the dwelling of the earth” as an initial Faktum. We exist on a planet which has been and is still habitable, therefore, it is possible to understand these natural conditions of life as a necessary a priori fact of our existence. We can assume that, in addition to having in mind the contributions of the Naturphilosophie, which have been useful for us to get rid of a merely mechanistic representation of nature, though counting with Heidegger’s Daseynsanalysis and the reflection on “dwelling”, it is necessary, I think, to set a new topic for reflection. The title “The Threshold of Nature” refers to that topic, that place, from where it may be possible to attempt a reflection on natural conditions of life as “a priori” of the existence. It is interesting to indicate that the word “umbral” in Spanish, (“threshold” in English, and “Schwelle” in German) combines two etymological meanings: “limit” as well as “light” (lumbre, luz), that is to say, “light limit”. “The threshold of nature” refers us to that imprecise strip of light, which, like an evanescent shadow, enters into the dark; into that “between” where human and nature, the dwelled and the undwelled (the inhabited and the uninhabited), simultaneously meet and become strangers to each other. From this “threshold” we can perceive that the complex ambiguity entailed by the relation between human and nature is expressed in a paradigmatic form in the experience of “dwelling the earth”. This is the point where we set our first thesis: dwelling is the main experience from which to understand the bond between man and nature. The dwelling of the earth is strange because through the dwelling, it manifests, in turn, the strangeness of our existence (Dasein). Dwelling is the immediate form of manifestation of the strangeness of our existence, nevertheless, through and by the dwelling in the strangeness, the earth, the habitable begins to take shape. From this strangeness, it is possible to understand from this argument why different peoples confer to the inhabited land, even strange, the motherly trait of the truest self, of the originary. As guests in the strangeness, dwelling the earth, we form an environment in which usual things weave the warp of hominess. The dwelling of the earth not only gathers us in the strangeness, but also reveals that distinctive trait of strangeness itself. First light of the memory of a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-007

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paradise that, due to being memory, in the immediacy of dwelling, it is represented as lost earth. We can understand this first light as the mythic matrix of dwelling. It is at this point where we will introduce the second fundamental thesis of this essay, this first sign of dwelling, its mythical memory, which still survives, in its dearest meaning, in the poetic word. What does “dwelling” mean? Where does it lead us to preconceive the dwelling as a phenomenon, an experience, which allows us to understand the natural conditions that make it possible? That what we call dwelling refers, at first, to an instance prior to any philosophical reflection, and therefore, also to any distinction between mere practice and theory. Nevertheless, despite this previous character, the dwelling contains a proto-reflexive sapiential sedimentation process. In as much as pre-reflective, the dwelling precedes, and simultaneously gathers in the same experiential unit, the distinction between ἐμπειρία, τέχνῃ, πρᾶξις, and, obviously, ἐπιστήμῃ. Perhaps, due to this previous character, this experience can only be named by that word that is born from the occurrence of dwelling itself. We know that word as poetic word. “The dwelling of the Earth” is strange because through the dwelling it manifests, in turn, the strangeness of our existence. In the strangeness of dwelling two strangers converge: man and nature. As Heidegger has suggested, dwelling is the immediate form of manifestation of the strangeness of our existence, nevertheless, through the dwelling in the strangeness, the habitable begins to take shape.¹ The sensitivity of some artists allows us to access through the poetic word to the variety of nuances that make up the experience of dwelling the earth.

1 Fascination and Dissolution of Limit in the Poetry of Georg Trakl The first verse that I want to evoke was extracted from Georg Trakl’s poem: “Spring of the soul” (Frühling der Seele²), on which there is an excellent comment from Martin Heidegger, published in “Unterwegs zur Sprache” with the title “Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht”. The poem reads: The soul is a stranger on Earth. (Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden.)

 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 145 – 164.  Georg Trakl, Dichtungen, 149 sq.

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The first clarification raised by Heidegger in his comment indicates that we must not understand the strangeness of the soul, alluded to by Trakl, in a platonic sense. Certainly, the fascinating journey of the soul through the river of life, from dawn to dusk, is impregnated with the powerful attraction of beauty: Greenish the river dawns, silverly the old avenues And the towers of the city. O gentle drunkenness In the gliding boat and the dark calls of the blackbird In innocent gardens. Already, the rosy veil thins. (Grünlich dämmert der Fluß, silbern die alten Alleen Und die Türme der Stadt. O sanfte Trunkenheit Im gleitenden Kahn und die dunklen Rufe der Amsel In kindlichen Gärten. Schon lichtet sich der rosige Flor.)

Beauty is, in its poetic celebration, the manifestation of the very essence of existence. Fascinated by beauty, in the light of noon, the bond between the poet and nature is pre and proto narcissistic, and in this sense as well, pre and proto oedipal. That is, they are figures (Gestalten) arisen from the attempt to identify man with that nature where he comes from. But then the poem continues as follows: Darker the waters flow round the graceful games of the fish. Hour of mourning, silent vision of the sun; The soul is a stranger on earth Spiritually blueness dusks over the clearcut forest; and a dark bell tolls for long in the village; peaceful cortège. Silently the myrtle blooms over the white eyelids of the dead. (Dunkler umfließen die Wasser die schönen Spiele der Fische. Stunde der Trauer, schweigender Anblick der Sonne; Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden. Geistlich dämmert Bläue über dem verhauenen Wald und es läutet lange eine dunkle Glocke im Dorf, friedlich Geleit. Stille blüht die Myrthe über den weißen Lidern des Toten.)

Trakl’s verse: “The soul is a stranger on earth” reveals the tragic essence of his poetry. So this poetry gathers, with a power always excessive for the experience, the extremes of attraction and brief repulsion, prohibition and inhibition in the presence of beauty. In Trakl’s poetry, the strangeness of the soul is such, that although it allows us to witness the highest point of attachment and detachment of man with nature, it destroys any possibility of mediation and installation of a “threshold of nature”.

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2 “The Colony” (die Kolonie), the Poetic Dwelling in the Poetry of Hölderlin In Hölderlin’s poetry, we can see that what the poet calls “On this earth” (Auf dieser Erde) is mentioned with the term “colony”. We can consider “the colony” as a possible figure (Gestalt) of the “threshold of nature”. In a writing by Hölderlin entitled: “In lovely blue” (In lieblicher Bläue³) we find the phrase that states: Well deserving, yet poetically Man dwells on this earth. (Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde.)

After this verse, diffused from its postulation as one of the interpretative keys of the essence of poetry, formulated by Heidegger⁴, in the same writing, Hölderlin asks himself: Is there measure on earth? (Gibt es auf Erden ein Maß?)

And he answers: There is none. (Es gibt keines.)

And then he adds: King Oedipus may have an eye too many. (Der König Oedipus hat ein Auge zuviel vielleicht.)

As we can appreciate, unlike the dominant fascination in the poetry of Trakl, when Hölderlin says: “King Oedipus may have an eye too many”, he introduces an excess that differentiates man from nature. These lines name the origin of the poetic dwelling “on this earth”. But what does “earth” mean when Hölderlin says: “on this earth”? We can find a first hint of an answer in the poem “Bread and Wine” (Brot und Wein⁵). In that poem we find: […] namely at home is spirit not in the commencement, not at the source. The home consumes it. Colony, and bold forgetting spirit loves.

 Friedrich Hölderlin, Gedichte nach 1800, 372– 374.  Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 35 – 49.  Friedrich Hölderlin, Gedichte nach 1800, 194.

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([…] nämlicht zu Haus ist der Geist,/Nicht im Anfang, nicht an der Quell. Ihn zehret die Heimat, Kolonie liebt, und tapper Vergessen der Geist.)

What Hölderlin calls “the colony” seems to answer our question about the meaning of “on this earth”. What does it mean to understand “this earth” as “the colony”? First, we must say that, according to Hölderlin, the spirit loves the colony because it dwells easily in it. “Easily” meaning “well deserving”. But the “poetic dwelling”, due to its a priori character, precedes any reward or recognition. Well deserving, yet poetically, Man dwells on this earth. (Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde.)

“Poetically” means, in this sentence, pending of what is given to us. “Dwell this earth” is for Hölderlin a Faktum of free donation, and free donation means debtless, innocent. For this reason, Hölderlin states that poetry is “the most innocent (and dangerous) of all occupations”. In Hölderlin’s poetic language, “earth” (Erde) is the place where free donation inhabits and dominates, from and in its strangeness, previous to any recognition to merit. “Earth” is the place where each one dwells, in and from our own free donation. But this free donation is not a sign of property in the sense of a total identification or possession, on the contrary, it is sign of the unobtainable. Heidegger, in his interpretation of Hölderlin’s poem: “The Ister” (Der Ister⁶), makes reference to the verses “Bread and Wine” (Brot und Wein) we have cited above. There he states: “Calling this earth “Colony” means for Hölderin at first: […] at home, the spirit is not at home […] ([…] zu Haus ist der Geist nicht zu Haus […])

The spirit does not dwell either in the commencement, nor in the source, “the homeland consumes it”, it dwells in the “colony”. Heidegger comments: although the origin is mentioned, commencement here means something else than “source”. The spirit is presumably pleased in the source, but at first, its being “at the source” is not being at home. That’s why it must be first homely “at the source”, and to do so, the spirit must first feel at ease, and go specifically “to the source”. (Der Geist ist sehr wohl und stets “an der Quell”, aber im Beginn ist er “an der Quell” nicht

 Martin Heidegger: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”, § 22, 156 – 170.

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zu Haus. Deshalb muss er erst “an der Quell” heimisch werden und dazu muss der Geist erst eigens “an die Quelle” gehen.⁷)

“Homeland” and “source” both subtract themselves at the beginning of the dwelling. The meaning that Hölderlin gives to the term “colony” expresses in a paradigmatic way the inherent contradiction of the dwelling. In this way, “the dwelling of earth” is not perceived at the beginning, but it is discovered and valued by the experience of the dwelling itself. Heidegger says: The spirit is essentially unhomely only when, for the sake of what is its own, from out of the will for its essence, it wishes the unhomely, the foreign. (Der Geist ist nur dann wesentlich unheimisch, wenn er um des Eigenen willen, aus dem Willen seines Wesens, das Umheimische, das Fremde will.⁸)

“Colony, and bold forgetting spirit loves” doesn′t mean something foreign or exotic. Love for the colony means for Hölderlin: love this home, this earth, but in such a way that it keeps pushing the strange “native home”. For that reason, in the love for the “colony”, the “bold forgetting” is implicit.

3 Beauty and the impossibility of joy in the poetry of Paul Celan On this way, through the poetry of Hölderlin and Trakl, we reach the poetry of Paul Celan, considered by many as the great contemporary poet. Alain Badiou places Celan at the zenith of the “age of the poets”⁹. This age is inaugurated by Hölderlin, announced by Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and finally completed by the poetry of Paul Celan. This age is closed with Celan, and this way we can consider as finished the poetically predominant task required by a time marked by the “flight of the gods”. With a very different tone and style from that of Badiou’s, the Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto tells us the following about the poetry of Celan: “Celan always had the awareness that the more his language advanced, the more it was destined not to mean”; […] “Celan then expresses himself in a system or earthquake

 Martin Heidegger: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”, § 22, 162.  Ibid., 164.  Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie. 48 – 58.

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of forms, aware of being driven towards muteness. This muteness is different from silence […]”. Therefore, Zanzotto states: There are neither births nor returns which are truly able to save, and there is no Heimat, no matter if it is longed for, mainly in the sense of strong cultural references, either close to a line of the German tradition, ranging from Hölderlin to Trakl, either by a really deep seated Hebrew element gradually assumed and suffered in all its extraordinary and awful fate. The fate of Celan can then be called, in each of its moments, a drama-action compulsively sacred, in which the curse impregnates the blessing in each poetic and human inventum.¹⁰

It should be added to all this, that while recognizing the influence exerted on the poetry of Celan by poets like Hölderlin, and in my opinion, even more by Georg Trakl, both poets fond of Heidegger’s interpretations; this, the poetry of Celan, is situated in a diametrically different perspective in regards to the thought of Heidegger, and its quadrate, “Geviert” of Heaven, Earth, the Divine, and Mortals¹¹. In this sense, distant from Heidegger, the Spanish philosopher Félix Duque, in his book “Residuos de lo sagrado”¹², interprets Celan’s work, states that the problem of his poetry is “the inherent connection and entanglement between memory and oblivion”. Duque begins the third part of this book, entitled: “Los incendios del tiempo: memoria y escatología en Paul Celan”, with a phrase of Theodor Adorno: […] it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance […] but then what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering.¹³

Duque comments on these words of Adorno and states: “they are as well intentioned as they are wrong and blunt.” Its good intention must be understood from its position and differentiation from the productions of the “cultural industry”, but for this reason, they do not reach that point in which the problem of art lies in: […] the inherent connection and relationship between memory and oblivion. […] Since by only facing the almost inexorable natural law of forgetting the traumatic it is possible the

   

Cf. Andrea, Zanzotto, El (necesario) mentir, 269 – 274. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 177. Cf. Félix Duque, Residuos de lo sagrado, 143 – 182. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 387.

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difficult erection of memory. […] Memory has nothing to do with what has happened, but with the justice of what has happened.¹⁴

After this introductory approach, Félix Duque asks himself: is the art, and fundamentally here, the poetry of Celan, a monument against oblivion, as the Ktèma eìs aeì (achievement for eternity) of Tucidides? The problem that Celan faces is that of the memory, which, when evoking the poem, to the same extent it remembers, the facts are inscribed in another memory, the literary one, the same task that, by means of evocation tries to avoid oblivion, “by registering it and inscribing it in the language, the same suffering that memory seeks to preserve is necessarily betrayed”.¹⁵ A similar situation to this paradox, to which we are led to face by memory and oblivion, is installed by the impossibility to speak for another and the consequent dissolution of the poetic self in the work of Paul Celan¹⁶, which Emmanuel Levinas states clearly¹⁷. These two paradoxes trace the course through which the work of Paul Celan is developed. Neither the voluntary oblivion added to the oblivion inherent to the nature of the memory, nor the mere naming to keep the memory alive, are paths that can be considered separately. From the meeting of Zeus and Mnemosyne, unity of power and memory, the poetry is like a Pharmakón that cures the pains by converting them into past. The same problem afflicts the intention to preserve the memory of what has happened. The task accepted by Celan is to keep the memory pure through a struggle of approaches and rejections to the God. A first attempt is found in “Poppy and Memory” (Mohn und Gedächnis¹⁸). The poppy, as the counterpart of memory, instills certain peace, induces to the fantasy that allows the poet to expose himself to the horror present in memory. Duque finds an example of this in “Sand from the Urns” (Der Sand aus den Urnen): The House of forgetting is mold green. Before each of the blowing gates your decapitated minstrel turns blue. He beats the drum of moss and bitter pubic hair for you; with festering toe he draws your brow in the sand. He draws it longer that it was and the red of your lips. You fill the urns here and feed your heart. (Schimmelgrün ist das Haus des Vergessens.

    

Félix Duque, Residuos de lo sagrado,143. Ibid., 145. Cf. Paul Celan, Obras completas. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, “El ser y el otro”, 29 sq. Cf. Paul Celan, Obras completas, 45 – 80.

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Vor jedem der wehenden Tore blaut dein enthaupteter Spielmann. Er schlägt dir die Trommel aus Moos und bitterem Schamhaar; Mit schwärender Zehe malt er im Sand deine Braue. Länger zeichnet er sie als sie war, und das Rot deiner Lippe. Du füllest hier die Urnen und speisest dein Herz.¹⁹)

In these verses and from them we can see how that which holds the poem is not the idea of a restoration of the past, but that of a future reconciliation. In spite of the deliberate and evident relationship between Celan’s poetry and the Holocaust, and of finding permanent traces of the Schoah, the essence of Celan’s poetry is not cut within these limits but, by containing it, the poetry transcends such limits. What in his work as a whole is noticed, states Duque, is rather a eschatology of the remains of history. The “other”, as proposed to be thought by Levinas, also appears as ontological residue and, in that sense, pre-historic. It is a matter of discrimination and elimination originated from the field of consciousness. For these reasons, poetry only manages to convey in its native matrix, by means of the mother tongue (Muttersprache). In a foreign language, poetry lies. In “Language Mesh” (Sprachgitter²⁰), Celan aims to become (similarly to Nietzsche) a poet of the earth. But the “little Hebrew” cannot. The earth is presented with the beauty of nature, but the “little Hebrew” cannot afford to perceive it, to be subjugated until rooted. In “Conversation in the Mountain” (Gespräch im Gebirg), Celan writes: So it was quiet, quiet up there in the mountains. But it was not quiet for long, because when a Jew comes along and meets another, silence cannot last, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and nature are strangers to each other, have always been and still are, even today, even here. So there they are, the cousins. On the left, the turk’s-cap lily blooms, blooms wild, blooms like nowhere else. And on the right, comsalad, and dianthus superbus, the maiden-pink, not far off. But they, those cousins, have no eyes, alas. Or, more exactly they have, even they have eyes, but with a veil hanging in front of them, no, not in front, behind them, a moveable veil. No sooner does an image enter than It gets caught in the web, and a thread starts spinning, spinning itself around the image, a veil-thread; spins itself around the image and begets a child, half image, half veil.²¹

Certainly, in the poetry of Celan the “Quadrate”, (“Geviert”) is not possible, the bond between heaven and earth, between gods and mortals, is torn by the spilled blood, as it is paradigmatically expressed in the poem Tenebrae.²² Similarly    

Ibid., 53. Cf. Ibid., 115 – 150. Paul Celan, Selected poems and prose, 23. Paul Celan, Obras completas. 125.

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to Trakl, tense in Celan by the irredeemable blood, the earth attracts us with the beauty of nature, but at the same time it is marked by the prohibition of joy. However, as the Italian philosopher Vincenzo Vitiello points out, in Celan’s poetry: The rupture of the syntactic connection has liberated the loose words from its restriction as precise and exact signifiers: it has liberated its polysemy, which has given back to the word its sonorous materiality. If the sky is abyss, the earth is not evil.²³

Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas, commenting on the poem L ’ Meridien of Paul Celan, states that the poem is: “Elementary communication and without revelation, babbling childhood of discourse […]” According to Levinas, Celan’s poem is placed not on “trans” level, but on a “pre” syntactic, “pre” logical, and also “pre” revealing level. Celan states the poem is: “A step out of the human” that leads back to a sphere of the human, “even if it is eccentric”. The poem turns the language into a sign of the strange, into a sign of something that transcends the human sphere of what has been said, of what has been explored. Flare fired into the dark.²⁴ Levinas states, it is through the light irradiated by the poem that we can capture “the man out of all roots and of all location”, i. e., in his being another as such. The poem marks the other’s otherness in a native land that abhors all dominions of the fatherland (Heimat). The history is the history of the deprivation of this earth, which survives in the poem, “The Step of its Earlier-More to its Always-Still”. His language arises and knows of a gift prior to any installation of power.²⁵ “Inhospitality of the being who does not offer shelter, but, in order to spend the night, he only has stones”. “Mineral language” that remembers a renegade history, “insomnia in the bed of being”, from where “the poem is the spiritual act for excellence, an impossible act, and at the same time, inevitable because of an “absolute poem” that “does not exist”.²⁶ There is neither absolute poem nor perfect poetry because there is always a mineral remainder in the sign, an apex of the wizened rims of the language. The poem itself is a useless gesture thrown towards the limit, the meridian, in pursuit of meaning something else. Useless gesture that liberates the language, even upon being defeated, from so many other useless restraints.

   

Vincenzo Vitiello, Los tiempos de la poesía, 153 sq. Paul Celan, Selected poems and prose, 37. Emmanuel Levinas, “El ser y el otro”, 34. Ibid., 38.

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4 Rilke: from “the Threshold of Nature” It is in the Duino Elegies²⁷ of Rainer Maria Rilke where we find a clear definition of “the threshold of nature” as a topic from which we can access to a change in our view of nature. In Rilkes’s words, we can state that nature is understood as a threshold of “the openness” (das Offene). In his “Thinking-lyric” (Gedankenlyrik), Rilke conceives nature in opposition to the city. Nature is the uncircumscribed, it exceeds, differs and subtracts itself from the limits traced by human constructions, at the same time, it appears as a chance of transformation. In the Eighth Elegy, the issue is brought up when Rilke compares the eyes of the creature (Kreatur) with that of man’s and states: With all its eyes the creature-world Beholds the open. But our eyes, as though reversed […] (Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene, nur unste Augen sind wie ungekehrt […]²⁸)

Rilke states that man has his eyes inverted (umgekehrt) and therefore is excluded from “the open” and is circumscribed in his gaze that dominates the environment. The creature, on the contrary, beholds “the open” “with all its eyes”. What is outside, we know from the brute’s face/Alone […] (Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers/Antlitz allein[…])

It is important to note that, when understanding man as having his senses inverted, Rilke introduces an interesting variant regarding the “eye too many”, about which Hölderlin speaks about. Man, through his consciousness, fragments reality and circumscribes space and time to the area limited by his domain. Héctor Mandrioni, in his book “Rilke y la cuestión del fundamento” (Rilke and the Question of the Ground) states the following: In addition, the consciousness allows the man to have future, and a future perceived as such […] this objectivizing power of determining objects and future founds in man the consciousness of death. ²⁹

 Rainer M. Rilke, Die Gedichte, 687 sq.  Ibid., 709 sq.  Héctor Mandrioni, Rilke y la cuestión del fundamento, 117.

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With this consciousness of future, man is invaded by fear, desire, and anguish, and is circumscribed in the world from his own consciousness of death”. Completely differently from man, for Rilke “the animal is free from death”, it lives in the pure spatiality of nature, in a time not annoyed by the predominance of the future. Mandrioni comments: The animal moves forward, as the springs that emanate from the bowels of the earth, which, without a defined purpose, they simply flow, as if their only purpose would consist of the free and joyful springing itself.³⁰

In this Eighth Elegy, we find three highly significant examples to think about the experience of “the threshold of nature”: the instinctive look of the dog, the play of the children and the lovers embrace. In the look of the dog, the figure of the animal in this elegy, the image of a world is renewed unceasingly, and its face, sometimes, comes as a plea, almost understanding (begreifend)³¹, but it stops, because if it could understand, would not be itself. The other example is the child that is originally oriented towards “the openness”. Mandrioni comments: “In the childhood, the existence is lost ecstatic in the boundless”, for the child, his own living is expressed in the play: “a bordering space between the world and the toy”.³² The space of play is that one of pure duration and pure happening. The third example is the embrace of lovers. Rilke says: Lovers – were not the other present, always spoiling the view! – draw near to it and wonder […] (Liebende, wäre nicht der andre, der die sich verstellt, sind nah daran und staunen […])³³

Almost in “the openness”, the lovers, as Rilke expresses it in the Second Elegy: “Until your embraces almost promise eternity”.³⁴ The animal, the children and the lovers are witnesses, from the “threshold” of the presence of the “openess”. In conclusion, Mandrioni states: “We could say that the animal is the being that it is and remains in the openness”.³⁵ The child is the one who was in the open-

     

Ibid., 118. Rainer M. Rilke, Die Gedichte, 117. Héctor Mandrioni, Rilke y la cuestión del fundamento, 119. Rainer M. Rilke, Die Gedichte, 710. Ibid., 692. Héctor Mandrioni, Rilke y la cuestión del fundamento, 119.

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ness at one time, but soon ceased to be there; and lovers, although they have never been in it, they were almost in “the openness”. So, in Rilke’s poetry, the look of the animal, the play of the child, and the embrace of the lovers are placed in the threshold and they are witnesses of “the openness”, the not configured, the profound, the pure space, nature in its pure dwelling.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7: Ästhetische Theorie, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2003. Badiou, Alain, Manifeste pour la philosophie. Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1989. Celan, Paul, Obras completas, translated by José Luis Reina Palazón. Madrid, Editorial Trotta, 1999. German edition: Celan, Paul, Gesammelte Werke, 7 vols., edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert,Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2000. Celan, Paul, Selected poems and prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001. Duque, Félix, Residuos de lo sagrado. Madrid, Abada, 2010. Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910 – 1976, vol. 4: Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936 – 1968), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 51981. Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe. II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923 – 1944, vol. 53: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (Sommersemester 1942), edited by Walter Biemel. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 21993. Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910 – 1976, vol. 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936 – 1953), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 92000. Hölderlin, Friedrich, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2: Gedichte nach 1800, edited by Friedrich Beissner, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1951. Levinas, Emmanuel, “El ser y el otro. A propósito deI Paul Celan”. In Sentido y existencia, edited by Gary Brent Madison. Navarra, Verbo Divino, 1976, 29 – 38. Mandrioni, Héctor, Rilke y la cuestión del fundamento. Buenos Aires, Guadalupe, 1971. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe, vol. 1: Die Gedichte, edited by Manfred Engel, et al. Frankfurt am Main, Insel, 1996. Trakl, Georg, Die Dichtungen. Salzburg, Otto Müller, ³1938. Vitiello, Vincenzo, Los tiempos de la poesía. ayer-hoy. Madrid, Abada, 2009. Zanzotto, Andrea, El (necesario) mentir. Prosa selecta, translated by Eduardo Montagner and Giampiero Bucci (Esenciales, 4). Madrid, Vaso roto, 2011.

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The Concept of “Technique of Nature” The Originality of an Inevitable Ambiguity Kant, in the third of his Critiques, makes a known reference to a vignette that a mathematician of his time, Segner, had placed on the cover of his book, almost like a rite of initiation before entering into the thing itself: a warning, a prescription. That vignette reproduced the epithet of Isis. I quote Kant: Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil’. Segner made use of this idea in an ingenious vignette prefixed to his Naturlehre [Natural Science], so as first to imbue the pupil, whom he was about to lead into this temple, with the sacred thrill that is meant to attune the mind to solemn attentiveness.¹

In the epithet of Isis is heard a call that requests from that individual who is going to begin the investigation of nature to pay a solemn attentiveness: Any theory is just a variation of a composition that will never reach its entirety, a call for prudence, like a prescription in which finitude is inscribed: not to be obliged by the necessity is to know that discrepancy that nature reveals in reason, but whose core key nature preserves: There is a fenced access. Why resort to this figure of “mother nature” at a time in which science has already conquered a language (the mathematical one), a method (the experimental one) and a theoretical body and technical instruments that allowed him to explain how natural phenomena work? And the natural science has been done with increasing success. In the eighteenth century, the discussion that confronts defenders of science and technique which see in them the factor of social progress, and its detractors, who see, on the contrary, the dehumanizing consequences (Rousseau) is already brought up. In the midst of this tension, Kant presents the concept of technique of nature: “But I shall henceforth use the term technic in other cases too, namely, where we merely judge [certain] objects of nature as if they were made possible

 KU, AA 05: 316. The works of Kant will be cited according to the Academy Edition (Kant′s Gesammelte Schriften. vols. 1– 22 edited by Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 23 by Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin and vol. 24 by Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1900 sq.). e. g. the first annotation would be: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 316. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-008

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through art”.² If the concept of technique has asserted its place alongside science, what does this analogy of nature mean with art’s way of proceeding? The concept of the technique of nature is introduced by Kant in the Critique of the power of judgment, when he proposes to think not only of nature as an object of scientific investigation, or as a set of the objects of a possible experience, but also of nature as a human world according to species determination. In this concept there are two terms linked, that were deployed historically through paths which were not always congruent: “techne” and “physis”, art and nature. This has led to talk about its constitution as an oxymoron, highlighting the semantic richness that such opposition generates. Kant translates the Greek word “τέχνη” as “Technik” and also as “Kunst”, and uses both terms as synonyms, in their original sense of power or capacity: “Art is not understood in the aesthetic sense (as fine arts) but as a verbal abstract of power (“können”), thus it indicates entirely in general a capacity”.³ The technique of nature is nature thought as art, according to the own causality of art, namely, as if a concept preceded the action of producing and guided it. What governs the artistic character of nature is purposiveness. The result of the activity guided by this idea is work of art. Having said that, is it possible to state that work of art is something else other than nature, or is it nature that produces itself in the diversity of its formations? Culture, the necessary devices for life, the technical instruments, are productions made with the material that nature provides, which are turned into a second nature. Breeding, regeneration and self-preservation are manifestations of a natural art, therefore, it can be said that nature makes itself. Art is not only artifice as opposed to nature, but art is also the very power of nature to beget and produce.⁴

 AA 20: 201.  Wilfried Seibicke, Technik. Versuch einer Geschichte der Wortfamilie um τέχνη, 14.  Kant considers the destructive forces of nature in the Analytic of the Sublime. The recognition of nature in its magnitude (mathematical sublime) an in its power (dynamic sublime) leads to the recognition of another superior strength in the human being: morality. That safe place, which Kant mentions, as a condition to experience the satisfaction typical of the feeling of the sublime, is interpreted very sharply by Schiller, not as a spatial place, but as the determination or the moral character. Another aspect of the destructive forces of nature considered by Kant is the balance in nature, for example, between breeding and mortality in species. Kant himself states that if we consider the external teleological relationship of nature as a whole, the following could be stated: “the carnivores exist in order to set bounds to the voraciousness of the plant-eaters; finally, humankind exists in order to establish a certain balance among the productive and destructive powers of nature by hunting and reducing the number of the latter”. (KU AA 05:427). Having said that, the destructive forces and the creative forces of nature are necessary

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The ambiguity lies in the relationship between art and nature and also in the very concept of technique or art. This concept contains a constitutive ambiguity. Art implies both the production of the beautiful and the production of what is useful. Art, as productive power, already contains in itself the difference: pleasure and utility. As a result of historical development, the concept of art is fissioned and releases its power until its two constituent elements appear as strangers: fine arts and techniques, the memory of the origin and the oblivion of the prescription stated in the epithet of Isis. The relationship between nature and art as opposition picks up the meaning of utility and has been the most explored, even to almost hide the other relationship, since it highlights the instrumental nature of technique regarding the manufacture of artifacts, and the instrumental character of nature as well, in regards of useful and usable object. The dissociation of utility and profit from beauty captured and enhanced the meaning of technique, fixing it to the idea of instrumental objective device. In Heidegger’s words, this is the instrumental and anthropological determination of technique.⁵ When the difference between nature and art is concentrated in the internal or external character of the efficient cause, it is hard to think the course of action of art as inherent to nature, that is to say, to think nature as the power of production of forms, and, at the same time, of destruction in relation to the conservation of the balance of the whole. It is manifested here the renewal that Kant states with the concept of technique of nature, as it constitutes the proposal to think the production of nature in analogy to the production by art, thus reintroducing the question of the purpose of nature from the transcendental critical level. |In this article, we will focus on the concept of “technique of nature”,⁶ introduced by Kant in the third Critique, particularly in the analogy of nature and art.

for the development of life and the balance in nature, although this does not mean that this is the only significance of the destructive capacity of nature.  See Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik.  Some authors have pointed out the richness of this concept in the work of Kant and in subsequent philosophers. Karl Kuypers, in Kants Kunsttheorie, 32, states that “the theme in this Critique [the Third Critique] is the investigation on the origin and the scope of the old analogy between “physis” and “techne” of the productions of nature and the human art”. Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos in Ideia de uma Heurística Transcendental, 98, considers the transformation that Kant makes on this concept of technique of nature: “It is important to highlight the contrast of the peculiar use that Kant proposes of the traditional expression “technique” or “art” and the peculiar semantic innovation condensed in the oxymoron “Technique of Nature”, which takes place precisely in a historical moment in which the notion of “technique” was already starting to indicate prevalently the contrary to what the philosopher intended to highlight

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Instead of thinking about the traditional separation between episteme, “techne” and “praxis”, this concept reveals the belonging of art to nature and praxis. Thus, the human world is nature configured according to the purposes that the human species has put in it.

The Analogy Between Nature and Art: Beauty The concept of the technique of nature indicates, in its internal opposition, the power of begetting of a natural art: beauty and living organisms are, respectively, footprint and testimony of that natural art. What tradition is collected in this oxymoron? What does the beauty of nature talk about and in what language? What is the testimony of living organisms compared to inert matter? What other horizons are opened by means of this analogy of nature and art unlike nature as a machine? We will address some of these issues. The expression “technique of nature” considers the objects of nature as if its possibility were based on art, that is, an idea that goes before and guides the production, as a purpose. Art indicates the causality of the idea, as it happens in the beautiful art and the handcraft production, but differently indeed, the theory of the genius marks that difference. The first formulation of the analogy is based on the beauty of nature: Independent natural beauty reveals to us a technic of nature that allows us to present nature as a system in terms of laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our understanding: the principle of a purposiveness directed to our use of judgment as regards appearances. Under this principle, appearances must be judged as belonging not merely to nature as governed by its purposeless mechanism, but also to [nature considered by] analogy with art. Hence even though this beauty does not actually expand our cognition of natural objects, it does expand our concept of nature, namely, from nature as mere mechanism to the concept of that same nature as art, and that invites us to profound investigations about [howl such a form is possible.⁷

with that expression, pointing out rather the mere instrumental execution of a simply mechanical production of nature, while, as we will see, Kant expressly contrasts his idea of a “technique of nature” with the conception of the simple “mechanism of nature”, by thus attributing to nature, although with an intention and a merely subjective use, something like an intimate causality which operates according to self-proposed aims”.  AA 05: 246.

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The investigation of this analogy promises to expand the concept of nature. Beauty and living beings indicate that nature is not just a machine ruled by causal laws of matter. Beauty is not investigated as an attribute that belongs to the concept of the object, but beauty constitutes and indirect attribution to the object, consequence of a subreption of language, which can name only when objectivating. Thus, the idea of a technique of nature is manifested, in a first instance, in the satisfaction that arises from the conciliation between sensoriality and rationality, whose paradigm is the aesthetic experience, as, in it, the sensitive configuration presented by imagination is not arbitrary, but intellectually plausible, but as it cannot be reduced to a determined concept, it generates an intense intellectual activity. The beauty of nature and also beautiful art speak of another form of “agreement” between nature and reason, an agreement that does not determine nature as an object or consider its products as cases of a law. The agreement, in the aesthetic sense, rests on the very character of beauty as intellectual and sensitive at the same time, hence it can only be perceived by beings that are both corporeal and spiritual. Beauty reveals the very constitution of the human: Agreeableness holds for nonrational animals too; beauty only for human beings, i. e., beings who are animal and yet rational, though it is not enough that they be rational (e. g., spirits) but they must be animal as well; the good, however, holds for every rational being as such.⁸

Nature speaks to us about that agreement, figuratively (figürlich) in its beautiful forms, in which nature no longer appears only as a book written in mathematical characters decodable by the understanding, because understanding is the one who owns the rules or codes for reading, but its writing is encrypted. There is in the nature an ultimate bottom irreducible to the mechanical gaze of understanding. The expression “cipher writing” refers to a tradition of thought that Kant knows, presumably through his disciple Hamann, and interprets in relation to the concept of technique of nature showing not only its closeness, but also its difference. Nature in its beautiful forms does not oppose to reason, but it shows footprints of a common language. Those footprints are signs of a possible reunion. Beauty is the key that speaks of the possible reconciliation between reason and nature.

 AA 05:210.

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Nature Thought as Art: Life It is widely known the expression of Goethe upon receiving Kant’s Third Critique. “Here I saw my diverse occupations placed side by side, art and natural productions, one treated like the other, the aesthetic faculty of judging and the teleological one illuminated each other”.⁹ Art and nature refer to each other. The challenge that the eighteenth century faces, due to the advancement of biology, has been the one of thinking nature from another matrix, different from mathematical physics, from where to be able to understand certain natural phenomena, whose explanation is not enough in the model of the machine. The investigations of biology started to demand an adjustment in the mechanical model, and even alternatives to it. The originality of Kant was the gathering, from a unique principle, of the beauty of nature, that is, nature as a generating power of forms, that imagination, in concordance with understanding make up intuition, and as a self-generating power in certain beings of nature, which find in themselves the reason of their internal organization, e. g., living beings. The philosopher realizes that certain products of nature can be only thought, regarding their form and appearance, as if nature imitated the human art, or better, a superhuman art, as if nature itself were an artist, or as if a secret artist, would produce his works through nature, which we consider as true works of art of nature, which we also appreciate through their beautiful form in the aesthetic judgment. But Kant goes a step further and extends the analogy to the own inner production of natural beings, by considering them not only through their form and appearance, but also through their structure and internal possibility.¹⁰

The technique of nature expresses the agreement between nature and reason, also in an objective-teleological sense, in the capacity for self-formation and regeneration of all living beings, in the instinct of animals and in the totality of natural productions, or the system of nature (as an ecosystem). This technical capacity belongs by itself to nature as formative force (Bildungstrieb).¹¹ Although

 Johann W. von Goethe. Werke Hamburger Ausgabe. Band 13,27.  Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos, “Kant e a Ideia de uma Poética da Natureza”, 14.  In his interpretation, Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos, Ideia de uma Heurística Transcendental, 160; he links this forming momentum to the concept of technique of nature: “Kant takes from Blumenbach the notion of “Bildungstrieb”, which is fundamentally in accordance with his own notion of “Technique of Nature” operating in the organized beings, which he discreetly associates, at least once, to the notion of “Einbildungskraft”, as if they had analogous functions, one in the organic life of nature, generating living beings, and the other one in the organic life of the spirit, producing works of art which are original and full of sense. Both constitute the syn-

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the difference with art as artifice is in the self-activity of nature, by means of which it is cause and effect of itself, but instead, in the producing of the technique, the produced is something different from the one who produces it; Kant will propose to the configurative force of nature as analogous to the production of art by collecting and re-elaborating the philosophical tradition: Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, Cicero and Seneca on the other hand¹². The other source of the concept of technique of nature is found in medicine, in Hippocrates, then also in Galen, and in Reimarus in the time of Kant. But the Kantian concept of technique of nature is not linked to instinct or to a specific sector of beings, but the natureart analogy extends to nature as a whole, implies the beautiful forms of nature, the organized beings and the unorganized ones, in a systematic integration, whose key core is the concept of organization. With the concept of the technique of nature, the mechanical order is incorporated within the organization of nature according to which all elements are in such interdependence that they produce one another. The begetting or productive capacity (“Erzeugung”) a characteristic of an organized being, it is not only the capacity of transmission of movement, but that one of a gestaltic plastic process (“plastisch”) that happens from, and in the inner part of the thing itself.

thesis between the transcendental and the multiplicity of the empirical in intuition, between the teleological and the mechanical. Both mobilize all the resources of nature or of the spirit, for the production of the new.”  Karl Kuypers in Kants Kunsttheorie, page 32, states: “As the own theme of the Critique of the power of judgment is clearly here a critical consideration of the analogy, used in the past, between art and nature, “techne” and “physis”, [analogy] that has been put aside in the philosophy of Descartes and Spinoza, as well as by the modern science of nature (Boyle, Newton). […] That analogy has been ruled out by the mechanical explanation of nature”. This author considers that this analogy impregnates Kant’s concept of technique of nature, and in turn, another line of investigation of nature is recovered with him, fundamentally from the Renaissance, but reformulated from transcendental philosophy. Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos, ibid, page 95, refers to the historical-semantic study of the concept of technique of nature in the Greek and modern philosophers, conducted by Santozski, and adds, on this matter, that the “the Renaissance idea of natural magic (for example, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino or Paracelso), of neoplatonic matrix, states the same (he refers to the Greek idea of téchne phýseos) and it should be considered in this inventory.” For his part, Santozki in his book, on page 340, analyses the relationship between the Kantian concept of technique of nature and the one of ars naturae of Cicero in De natura deorum II. He also analyses the sources of that relationship in old medicine in section 7: Technik, Natur und System bei Kant, den Stoikern und Galen: Original und Vermittlung, pages 327 and ssg. See especially section 7.2.2., pages 340 – 353, Hippokratische Medizintradition, stoische Biologie und Kosmologie bzw. Theologie und deren Rezeption: Galen, Seneca, Hume, Reimarus, Herder, Sydenham. In addition to his interpretation, the author offers plenty of textual quotations of sources.

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The matter is not aggregated, but produced by the very individual, therefore, the qualitative difference is in its division and cohesion process. In turn, the relationship of the parts it is not that of mere instruments, but of organs which, by generating themselves, they generate other parts, and therefore, they generate the whole itself. That is why the processes of self-regulation and regeneration are possible. If nature is thought only from the mechanism, living beings are left without a plausible explanation, at least in those processes of life itself, as it is contrary to reason to sate that raw matter has made itself through mechanical laws, or that life has emerged from matter without life or that the organization towards aims is a quality of the inert matter itself.¹³ Finally, a peculiar characteristic of the living being is the one of being related to other organized beings, and, to other not organized beings as well, as a necessary requirement for self-conservation. Its presence in nature constitutes a relationship with the natural environment, according to which each preserves its life in relation to the environment and the others–producing the necessary adaptations– and, in turn, each living being preserves nature as a whole by preserving itself as an individual and as a species. This opening to the world, that living beings instate, is decisive to think the balance of the whole, a balance that is established between the creative and destructive forces of nature itself. This is one of the reasons that requires to think nature as a systematic unit or ecosystem. This way we see that through the presence of living beings and beautiful forms, nature is not an object as any other object. Therefore, the heuristic resource to the analogy nature-art allows to expand the explanation of nature and, in turn, reveals in nature an irreductible bottom to any empiric explanation. Thus, with the idea of technique of nature, Kant shows the difference between a product of natural art and a product of mechanical art, as the first one is never completely assimilable to the model of the machine. Beauty and living beings are the manifestation of a natural art, of a power of configuration that is the one of nature’s, by which nature is irreductible to the mechanical model. From the concept of technique of nature, the opposition nature-reason is turned into a complementary pair, by means of which nature hears the voice of reason and not only resists to it; and reason is called to recognize the voice of nature in the form of ars naturae. To listen to the voice of nature is to attend to this power. Why, then, make the voice of Isis heard before entering into the science of nature? Because it is a call that calls for prudence, as a prescription on which

 Cf. KU AA: 05:379.

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finitude is inscribed. There is a fenced access. Art and life guard that access. The art because: only beauty, he added, is lovely and visible, at the same time: it is, nota bene, the only way in which we can receive and bear the intellect. Or what would become of us when the divine in general, reason, virtue and truth would be available like this to our senses? Would we not burn and die from love, like Semele before Zeus? Thus beauty is the way of the feeling one to reach the mind –only a way, a means, my little Phaedro.¹⁴

Life because: certain is this that we may boldly state that it is absurd for human beings even to attempt it, or to hope that perhaps someday another Newton might arise who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced.¹⁵

Faust and Frankenstein are the modern figures of excess.

Some Issues Surrounding a Controversial Bond 1. Techne is constitutive of episteme and of praxis, nevertheless it has been thought as independent from one as well as the other. The development of nature research on mathematical bases has been the achievement of modern science. It has shown that nature is a book written in mathematical characters, and the individual that does not know that language does not understand the phenomena. However, nature is also shown as an encrypted book, whose code remains inaccessible to us. When Kant alludes to the vignette that Segner used to put before the eyes of the disciple who was about to begin the investigation of nature, he recognizes this double writing, and with it, the need to maintain the reference of any advance of knowledge to an instance, to a power that we do not dominate or will ever dominate. To believe that we can, believe that “we do it because we can”, is the Faustian cry. 2. The ambiguity of the nature-technique bond: natural-technical/artificialtechnical produces an oscillation, ranging from the figure of a battle: the conquest of nature, the control of impulses (nature versus art) to the complementary coexistence: to listen to the voice of nature is to listen to the logos that configures it, its own ars naturae. The control-domain/collaboration-custody pair reveals  Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, 33.  AA 05:400.

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the inevitable ambiguity, with which the concept of technique or art bears since its origin, as well as the ambivalence of its bond with nature: natural art/art as artifice. The art or ‘technique of nature’ is a secret never deciphered, with which mother nature will continue defying human beings with its mystery, as Isis, the Egyptian goddess of Sais […] challenged her devotees with this statement inscribed on the frontispiece of her temple: ‘I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle’. […] the human art itself will have to be explained by this mysterious art of nature whose intimate secret has not been revealed to us.¹⁶

In this ambiguity between nature and art lies the secret that Mother Nature protects for all mortals. 3. If the concept of the technique of nature shows the analogy between the productive process of nature and that of art as a production oriented by an idea, in other words, which implies logos, it is possible to think the products of nature as products of art, of a natural art, and this implies to think a nature able to agree with the purposes of reason, and therefore, to integrate the natural world into the world of praxis. Something that shows the end of the third Critique is that from the concept of technique of nature, the nature-reason opposition becomes a complementary pair, this means that nature hears the voice of reason and not only resists it. What is in the human being the determination of its nature in which lies its most own productive power? Kant responds: “By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i. e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason”.¹⁷ Hence, the ultimate purpose of nature, by the existence of the human being in it, is to become culture, this human creation, nature elaborated from the material that it provides, or second nature. By such a configuration nature becomes a human world. With the idea of a technique of nature Kant opens a new way of research for the interests of reason. Human reason is free praxis, this is the power to orient actions according to purposes, in a world that shares with the other congeners, of whose destiny of species we are all responsible for. 4. Nature as configurative force or art entails in the human being a consequence, as it reveals a discrepancy, that of the unconditioned in the conditioned. It is about, as Schiller states, the constitutive non submission to necessity (Notwendigkeit). It implies not to be subjected, or as it has been stated, to be open to the world, but this openness is at the same time restlessness, as in the human

 Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos, Ideia de uma Heurística Transcendental, 158.  AA 05: 303.

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being, nature itself exceeds the conditions it poses. Nature is what is given, but, at the same time, as rational nature, it is the power that configures what is given. Hence, going back to nature is impossible if it is not done from oscillation; the return is to syntonize its double constitution, that of the senses and the rational one, and to tune dispositions, a counterpoint game, always protecting those things that in nature are neither revealed nature nor revealable nature.

Bibliography Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung: Veröffentliche Schriften 1910 – 1976, vol. 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. Johann W. von Goethe. Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 13: Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Erich Trunz. München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982. Kant, Immanuel, Kant′s Gesammelte Schriften. vols. 1 – 22 edited by Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 23 by Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin and vol. 24 by Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1900 sq. Kuypers, Karel. Kants Kunstheorie und die Einheit der Kritik der Urteilskraft. Amsterdam/London, North Holland Publishing Company, 1972. Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, translated from the German 1912 edition by Martín C. Doege, 2008. Ribeiro Dos Santos, Leonel, “Da experiência estético-teleológica da natureza à consciência ecológica. Uma leitura da Crítica do Juízo de Kant”. In Trans/Form/Ação 29.1, 2006, 7 – 29. Ribeiro Dos Santos, Leonel, Ideia de uma Heurística Transcendental: Ensaios de Meta-Epistemologia Kantiana. Lisboa, Esfera do Caos Editores, 2012. Santozki, Ulrico, Die Bedeutung antiker Theorien für die Genese und Systematik von Kants Philosophie (Kantstudien-Ergänzungshefte 153). Berlin, Walter De Gruyter, 2006. Seibicke, Wilfried, Technik. Versuch einer Geschichte der Wortfamilie um τέχνη in Deutschland vom 16. Jahrhundert bis etwa 1830. Düsseldorf, VDI-Verlag GMBH, 1968.

Historical Framework

Rudolf Kilian Weigand

Man or the Human Being – End or Culmination of Creation? Scientific Systems of Order on ‘Nature’ in the Middle Ages

1 Starting Point: A Vernacular System at the End of 13th Century As early as in the Middle Ages without the knowledge of nature, that elementary basis of life, which is necessary to cope with life at all, nobody was able to survive. His observations concerning this realtion of uncontrollable nature and the uncontrolled use of ressources by the human being presents us the Bamberg schoolmaster Hugo of Trimberg (died in 1313) in his vernacular didactic poem “Der Renner” (“The horse racer”):¹  Unmêzic regen verderbet die sât, Unmêzic slinden ouch ofte hât Verderbet manigen guoten magen, Daz hœrt man manigen siechen klagen. In kleinen hiusern kleiniu fiur Sint gewarsam und gehiur, Mêzic trinken und kleine spîse In wîser liute magen ich prîse: Tôren ist aber diu werlt nu vol,  Die slindent vil und sint doch hol.

To much rain ruins the sowing, and also immoderate gorging has often turned a well done stomach into a upset stomach. This are often lamenting sick people. In small houses small fire is controllable and confidential. I praise a little water and some food in the stomach of wise people. But today the world is full with fool who gorge immoderate, but are still hollowly.

For a medieval human being nature was not only hard to control. In his area of observation nature was split up in different spheres of imagination and experiences. A detailed and lucid, but also ideosyncratic system of order can we find about 10.000 Verses later in Hugos poem:²

 The quotations of the “Renner” are given in Verse lines, here see Hugo von Trimberg, “Renner”, V. 9460 to 9470. About the structure of Hugos “Renner” see Rudolf K. Weigand, Der “Renner” des Hugo von Trimberg, 364– 374.  See Hugo von Trimberg, Renner, V. 19243 to 19258. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-009

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 Eyâ got herre, sölte ich durch varn Mit dîner hilfe, waz an den arn Dîn hôchgelobtiu wirdikeit Besunder wunder hât geleit, An lewen, an hirzen, an den helfant, An vogel, an manic tier unbekant, An slangen, an vische und ouch besunder  An würze, an würme und an manic merwunder. An bluomen, an boume, an edel gesteine, An berge, an manige brunnen reine, Daz ich diu möhte mit mînem getihte Pfaffen und leien alsô verrihte  Als ez geschriben ist in latîn, Daz si dâ bî gedêhten mîn: Des wölte ich in ein büechelîn Vil gerne machen, möhte ez gesîn!

God, Lord, if I should with your help pass through all that, what your high praised dignity layed of admirable things into the eagle, into the lion, into the deer, the elephant, the birds and many unknown animals, into snakes, fish, and specially also in spices, worms and many wonder of the oceans, in flowers, trees and gemstone, in mountains, in clear fountain wells, so that I with my book scholars and laymen could teach exactly the way as it is written in latin, and therefore they commemorate me: then I would willingly write a small book about that all, if I could do that!

As for reflections on nature, for which he is reluctant to produce a specific “booklet” (büechelin 19257) because he is lacking sufficient abilities, the following aspects are essential with regard to Hugo’s compilation: wild and domesticated animals, plants, herbs and gems, but also mountain regions and fountain wells. In a broader sense this knowledge comprises also general medical science, farming and further fields. The structuring of this area of knowledge on nature is done with the help of an system of order derived from different sources. About thousand lines after his introductory part leading to that digression on nature in his poem, which consists of up to 1200 rhymes (V. 19161– 20346), Hugo names his authorities, from which he derives his findings, all of which written in Latin (als ez geschriben ist in latîn V. 19255) and quotes:  Solînus und Ysidôrus, Physiologus und her Plînius, Plâtô und meister Adellîn, Ambrôsius und sant Augustîn, Jerônimus und Orîgines, Jacob und Aristotiles Sint von natûre der schrift geziuge  In irm getihte, daz ich niht liuge.

Solinus and Isidore, the Physiologus und Pliny, Plato and Master Claudius Aelianus, Ambrose and Saint Augustin, Hieronymus and Origines, Jacobus and Aristotle are in their writings the witnesses of the book of nature, if I do not deceive myself.

At first glance, Hugo’s list of authors seems to deal with the knowledge of nature taught by ancient Greek and Latin writers: Pliny the Elder with his Naturalis historia,³ who already refers to Aristotle and Plato; the Christian didactic text called  Cf. Wolfgang Hübner, “Der descensus”.

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Physiologus,⁴ where we can find quotations of Claudius Aelianus (meister Adellîn), Solinus and his De mirabilibis mundi (The wonders of the world) and some others. However, Hugo had actually not read all their complete writings himself. In his lifetime at the end of the 13th century there were already distinct medieval collections available that presented the knowledge on nature from the ancient world: Specula (mirrors) with their specific types of structuring the material,⁵ libri (books) collecting the knowledge about the world, nature and human beings,⁶ and the vast range of imago mundi (Description of the world, by Hugo as der werlde bilde quoted in V. 19781; werlde, the german term for world, means here nature as well).⁷

However, the most important collectors and compilers of knowledge were the so called “Great Four”-writers of medieval “encyclopedias”: Thomas of Cantimpré, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Vincent of Beauvais and Juan Gil de Zamora.⁸ If we study the contents of their presentation of nature, we modern scholars are especially amazed by the immense amount of the specifc medieval “spiritual meaning” in contemporary natural history.⁹ Whether and to what extent this is matched by the history of knowledge or its progress in some other ways has rarely been focused on. Yet, one has to study the pre-modern rules of composing the material and the chain of argumentations thoroughly to order to learn the ways in which the different functional interdependencies and interactions in the Middle Ages do reveal their concepts. Against this background, what sort of challenge is the scholar or the simple user of medieval natural history confronted with when using those sources? What kind of material is he faced with, how is it organized? Which patterns of approach can he resort to? What does it result in, if he makes use of that ancient classical heritage and presents it with medieval methods again in our times, thus changing its structures of presentation?¹⁰ The great collector of the knowledge of nature in Roman times, Pliny the Elder, is also cited by Hugo. Nearly all medieval writers of natural history rely on him. Plinius made use of the device to present the 37 books of his ‚naturalis  Otto Schönberger, ed., Physiologus; and Benedikt K. Vollmann, “Spätmittelalterliche Naturlehre”, 154.  Cf. Rudolf K. Weigand, “Die Mongolen in Nürnberg”, 134– 138.  Walter Buckl, Das 14. Jahrhundert, 113 – 115.  Rudolf K. Weigand, “Die Mongolen in Nürnberg”, 135 sq.  Benedikt K. Vollmann, “Spätmittelalterliche Naturlehre”, 155.  Ibid., 154.  Ibid., 168.

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historia’ in such a way that each single liber can be used separately.¹¹ According to our classifications his complete works are not confined to a description of nature itself. His topics, such as kosmography (book 2), geography and climate (book 3 to 6), the knowledge about man (anthropology in book 7), fauna (zoology in book 8 to 11), of plants (book 12 to 19) and medical knowledge (book 20 to 32) and finally metallurgy and mineralogy and additionally painting and history of art (book 33 to 37) reach far beyond pure reflections on nature. They combine also the methods of different practical areas. Thus Plinius’ comprehensive knowledge comes close to a text type which later is termed as “encyclopedia”. On the basis of the sectional structure of his work Plinius created the option to use the single spheres of knowledge separately. Encyclopedic structures in the Middle Ages, which basically most often refer to Plinius’ collections of material, later follow various new patterns and systems of order.¹² The prevailing pattern surely was the theological orientation according to the ordo rerum.

2 The Order According to the History of Creation: ordo rerum The ordo rerum considers all material conditions of nature as elements of God’s creation. This structure based on traditional theology is graded according to the matters of creation on the basis of Genesis. 1st day: deluge and light 2nd day: division of the waters into the spheres above and underneath the firmament 3rd day: land, sea and plants 4th day: sun, moon and stars 5th day: water animals and birds 6th day: land animals and man

Such a succession ends or rather culminates in man as the object of the final act of creation. He is emphasized as the crown or pride of the whole comprehensive process of creation. With Plinius he was still embedded between geography and climatology and the world of animals (book 8 to 11). As opposed to the typology of the Hexaemeron a gradation according to the value of the items of consideration can be found. Here the structuring according  Cf. Otto Schönberger, ed., Physiologus, 15.  Christel Meier, “Enzyklopädischer Ordo und sozialer Gebrauchsraum”, 515.

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to a purely chronological creational point of view is missing. Instead of the succession of the Six Days the authors choose rather a different hierarchic order. It decends from higher valued items down to lower rated items. After man on top chapters on animals – higher animals – lower animals – higher plants – stones – metals follow. It should be stressed that this kind of structuring did not actually have its origin in biblical-theological motivations. It is rather derived from Plinius’ pattern in his Naturalis historia as shown above (after the description of earth: man – animal – plants), even though those principles were not taken over completely. This simple example indeed can help to understand the peculiar process of the history of reception of natural descriptions. By combining the items and the pattern of order the authors take over contents, but by giving them different positions in the treatises not only traditional points of views are adapted, but also new perspectives are created. In Hugo’s case a different tone with regard to Plinius can be found in the way he presents his findings. We do not read the informally narrated descriptions of nature of antiquity again, now they are supplemented by rather long moral interpretations of the sparsely characterized natural phenomena. But also this form has a pre-history which runs parallel to the reception of Plinius.¹³

3 Practical Use: Healing and Helping with the Knowledge of Nature We mentioned above Plinius’ division in his presentation of nature into autonomous books which marked the starting point of a broad range of literature on applied natural science.¹⁴ Different kinds of medical treatises are based on the knowledge of healing in Plinius’ books 20 to 32. They are updated in the school of Salerno and enriched with new knowledge. The pharmacological state of knowledge is collected in Macer floridus (Odo Magdunensis) to culminate in the general collection of Hortus sanitatis in the 15th century or the ambitious “Gart der gesundheit” (Johann Wonnecke von Kaub on behalf of Bernhard von Breitenbach 1485 at Peter Schöffer in Mainz/Germany). Apart from medical treatises and books on herbs so called bestiaria, books on animals, present further details of the knowledge of nature. But the most widespread text type of bestiaria  Benedikt K. Vollmann, “Spätmittelalterliche Naturlehre”, 156.  Benedikt K. Vollmann, “Spätmittelalterliche Naturlehre”, 153.

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called Physiologus cited by Hugo is not merely a book on animals. This early Christian presentation of nature contains in its original form 48 short chapters in which apart from some animals two trees and six gems are described. On the other hand, Isidor’s Etymologiae contain, of course, with liber 12 de animalibus a section on animals. As mentioned at the beginning, Hugo of Trimberg chooses a peculiar order when enumerating the animals: lion, deer and elephants form one group, which is unusual in this combination. We find a comparable system in Physiologus. Even the numerous variations, alterations and extensions of the texts after many grades of receptions let the basic structure shine through. Starting with a quote from the bible where an animal is mentioned, a brief factual account follows which finally ends up in moral instructions including allegorical interpretations. Thus the original function becomes manifest. The natural phenomena to be found in the bible are to be embedded in a wider context of knowledge. Against this background of a bigot basic attitude, medieval research has long categorized the Physiologus among people’s books.¹⁵ Such a verdict however misunderstands the state of research of this kind of literature as a result of shortsighted parallels. In fact, at the time of early book printing these texts mirror the contemporary scientific schemes of order. As we find the combination of quotes from the Bible and statements on nature in the “Renner”, too, Karl Langosch (1942) regarded the Physiologus as the only essential source of Hugo’s digression on nature.¹⁶ Yet he did not realize that Hugo considered quite a number of natural phenomina which cannot be deducted from Physiologus. He must have exploited other texts for his “Renner”. In fact, Hugo made use of a work whose order follows a different pattern and which was widespread among philosophical treatises in the Middle Ages – the ordo artium. ¹⁷

4 ordo artium: Nature’s Place as Structured in the Academic World It was the encylopedia of the so called ‘Great Four’ in the 13th century, namely Thomas, Bartholomew, Vinzenz, Juan Zil de Zamora, that in the first place presented a categorisation of knowledge in the academic life at that time. We can

 Cf. Albrecht Classen, The German Volksbuch.  Karl Langosch, Das Registrum, 42.  Christel Meier, “Enzyklopädischer Ordo und sozialer Gebrauchsraum”, 515.

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observe this systemisation of knowledge in the most sophisticated way in Vinzenz of Beauvais’ ‘Speculum doctrinale’. This third part of his great ‘Speculum majus’ is divided in 17 libri with all together 2.374 chapters.¹⁸ First, he deals with the basic principles of logic (grammar lib. 2; logic, rhetoric, poetry lib. 3). It is followed by practice (lib. 4 to 10 with various outlines, such as monastica lib. 5, oeconomica lib. 6, politica lib. 7; law combined with actiones in lib.8, law and crimines lib. 9 and 10). After that he deals with mechanics (artes mechanicae lib. 11 and practica medicinae lib. 12) until he reaches the highest level of reflection with Theorica – Theory (medicine lib. 13 and 14; physics lib. 15; mathematics lib. 16; theology lib. 17). There is an amazing finding. In medieval academic life there is no reflection on nature as an independent type of research. Nature does not hold a fixed or set place in these methodologically structured reflections, but it is categorized in manifold approaches by the learned authors (such as description of the world, help in coping with human existence, aid in case of sickness, interpretations of interactions). Vincent, too, gave its Speculum a broader scope, next to and before his doctrinae, which only became the third part of the comprehensive Speculum. His “Great Mirror of the World” contains a Speculum historiale and the Speculum naturale. The way in which the content of the part concerning nature is presented follows the pattern of the Six-Day-Work as shown above. A brief outline of the content of these 32 books can also be found in the historiale (lib. 1, c. 1– 14 of 131, sections covering the timespan from creation to the birth of Mose.) It is the part that outlines the chain of events in a chronological order within the work of the creation. Of course, thus it aims at its purpose and end.¹⁹ We can conclude that the knowledge on nature around God’s creation is used as an essentially basic information in order to understand the history of salvation.²⁰ Such a specific conceptual focus excludes curiositas a priori, which was already despised by patristic writers because it only lists the objects of nature and their peculiarities out of sheer curiosity. Instead, it replaces curiositas by the strive for detailed knowledge which then serves as the basis of a typological-historical interpretation. Even though the gain in knowledge might seem rel-

 Cf. Rudolf K. Weigand, Vinzenz von Beauvais, 35 – 38.  Cf. Ibid., 39 – 47.  Rudolf K. Weigand, Vinzenz von Beauvais, 69 – 76.

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atively small, such a combination does document in a lucid way the medieval concept of the distribution and the hierarchy of the spheres of knowledge. In an age when the entire available knowledge was collected, such a perspective equally justifies gathering the complete knowledge around natural phenomena and communicating it abundantly without hierarchical weighting. In practise, however, the factual knowledge around nature is presented at the beginning and the analysis can only tie with when the facts were delivered earlier on. It is this stringent succession or order, that allows it to leave out the “spiritual meaning” of nature, too, and thus makes it possible to present an autonomous collection of knowledge.²¹ This step was made by Thomas of Contimprè in the version ‘Thomas III’, which represents this phase of reception of his encyclopedias on nature.²² This can also be found in the systematic order of nature with Hugo of Trimberg.²³

5 Ordering Knowledge and Collecting Experiences At a closer glance, all encyclopedia of the types presented above can be seen as collections of knowledge in books without relating to real nature. The variant with reference to the examination of nature in the Middle Ages can be found in applicable instructions derived from Nature which handbooks of human and veterinary medicine present in their practical sections. Overviews on farming are also part of this type. But really exciting challenges emerge if encyclopedias of the ‘Great-Four-Group’ are combined with practical handbooks, but definitely not only by being part of the same codex, but by new arrangements and additionally by the way material is assembled. Even if from time to time the paradoxical situation arises that proven methods of using nature that were gained through experience are combined with allegorical interpretations of natural phenomena, gradually and measurably the view on natural phenomena is shifting.

 Cf. Udo Friedrich, Naturgeschichte zwischen artes liberales und frühneuzeitlicher Wissenschaft, 2– 14.  Cf. Thomas von Cantimpré, Liber de naturis rerum, 133.  Lutz Rosenplenter, Zitat und Autoritätenberufung, 477– 506.

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A parallel presentation of Thomas de Cantimprè’s starting point on the one hand with two stages of reception on the other hand can illustrate the methodological approach:²⁴ Edition Thomas III

Hugo of Trimberg

Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib. Lib.

lewe, hirz etc. vogel merwunder vische slange würme (including insects) boume balsam würze edel gesteine

Lib.

ThomasI/II rsp. Boese (or source) (Lib.  corpus humanum s.b. Lib.  Lib.  homines monstruosi s.b.)  quadrupedes Lib.  quadrupedes  aves Lib.  aves (birds)  monstra marina Lib.  monstra marina  pisces Lib.  pisces (fish)  serpentes Buch  serpentes (snakes)  vermes Lib.  vermes (worms)  arbores Lib.  arbores (trees)  arbores aromatice Lib.  arbores aromatice  herbe Lib.  herbe (herbs)  lapides Lib.  lapides (stone)  metalla Lib.  metalla (metal)  VII regiones aeris Lib.  VII regiones aeris  spera Lib.  planete (planets)  passiones aeris Lib.  meteora  quattuor elementa Lib.  elementa  quedam notabilia (mostly Thomas-I/II u. Aristotle)  corpus humanum Lib.  corpus humanum (man)  homines monstruosi Lib.  homines monstruosi  diverse minerie Ps.-John Folsham and Thom.I/II (lib. )  diverse cure (unknown source: prescriptions)

mensche brunnen (fountains)

6 Conclusion: The Threefold Challenge and the Modern Academic System If we trace the development up to this point we may state the following. The medieval researcher of nature has to face a threefold challenge: 1. As he understands the world, it is his duty to work out the description of phenomena with the help of written sources available. He has to gather the various ways of information.  For the basic structure of the table compare Benedikt K. Vollmann, Janine Déus and Rudolf K. Weigand, eds., Thomas von Cantimpré ›Liber de naturis rerum‹, 143. For the vernacular transmission of Thomas‘ liber see also the complex around Konrad von Megenberg: Walter Buckl, Megenberg aus zweiter Hand; Gerold Hayer, Konrad von Megenberg: Das Buch der Natur.

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2. As a user of the knowledge of the world he is expected be able to transfer the items of information into practical use which may help to make human existence more efficient and productive. 3. As an interpreter of the world it is his task to set the “Book of Books”, i. e. the Bible, aside the “Book of Nature” additionally. In the concrete written language the three areas are differentiated again and again in the course of the historic development and so autonomous functional categories emerge. Above all, theology was confronted with a big challenge. If it wanted to keep up its claim as the leading science then it had to adopt the new observations or findings and then harmonize them with theological interpretations. A result of these endeavours can be seen in the reprint of Vinzenz of Beauvais’ Speculum majus in the monumental edition of the Benedictines of St Vedastus as late as in 1624.²⁵ Of course, such enterprises were often quickly outpaced by the proceeding experimental science of experience. Still, the process of differentiation and new reapprochement among the individual scholarly disciplines has not come to an end even today. This can be shown by tendencies such as the use of methods of a “holistic (integrated) approach” of “practical wisdom” which tries to make use of recipes gained from medieval medicine and spirituality for the modern life style (medicine from monasteries, attentiveness, teachings of leadership derived from monastic rules). Again, just like in the “Six-Day-Work”-theory the human being moves up to the top of evaluations, although he marks the end of the reflections. So a special type of Anthropology is created. Such a position, combined with a clear hierarchic system of the knowledge, we can already find in the Late Antiquity by studiing the writings of St Augustine.²⁶ He classifies sapientia higher than scientia, according to St Paul in the bible.²⁷ The fact that already in the 13th century researchers are faced with challenges, which exceed pure knowledge, we observe in the vernacular tradition of Thomas‘ Liber de natura rerum. ²⁸ It can be also found in Hugo’s ›Renner‹ again. Significantly he does not articulate this in the context of his reflections on the Book of Nature. But he mentions it when he treats the sin of frâz, the immoderate use

 Rudolf K. Weigand, Vinzenz von Beauvais, 46.  See Augustinus, De doctrina christiana, 2,16, 24. The qutations of St Augustine on human necessary knowledge of nature collected by Gregor Schiemann, Was ist Natur, 80 – 85.  1 Cor 1,20.  Cf. Dagmar Gottschall, Konrad von Megenberg. The vernacular manuscript tradition (more than 100 mss.) of Konrads buoch von den naturleichen dingen is analysed by Gerold Hayer, Konrad von Megenberg: Das Buch der Natur. The german text is edited by Luff/Steer.

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of the gifts of nature. Hugo dedicates the third distinction of his doctrine of sins to this vice. It is the immoderate consumer’s fault (error/deficiencies) that due to his boeziu gewohnheit (bad habits) he is unable to realize the wariu lere (true doctrine) which is manifest in nature. To achieve this understanding he has to make use of sapientia, wisdom:  Swer weste waz rehtiu wîsheit wêre, Alle irdische wisheit er verbêre, Wenne manic man vil buoche kann  Und ist doch niht ein wîser man. Wie wolken swimmen, wie wazzer diezen, Wie tier sich grimmen, wie vische fliezen, Wie würme kriechen, wie vogel fliegen, Wie sunnen und mânen schîn uns triegen, Wie brunnen klingen, wie vogel singen, Wie bluomen in maniger varwe ûf dringen, Wie wazzer und erde sich nider senken, Wie fiur und luft ze berge ûf swenken, Wie kindes lîp in muoter lîbe  Sich samen und füege, wie ez beklîbe, Mit welhem jâmer ez werde geborn, Wie loup und gras, obez, wîn und korn Ûf erden wahse, wie grôz wunder Daz mer in im ouch habe besunder: Weste ich daz allez, sô diuhte ich wîse!

The one who knows, what real wisdom is, he would live without any wisdom of this world, because many people know many books, but do not be wise. The way the clouds swim and the water sweeps, the way animals rage and fish are floating, the way reptiles creep and birds are flying, the way the shine of sun and moon is deceiving us, the way fountains are rushing and birds are singing, the way flowers florish in many colours, the way water and earth are declining, the way fire and air are raising up a mountain, the way a childs body is developing, fitting and staying inside the mother, under which pain it is born, the way foliage, gras, fruit, vine and grain grow on earth, how huge wonder the ocean holds inside: If I knew that all, then I would seam wise!

Consequently, not the functionless, compiled knowledge in books, but the comprehensive knowledge of the natural processes and their interactions constitute, as a school master in Bamberg in the 13th century said, the essence of wisdom: true wisdom.

Bibliography Primary Sources Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner. 4 vols., edited by Gustav Ehrismann, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1970. Konrad von Megenberg, Buch der Natur, vol. 2: Kritischer Text nach den Handschriften, edited by Robert Luff and Georg Steer (Texte und Textgeschichte, 54). Tübingen, De Gruyter, 2011. Der altdeutsche Physiologus. Die Millstätter Reimfassung und die Wiener Prosa (nebst dem lateinischen Text und dem althochdeutschen Physiologus), edited by Friedrich Maurer (Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 67). Tübingen, De Gruyter, 1967.

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Physiologus: Griechisch/Deutsch, translated and edited by Otto Schönberger. Stuttgart, Reclam, 2001. Thomas Cantimpratensis‚ Liber de natura rerum. Editio princeps secundum codices manuscriptos, Teil 1: Text, edited by Helmut Boese. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 1973. Thomas von Cantimpré, Liber de naturis rerum, vol. 1: Kritische Ausgabe der Redaktion III (Thomas III) eines Anonymus, edited by Vollmann, Benedikt K., Janine Déus and Rudolf K. Weigand (Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter, 54.1). Wiesbaden, Reichert, 2017.

Literature Buckl, Walter, Megenberg aus zweiter Hand. Studien zur Redaktion B des “Puochs von den natuerleichen Dingen” (Germanistische Texte und Studien, 42). Hildesheim/Zürich/New York, Olms Verl., 1993. Buckl, Walter, ed., Das 14. Jahrhundert: Krisenzeit (Eichstätter Kolloquium, 1). Regensburg, F. Pustet, 1995. Classen, Albrecht, The German Volksbuch. A critical history of a late-medieval genre (Studies in German language and literature, 15). Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Pr.,1995. Friedrich, Udo, Naturgeschichte zwischen artes liberales und frühneuzeitlicher Wissenschaft. Conrad Gessners “Historia animalium” und ihre volkssprachliche Rezeption (Frühe Neuzeit, 21). Tübingen, De Gruyter, 1995. Gottschall, Dagmar, Konrad von Megenbergs Buch von den natü rlichen Dingen. Ein Dokument deutschsprachiger Albertus Magnus-Rezeption im 14. Jahrhundert (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 83). Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2004. Hayer, Gerold, Konrad von Megenberg “Das Buch der Natur”. Untersuchungen zu seiner Textund Überlieferungsgeschichte (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 110). Tübingen, De Gruyter, 1998. Hübner, Wolfgang, “Der descensus als ordnendes Prinzip in der ‘Naturalis historia’ des Plinius”. In Die Enzyklopädie im Wandel vom Hochmittelalter bis zur frühen Neuzeit, edited by Christel Meier, München, Wilhelm Fink, 2002, 25 – 41. Langosch, Karl, Das “Registrum multorum auctorum” des Hugo von Trimberg. Untersuchungen und kommentierte Textausgabe (Germanische Studien, 235). Nendeln/Liechtenstein, Kraus, 1969. Meier, Christel, “Enzyklopädischer Ordo und sozialer Gebrauchsraum. Modelle der Funktionalität einer universalen Literaturform”. In Die Enzyklopädie im Mittelalter vom Hochmittelalter bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Id., München, Wilhelm Fink, 2002, 511 – 532. Rosenplenter, Lutz, Zitat und Autoritätenberufung im Renner Hugos von Trimberg. Ein Beitrag zur Bildung der Laien im Spätmittelalter (Europäische Hochschulschridten, 1, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 457). Frankfurt am Main/Bern, Lang, 1982. Schiemann, Gregor, Was ist Natur? Klassische Texte zur Naturphilosophie. München, Dt. Taschenbuch-Verl., 1996. Vollmann, Benedikt K., “Die Arbeitsweise mittellateinischer Fachschriftsteller. Bemerkungen zur Überlieferung des Thomas Cantimpratensis Abbreviatus (Thomas III)”. Aevum 84, 2010, 465 – 474.

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Vollmann, Benedikt K., “Spätmittelalterliche Naturlehre – weltlich und geistlich”. In Neuere Aspekte germanistischer Spätmittelalterforschung, edited by Freimut Löser et al. (Imagines Medii Aevi, 29), Wiesbaden, Reichert, 2012, 153 – 159. Weigand, Rudolf K., Der “Renner” des Hugo von Trimberg. Überlieferung, Quellenabhängigkeit und Struktur einer spätmittelalterlichen Lehrdichtung (Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter, 35). Wiesbaden, Reichert, 2000. Weigand, Rudolf K. “Die Mongolen in Nürnberg. Zu Expansion des Kanonwissens über den Osten in Enzyklopädien für die Predigt”. In Religiosità e civiltà. Conoscenze, confronti, influssi reciproci tra le religioni (secoli X-XIV), edited by Giancarlo Andenna, Milano, Vita e pensiero, 2013, 133 – 149. Weigand, Rudolf K., Vinzenz von Beauvais. Scholastische Universalchronistik als Quelle volkssprachiger Geschichtsschreibung (Germanistische Texte und Studien, 36). Hildesheim/Zürich/New York, Olms Verl., 1991.

Nicolangelo D’Acunto

Resilience as an Interpretative Key to the Relationship between Man and Nature in the Middle Ages The relationship between man and nature, perhaps more than any other aspect of medieval life, has contributed to consolidating the legend of the Dark Ages.¹ If we refer to the topic of our meetings, the challenges of life, then that of medieval man with nature has always been considered in the Western cultural tradition a challenge that was lost from the start. In actual fact, a new and different consideration of the Middle Ages has come from a calmer and more meditated reflection on the relationship between man and nature.² This reflection is part of the new general debate on environmental determinism, which certainly does not enjoy much good fortune in geo-historical research, still dominated to a great extent by the approach to the problem laid down by Lucien Febvre. In his book “La terre et l’évolution humaine” of 1949, the accent is placed on the ability of societies to react to the conditionings of nature through a very wide range of cultural instruments. On the other hand, the “influences” of nature on man and in particular of the soil on history are considered without value.³ Research on global warming, which attributes the recent climate change to the excessive combustion of hydrocarbons by man, also reflects this “anthropocentric” approach. Not surprisingly, the most radical objections to the theory of global warming have come from studies on the history of medieval climate, where oscillations of the average temperature can be observed in a context which certainly underwent little influence from human activities.⁴ In an excellent paper on the early medieval environment as a historiographical topic, Paolo Delogu has also observed that: […] it is difficult to avoid the temptation to relate at least the two main phases of the climatic trend between the 5th and the 13th centuries with the historical evolution of European societies in the same period; the chronological correspondence of the cooling phase with

 Cf. Giorgio Falco, La polemica sul medioevo.  Cf. Ellen F. Arnold, “An Introduction to Medieval Environmental History”; Robert Delort, “Les facteurs éco-biologiques”; Fredric L. Cheyette, “The Disappearance of the Ancient Landscape”; Paolo Delogu, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”.  Cf. Lucien Febvre, La terre et l’evolution humaine.  Cf. Rudolf Brázdil et al.,”Historical Climatology in Europe”; Paolo Delogu, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”, 68 – 83. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-010

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the processes of disaggregation of the settlement and territory, probably of population decline as well, which are recorded in Western Europe between the 6th and 7th centuries, and that of the warming phase with the Carolingian reorganization and more clearly with the explosion of the Year One Thousand and the height of the medieval civilisation in the 12th century .⁵

The studies on the history of the climate in the Middle Ages therefore seem to restore credibility to a new form of environmental determinism, thanks to a perfect overlapping of their chronology with that of the main social, economic and even political and cultural transformations, to the extent that a history of the medieval Western world could be sketched out marked by the modifications of the sun’s radiation and the consequent climatic variations. Even though we cannot exaggerate with these monocausal explanations, it is obvious that in the Middle Ages man experienced his weakness and his fragility in the challenge with the environment on a daily basis. From the Christian biblical and Patristic tradition, he had received a positive conception of the creation, through the story of Genesis which says that God saw that every single one of His creatures was a good thing. Yet the experience of nature placed medieval man up against a perennial checkmate, a short life, dominated by individual and collective diseases, a hostile and predominant physical environment and natural catastrophes that continuously contradicted the optimism of Genesis. In order to explain this contradiction, the idea that God punishes men for their sins, even though the creation is in itself good, was elaborated. This theological concept also led to the failure to distinguish between natural causes and anthropic factors: war, hunger and famines all had in common in the medieval perception that they were scourges inflicted by God on sinning humanity. This idea heavily influenced the quality of the sources that inform us about the relationship between man and nature in the Middle Ages. Those sources are ecclesiastical and amplify catastrophes to offer a theological interpretation in terms of divine punishment, thus building up a distorted image of the relationship between man and nature which must not deceive the historian.⁶ It is however undeniable that medieval man had a feeling of impotence because he felt submitted “to powers that could not be disciplined” (Marc Bloch)⁷. The sensation of the precarious nature of life was confirmed by the high infant mortality rates but also by the low average lifespan. In private documents, most of the people mentioned no longer have their father. The humanity that

 Paolo Delogu, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”, 82.  Cf. Jaques Berlioz, “Flagelli”.  Marc Bloch, I caratteri generali, 49.

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populates our early medieval sources is made up of orphans and the dead and relatively few young survivors. This can clearly be seen in the libri vitae of the monasteries.⁸ Since “the frequent and early deaths took away value from life”⁹, life was less important than death, so that the date to be remembered in the existence even of the most important Christians was not that of their birth, but the final one of their resurrection in Christ through death, which was punctually recorded and handed down to later generations in books placed on the altar of the churches where the relics of the saint were and where the living prayed for the dead buried in the same building or near it.¹⁰ This mixing between the living and the dead shows that in the early Middle Ages “the natural and the supernatural worlds were not yet divided by the line that was to be widened and reinforced starting from the high Middle Ages; they were both made of the same matter”¹¹ and the exchanges between the two worlds were considered completely natural. Even extraordinary phenomena had natural explanations, whilst from the 13th century they were to be interpreted as supernatural phenomena and Paradise, which in the early Middle Ages was still thought of as a garden, was to increasingly take on a spiritual appearance and therefore increasingly less material and similar to reality known to man’s daily experience. Quite rightly, Berlioz invites us to abandon an excessively pessimistic view of the Middle Ages: […] the will to survive, the daily and effective acts against accidents have been passed under silence for too long by historians who show little criticism of their ecclesiastical sources and are inclined to represent fear as the motor of history. In the face of disasters, the West has overall shown an extraordinary dynamism.¹²

The challenge of man to nature in the Middle Ages was solved by the ability of adaptation as the response to a limit that was considered impossible to eliminate but could nevertheless be faced in different ways, depending on the time and the place. In this sense it becomes essential to consider the relationship between man and nature in a historical perspective and therefore attentive to the chronological dimension. The few possibilities of having an effect on the natural environment produced during the Middle Ages a series of reactions which we can interpret in the light of the category of resilience. This term, which in physics

 Cf. Vito Fumagalli, Quando il cielo s’oscura, 37.  Ibid., 41.  Cf. Dieter Geuenich and Uwe Ludwig (eds.), Libri vitae.  Vito Fumagalli, Quando il cielo s’oscura, 17.  Jacues Berlioz, “Flagelli”, 443

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indicates the property of materials to resist shocks without breaking, in psychology indicates the capacity for self-repair after damage, to cope, to resist but also to build and succeed in positively reorganizing one’s life despite difficult situations that suggest a negative outcome. For example, we can read the prologue to the Regula Benedicti: Therefore we must prepare our hearts and our bodies to do battle under the holy obedience and let us ask God that He be pleased to give us the help of His grace for anything which our nature finds hardly possible.¹³

The success of this rule depended to a great extent on its moderation and proposing obedience to rules which, although imposing an itinerary of personal perfection, were however respectful of human nature and complied with its limits. The experience of time was made dramatic by the threat of death but more in general man had a very problematic relationship with corporality, marked by the terrible and continuous daily experience of physical pain which did not even spare popes or emperors. When we hear our ecclesiastical and monastic sources condemn the flesh, on the one hand we have to remember to whom those sermons were addressed, vowed to vowed to terrena despicere for quaerere caelestia, on the other, we have to bear in mind that the corporeal dimension was conceived as an ungovernable enemy, capable of inflicting daily pain that is insistent and unimaginable for modern man. The first and most brutal answer to the precarious nature of life was that of increasing the number of children.¹⁴ Even Charlemagne, who lived until he was over seventy, had to react to the death of many of his heirs by multiplying his offspring. This is only one of the many ways through which man, in the early Middle Ages and for many more centuries to come, showed resilience, continuously adapting to the challenges that an overpowering nature set him and from the progressive loss of the instruments that in Roman antiquity had allowed men to achieve significant successes in that struggle. The first difficulty in the face of nature was represented by the impossibility of measuring space and exactly knowing its extension. In Roman times, travellers could quantify distances by reading the milestones and measure extensions of the landscape through the system of the centuriae. The mathematical dimension of space replaced in the early Middle Ages the experience of distance and

 “Ergo praeparanda sunt corda nostra et corpora sanctae praeceptorum oboedientiae militanda, et quod minus habet in nos natura possibile, rogemus Dominum ut gratiae suae iubeat nobis adiutorium ministrare” see the Prologus of Rudolphus Hanslik, Benedicti Regula.  Cf. Vito Fumagalli, Quando il cielo s’oscura, 43.

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the path covered was measured in days of travel and no longer in miles¹⁵, also because the milestones no longer told the truth. Not only did the traveller adapt to the new conditions but so did the Roman roads, which had violated nature by overcoming the natural obstacles with tunnels, bridges and viaducts, changing their route adapting to the landscape and following its obstacles.¹⁶ The same thing happened with the choices for settlement. Whereas in the Roman period, the lack of water was overcome by building aqueducts which made cities without hydric resources habitable, in the early Middle Ages all this was no longer possible and the new settlements which arose between the 8th and the 9th centuries were founded “near woods and scrubland […] water and wetlands in the flood plain” with a slight and gradual impact, essentially adapting to the configuration and the resources of the natural environment, “without radically transforming its vocation and character”¹⁷, also out of fear of “being an alternative to the order of the reality of nature”.¹⁸ The wildness that characterized the early medieval landscape before the agrariarization of the land which started in the 11th century did not exclude the intervention of man in the absolute sense but rather determined his action within the margins that were granted to him by an overpowering nature, in which the harsh and rainy climate had caused floods, the retreat of the coastlines, the advance of the glaciers, the growth of woods and areas covered by marshes which made any attempt at containing water useless. Nevertheless, the land was anthropized, although with ways suitable for a wild landscape.¹⁹ For this reason too in the 5th to 7th centuries, the forests, in particular south of the Alps, were not completely removed from human control. On the contrary, desert spaces and areas of solitude were on the sidelines of the inhabited areas and close to them, the destination of daily incursions by peasants-shepherds and peasants-hunters fully integrated into a nature that was still too strong to be defied in some way.²⁰ With the 9th century, the situation slowly began to change, at times due to the growth of monasticism, even though the link between the presence of monasteries and deforestation is increasingly a subject of discussion. These interven-

 Cf. Arnold Esch, “Homo viator”.  Cf. Id., Römische Strassen in ihrer Landschaft.  Paolo Delogu, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”, 106 sq.  Vito Fumagalli, Quando il cielo s’oscura, 21.  Cf. Id., Uomini e paesaggi medievali, 37– 39.  Cf. Charles Higounet, “Les forêts de l’Europe”; Bruno Andreolli and Massimo Montanari (eds.), Il bosco nel Medioevo; Massimo Montanari, “La foresta come spazio economico e culturale”; Chris Wickham, “European forests in the Early Middle Ages”.

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tions were only dotted around the land and could not change the landscape in its essence. Delogu, already quoted, observed that the contrast with wild nature did not find in the monastic world: […] the ideal expression in the agrarian conquest of productive spaces, but in the construction of highly organized environments, in which usefulness was associated with pleasantness. This conception of the anthropized environment as eminently ordered territory corresponds to the Carolingian ideology of rational order as the purpose of government and culture.²¹

They were evidently ideological developments with little practical impact on the landscape in the immediate term but in the long term they were to have had a profound effect on the practices of self-representation and self-legitimization of power in relation to its ability to put order into the territory, by governing nature and asserting man’s superiority over it. In practice this took place from the 13th century onwards, with the agrarianizaton of the land and an increasingly smaller extension of uncultivated areas, woods and marshlands, reduced to a complementary function with respect to the areas on which the activity of the peasants was concentrated, with their function becoming increasingly important, including on a symbolic level. In the contemporary narrative sources, the news of floods is multiplied, which made clear the fragility of the conquests of agriculture, even in a phase of great economic expansion. The technical capacities for making safe areas of recently-tilled and cultivated land, until then dominated by dense and wild vegetation and by uncontainable flows of water, which at times of spate once again flooded the cultivated areas, were lacking. Whilst in the early Middle Ages these calamitous events had not made an impression on the chroniclers or stimulated the activity of legislators, because they were considered perfectly natural and did not have an impact on human activities, in the 12th and 13th centuries, both the narrative sources and the by-laws of the communes in the Po area offer a great deal of information in this regard. In actual fact, the bewilderment in the face of nature grew together with man’s illusion of having in some way dominated it through farming activities.²² In this case too, the early medieval vision, which was unitary and organic, of the relationship between man and nature was replaced in the late Middle Ages by the awareness of the separateness of man from an object that he could observe with detachment – nature – which could from one moment to another show its hostile side again. In

 Paolo Delogu, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”, 96.  Cf. Vito Fumagalli, Uomini e paesaggi medievali, 63 – 66.

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the early Middle Ages, this adversary did not even have a name. Not even Carolinigan culture had been able to work out “a synthetic conception of nature as an organic whole that represents the environment in which the lives of men are played out”.²³ Man had considered himself immersed in nature to the point of being confused with it. In the natural elements, the elites had looked for allegories and symbols which showed the contiguity between the natural and the supernatural, but they approved the substantial illegibility of reality as such. With the 12th century, everything changed and nature even became personified, “lady Nature (dama natura)”, praised by poets and studied by philosophers. The discovery of nature entailed for man the “awareness of dealing with an external, present and intelligible reality, like a companion whose strength and laws called for agreement or conflict, at the same time when, with a parallel trauma, they also realized that they were part of this universe which they were getting ready to dominate”, no longer observing the extravagant phenomena which had struck the generations of the past, but rather “the regular and specific sequences”.²⁴ The desacralization of nature and the criticism of early medieval symbolism opened the doors to a different view of the natural-supernatural pair. For example, the forest, which in the early Middle Ages had been the privileged place of the encounter between man/shepherd and nature, in this phase became the horrid “elsewhere” in which to project the disvalues, the dark woods in which Dante Alighieri loses the “straight way” of a morally ordered existence. At the same time, the forest took on “a supernatural content and appearance, concomitantly with the progressive separation of man from nature”.²⁵ The debate on the real incidence of these cultural elaborations on the widespread mind-set is still open. It is certain that a figure such as Francis of Assisi was usefully taken back within the coordinates of similar discussions for his ability to bear witness to the very acute perception of the autonomy of the creation and together with it the ability to express it in a perfect existential synthesis. Yet the potential effectiveness of this synthesis is perplexing, considering its capacity to define the identity of the Friar Minor as a man “theoretically” open to a new definition of the man-nature relationship. If this were true, we would be confronted by a sort of explicit democratization of a wealth of ideas and attitudes which through the Franciscans would have extended to the classes which were the object of their pastoral care. Our enthusiasm is dampened by the observation that this

 Paolo Delogu, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”, 99.  Marie D. Chenu, La teologia nel XII secolo, 26, 35; Cf. also Tullio Gregory, Speculum naturale; Id., “La nouvelle idée de nature”.  Vito Fumagalli, Quando il cielo s’oscura, 16.

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“ecological” component of Franciscanism played a marginal role in defining the identity of this nevertheless innovative religio and as a consequence it is difficult to evaluate its impact on society. On the figurative level, the realism of Giotto and in particular his interpretation of it in the “Stories of St Francis” in the Basilica of Assisi undoubtedly marks the end of the iconographic immobility inherited from Byzantine painting.²⁶ Giotto was the first to portray the natural world without the filter of a symbolic interpretation, making it the stage where the story of man is played out, in line with a Franciscan culture which through Bonaventura da Bagnoregio had metabolized the lesson of the 12th century. And yet, with respect to these deep-reaching transformations which seemed to be a prelude to modernity, the crisis of the 14th century represented an unquestionable reversal of trend. The black death and the sudden climate change reactivated the vicious circle between poor harvests, high prices, famine and mortality that had made the existence of the early medieval man precarious. Nature was once again setting its challenge to man, who did not react using the cultural resources developed in the 12th century, because the terror of divine punishment forced him to seek refuge again in asceticism to use physical pain as an instrument of expiation and all the social classes invoked a more intensely religious art.²⁷ This way the late Middle Ages gave modernity a negative perception of nature, once again perceived by man as an untameable enemy, the source of continuous challenges before which he felt powerless anew. In the following centuries, the answers of modernity were to have provided evidence for the umpteenth time of the resilience of Western man.

Bibliography Andreolli, Bruno and Massimo Montanari, eds., Il bosco nel Medioevo. Bologna, CLUEB, 1988. Arnold, Ellen F., “An Introduction to Medieval Environmental History”, History Compass 6, 3, 2008, 898 – 916. Berlioz, Jacques, “Flagelli”. In Dizionario dell’Occidente medievale, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Jean Claude Schmitt. Torino, Einaudi, 2011, 430 – 444. Bloch, Marc, I caratteri generali della storia rurale francese. Torino, Einaudi, 1973. Brázdil, Rudolf et al., “Historical Climatology in Europe. The State of the Art”, Climatic Change 70, 2005, 363 – 430. Chenu, Marie D., La teologia nel XII secolo. Milano, Jaka Book, 1986

 Cf. Chiara Frugoni, Quale Francesco?.  Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena.

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Cheyette, Fredric L., “The Disappearance of the Ancient Landscape and the Climatic Anomaly of the Early Middle Ages: a Question to be Pursued”, Early Medieval Europe 16, 2008, 127 – 165. Delogu, Paolo, “L’ambiente altomedievale come tema storiografico”. In Agricoltura e ambiente attraverso l’età romana e l’alto medioevo, edited by Paolo Nanni. Firenze, Le Lettere, 2012, 68 – 108. Delort, Robert, “Les facteurs éco-biologiques de l’espace: permanences et mutations”. In Uomo e spazio nell’alto, vol. 1, edited by Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiani di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 50). Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 2003, 69 – 90. Esch, Arnold, “Homo viator: l’esperienza di spazio e distanza”. In Uomo e spazio nell’alto medioevo, vol. 2, edited by Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiani di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 50). Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 2003, 745 – 770. Esch, Arnold, Römische Strassen in ihrer Landschaft. Das Nachleben antiker Strassen in Rom. Mit Hinweisen zur Begehung im Gelände. Mainz, Phillip von Zabern, 1997. Falco, Giorgio, La polemica sul medioevo. Napoli, Guida, 1988. Febvre, Lucien, La terre et l’evolution humaine. Introduction géographique à l’histoire. Paris, Albin Michel, 1949. Frugoni, Chiara, Quale Francesco? Il Il messaggio nascosto negli affreschi della Basilica superiore ad Assisi. Torino, Einaudi, 2015. Fumagalli, Vito, Quando il cielo s’oscura. Bologna, il Mulino, 1987. Fumagalli, Vito, Uomini e paesaggi medievali. Bologna, il Mulino, 1989. Geuenich, Dieter and Uwe Ludwig, eds., Libri vitae. Gebetsgedenken in der Gesellschaft des Frühen Mittelalters. Köln/Weimar/Wien, Böhlau, 2015. Gregory, Tullio, “La nouvelle idée de nature et de savoir scientifique au XIIe siècle”. In The cultural context of medieval learning. Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science and Theology in the Middle Ages, edited by John E. Murdoch and Edith Dudley Sylla. Dordrecht-Boston, D. Reidel, 1975, 193 – 214. Gregory, Tullio, Speculum naturale. Percorsi del pensiero medievale. Roma, Storia e Letteratura, 2007. Hanslik, Rudolphus, ed., Benedicti Regula, Editio altera emendata. Wien, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977. Higounet, Charles, “Les forêts de l’Europe occidentale du Ve au XIe siècle”. In Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto Medioevo, edited by Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiani di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 13). Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 2003, 343 – 398. Meiss, Millard, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. Princeton, Princeton Univ. Pr., 1951. Montanari, Massimo, “La foresta come spazio economico e culturale”. In Uomo e spazio nell’alto Medioevo, vol. 1, edited by Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiani di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 50). Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 2003, 301 – 340; Wickham, Chris, “European forests in the Early Middle Ages: landscape and land clearance”. In L’ambiente vegetale nell’alto Medioevo, vol. 2, edited by Centro italiano di studi sul

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l’alto medioevo (Settimane di studio del Centro Italiani di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 37). Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 1990, 479 – 545.

Guillermo Wilde

Taming Nature Early Modern Variations on the Human-Animal Relationship From a historical and cross-cultural point of view, animals are more than simple elements of nature. Apart from the modern naturalistic framework, animals can be considered metaphors of social relations, symbols of moral behavior, or patterns of thought. A lot has been written on this topic in the last fifty years. Social and cultural anthropology has explored the place of animals in native taxonomies and the construction of social relationships (from Durkheim and Mauss to Mary Douglas and Lévi-Strauss, who defined animals as “good to think”). The so called “ontological turn” has contributed to rethinking the relationship between human and non-human as a culturally inscribed variation.¹ Medieval history also paid special attention to animals as central elements of religious symbolism and moral models.² More recently, the history of science has addressed the question of how the human-animal relationship evolved over the long term, and when and how did an eventual separation emerge and consolidate.³ These approaches have underlined the fact that “naturalism” is an exceptional development in human intellectual history mainly associated with the expansion of capitalism and modern western philosophy.⁴ However, cultural traditions beyond and before Western modernity point to the continuity between human and nature that has been identified in different contexts such as animism, totemism or analogism.⁵ Central to the current research agenda is to understand both the way nonwestern traditions conceive of nature and humanity and the way the very modern idea of “nature” (and “individual”) emerges in western tradition.⁶ Provincializing Europe would consist in approaching the different cultural conceptions of humanity and animality (European included) in their own terms at certain

 Cf. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes; Roy Ellen and Fukui Katsuyoshi (eds.), Redefining Nature; Tim Ingold, The perception of the environment; Philippe Descola, Par delà Nature et Culture; Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, Metafísicas caníbales.  Cf. Michel Pastoureau, Una historia simbólica de la Edad Media; Éric Baratay, L′église et l′ animal.  Cf. Marcy Norton, “The Chicken or the Iegue”; Alexandre Surrallés, “Antropología escolástica”.  Cf. David Harvey, Spaces of hope.  Cf. Philippe Descola, Par delà Nature et Culture.  Cf. Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-011

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points in time, and in tracing the transformations of the western conception over the long term. There is sufficient evidence that the medieval conception of the world, framed in an analogic notion of the universe, survived into the early modern period and was eventually transplanted to the New World in the 16th century. What was the conception of nature in the transition from the medieval age to early modern and the Latin American colonial period? What was the place of animals in the conceptions of nature, order and mankind before, during and after European expansion? How did European and Native American conceptions of animals interact in the process of colonizing the Americas? There are two historical moments in which the notion of “nature” is problematized in relation to the New World. One is the 16th century debate on the “nature” of the Indians, developed in the well-known debate of Valladolid, which confronted Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas against Gines de Sepulveda, on indigenous rights. It was not only the human nature of the inhabitants of the New World that was at stake in this debate, but the overall rights of the Indians to conserve their autonomy and the limits of the crown′s right to make them submit. Las Casas′ master, Francisco de Vitoria, had defined in his De Indis the limits of what would be a subject of right, excluding from that category what he calls the “brutes” or animals. In effect, the Indians had dominium because they enjoyed titles over their goods before the arrival of Europeans, and they could not lose them even if they were pagans or sinners. Vitoria argued against natural enslavement, claiming that the difference between Europeans and Amerindians was not ontological. As an argument of exclusion, Vitoria claims that for exercising the right of dominium it was essential to be a rational being, since after Thomas of Aquinas only the rational creature was owner of its actions.⁷ Therefore, “nature” was something related to the law of the inhabitants of the new world, the “naturales”, as they were called in colonial legislation, who were rational beings and had natural rights and customs that had to be respected. Another relevant moment in the debate about “nature” was the 18th century′ s so called “dispute of the new world”, as Antonello Gerbi has called it, when American intellectuals, mainly Jesuits such as Francisco Xavier Clavijero (1731– 1787) among others, reacted to the argument defended by Cornelius De Pauw (1739 – 1799), George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707– 1788), William Robert-

 Cf. Alexandre Surrallés, “Antropología escolástica”.

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son (1721– 1793), and abbe Raynal (1713 – 1796), among others, on the presumed degeneration of American nature.⁸ These two moments point to very different stages in the definition of nature. While the former is an inheritance of the longstanding ancient cosmo-centric notion of “nature” conceived as the whole universe of existing beings and entities, the latter represents a conceptual turning point with the emergence of a naturalistic definition of nature understood as an object separated from human subjectivity. The transition from one conception to the other was slow and gradual. It occurred between the end of 17th century and the end of 18th century. The New World expanded experience to a point that the ancient concept of nature and reality was unsustainable, at least in theory. Missionary experience in American lands was at the core of this reconceptualization of nature. Accounts produced by missionaries show how the interaction with native peoples contributed to gradually reshaping the relationship between human and nature in both representations and practice. I will focus on the analysis of this transition paying attention to the way elements of nature, particularly animals, were presented and used in missionary narrative. Some general assumptions need to be clarified as a departing point. One is that the boundary between animal and human is ambiguous and ambivalent in both missionary narratives and indigenous traditions, which created a middle ground concept that may have facilitated Christian conversion. Another assumption is that human-nature ambiguity survives over the long term in missionary practice, even though the European intellectual tradition tends to create and consolidate a clear-cut separation between nature and humanity, especially beginning the 18th century. The late emergence of a great nature-culture divide is above all a political fact (of “purification”, as Bruno Latour would call it) that needs historical contextualization.⁹ Missionaries’ early systematic accounts frequently provided descriptions of the place of animals, humans and other beings in the order of creation. That was the aim of most of the “Natural histories” produced throughout the 16th century, the best known of which is probably Jesuit José de Acosta′s Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1590).¹⁰ These Natural histories were also moral histories that proposed a general description of all the existing beings and explanations of marvelous phenomena that had a place in God′s creation.  On this dispute, apart from Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del Nuevo Mundo; see David Brading, Orbe Indiano; Silvia Sebastiani, “Las escrituras de la historia”; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Cómo escribir la historia del Nuevo Mundo.  Cf. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes.  Cf. José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral.

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The mentality of the men arriving in the Americas at the end of the 16th century was shaped by a cultural, intellectual and political background that conceived of “reality,” the “world” and the “order of things” according to a coherent view informed by pre-established biblical tradition.¹¹ Both “Canon law” and “Natural law” were the basis for explaining and interpreting that order of the world. This theoretical framework was systematically formulated by Christian Reading of the Aristotelian tradition as represented by Thomas Aquinas, and Iberian intellectuals. Some of the main traits of the order of the world according to ancient ideological tradition can be schematically enumerated: a) the order of the world is “natural” and has a divine origin; b) it is heterogeneous and diverse, yet it is coherent and hierarchical; c) it is harmonic, in the sense that it establishes necessary links between its constituting elements; d) it is total and universal, and integrates the supernatural phenomena; e) it is defined by affinities (affections) between its elements (analogic connections), relations of similitude as Michel Foucault would call them;¹² f) all its elements (animated or animated, even supernatural beings) have continuous relations amongst themselves and are subjects with rights; g) the order of things is symbolic and conceals an occult meaning that needs to be deciphered. Even though these traits seem abstract, they are linked to social practices and based in forms of similitude. Natural reality is saturated with supernatural elements such as fabulous beings (the dragon, the phoenix, the unicorn, the mermaid, the faun), who inhabit some uncertain but existing part of the earth, away from the known world. According to this view hell, purgatory and paradise can be traced and mapped on earth. And new elements of experience are always interpreted according to the pre-existing framework. Sensory experience or reason are insufficient instruments to access the last secrets. They only give access to superficial appearances. Visions and dreams are the roads to grasp that occult reality. Sorcerers, magicians or priests are supposed to have knowledge of hidden forces and the appropriate instruments to control them (enchantments, processions, prayers, spells, sacraments, etc.).¹³ Nothing escapes to the natural order. According to jurist Antonio Manuel Hespanha, even supernatural beings, such as God and the angels, fit in the natural order and are endowed with protected juridical rights. Also, saints and angels can be affected by juridical situations, as well as the soul of a dead person,

 Cf. James Muldoon, “Medieval Canon Law”; Cf. Gert Melville, “Medieval Understandings”.  Cf. Michel Foucault, Las palabras y las cosas.  Cf. José L. Romero, La revolución burguesa.

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or even birds, among other animals and beings.¹⁴ In the framework of natural law, there was not a clear-cut distinction between subjects and objects of right, between “men” endowed with the use of reason and “things” lacking rational capacity. Natural right was taught by nature to all the animals that were born on earth and seas. In this sense, animals were “juridical persons” that could be subject to prosecution and punishment.¹⁵ A conspicuous intellectual of the Iberian scholasticism, Domingo de Soto (1494– 1560), recovered in his writings the roman and medieval tradition of the rights of animals. Regarding animals’ juridical status, De Soto wrote in his Tractatus de iustitia et de iure (Cuenca, 1556): It could be affirmed that, in their way, also brute animals have dominium (i. e., property) over the herb […] and it seems that the queen of the bees has dominium (i. e., political power) over her swarm […], and among the beasts, it seems that the fierce lion is who dominates over the rest of the animals, as the hawk seems to have dominium over the unhappy birds. […] the unanimated skies have dominium over the sublunary world, spilling heat over it and over the force with which it sustains and develops itself.¹⁶

According to Pastoureau, in medieval times there were two contradictory trends of thought regarding the relationship between animals and humans. Some authors emphasized the necessity of clearly differentiating and separating humans from animal creatures. Others suggested the existence of links between them based on biological and transcendental kinship relations.¹⁷ The first position tended to prevail over the long term. However, the ambiguous relationship between animals and humans seems to have been used efficaciously in constructing metaphors of exemplary moral and social behavior as early iconographic and textual evidence from different geographies show. Recent scholarship suggests that this tension can be found in the expansion of Christianity beyond Europe. The missionaries of the mendicant orders that arrived in American lands rapidly engaged in the debate about the separation between the animal and the human world. Surrallés notes that, despite finding elements in their own intellectual traditions to think in an ontology without a radical separation between human and animal, both Franciscans and Dominicans were not able or did not want to promote a continuity between humans and animals. Rather, they tended to reify the difference and discontinuity of both worlds in the standardized indigenous general languages. Thus, they grad   

Cf. Antonio M. Hespanha, “Las categorías de lo político”, 91. Ibid., 90 – 91. Quoted by Antonio M. Hespanha, “Las categorías de lo político”, 90. Michel Pastoureau, Historia simbólica, 29.

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ually succumbed to the opinions of the “physician philosophers” who started to think of animal behavior in a mechanistic way from a materialist perspective stripped from metaphysics. One of those physician philosophers, Gómez Pereira (1500 – 1558), proposed in his opera magna Antonianna Margarita (1554) a radical ontological demarcation between humans and animals, the latter being guided by the laws of nature that appear autonomous even from the divine plan.¹⁸ Narratives of the global expansion of Christianity commonly produced this kind of ambiguity, which migrated from East to the West. The transplant of these narratives to the New World show adaptations associated with the local context and populations. I will quickly mention examples that circumscribe topoi of analysis in missionary sources, which need more in-depth exploration perhaps resorting to what Aby Warburg has defined as “Pathosformeln” and “Nachleben”.¹⁹ There is the well-known narrative and iconography referring to the capacity of good Christians being able to communicate with animals. The example of Saint Francis is an ancient paradigm in this sense, connected to other iconographic themes that show the continuity between animals and humans, such as those of animals serving saints, saints that heal or send away animals, animals that show gratitude to the saints, mourning animals in front of dead saints, animals capable of preaching and talking about God, etc.²⁰ Colonial American hagiographies generally emphasized the capacity of missionaries and martyrs to communicate with animals and to preach to them. Figures such as Jesuit Joseph de Anchieta (1534– 1597), famous for his linguistic works among the Indians of Brazil, have been depicted as ideal Christian persons with those special qualities. An image included in one of his biographies shows Anchieta taming jaguars in the middle of the Brazilian jungle.²¹ A stamp made by Stephanus Coppa decades later shows Anchieta in a similar position preaching to both jaguars and Indians. The selection of jaguars as central elements in the portrait of Anchieta may have been intentional and fraught with meaning, since jaguars are animals central to Amerindian cosmologies, characterized by their ferocious predatory habits and their ambiguous status between human and animal.²² At

 Cf. Alexandre Surralés, “Antropología escolástica”.  Cf. Aby Warburg, The renewal of pagan antiquity.  For an exploration of the idea of “openness” in the relationship between animal and human in Western philosophical tradition see Giorgio Agamben, Lo abierto.  Cf. Simão de Vasconcellos, Vida do venerável padre.  On this aspect ethnological literature has provided many examples. See especially Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Vingança e Temporalidade”; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A inconstancia; Carlos Fausto, “Se Deus Fosse Jaguar”.

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the same time both representations emphasize the dominion of sainthood over animality. Moreover, Coppa’s engraving establishes a visual continuity between animality and infidelity through the depiction of a bending Indian in the left corner bellow wearing a turban. The topic of taming animals is also depicted in the Latin American Christian transfiguration of the ancient myth of Orpheus. In this iconography, the missionary is frequently compared to Orpheus using the sound of a musical instrument to attract both animals and heathen Indians from the savage rain-forest. This is a pervasive narrative in early missions’ accounts which associates the domain of animality with paganism. Heathens are usually portrayed as lions (tigers or serpents) while Christian neophytes as innocent lambs, both domesticated by the sound of music. One very common iconography in the South American Lands is that of Saint Francis Solanus, defender of the Indians of the Viceroyalty of Peru, well known for the miracles of reviving a dead boy and taming ferocious bulls. He is frequently depicted holding a violin or a guitar while surrounded by Indians. Prodigies and the miracles of saints are connected to broader narratives about wonders and the marvelous that were deeply rooted in the Iberian culture of the 16th and 17th centuries. This culture was influenced by fables of strange beings and anomalies that circulated widely from East to West. Jorge Flores studies an intriguing imprint of Theodor de Bry, included in his “Orientalisches Indien”. It shows an interesting adaption of a fable from India collected by missionaries in the early 17th century. One of the versions of the fable tells that the king of Bengal sent an embassy to Jahangir, king of the Mogors, with many treasures as a gift. The delegation was guided by animals, many of which were beautifully clothed monkeys. The fable circulated in different versions for around two hundred years. There is a Christian adaptation of it in which one of the monkeys has prophesying powers and at the end of the story he chooses Christianity as the “true” faith. Interestingly, De Bry′s image portrays the Mughal Emperor as a Tupi Indian.²³ These different examples show a geographic and temporal migration of metaphors about good moral behavior associated with the ambiguous figures of human-animals. These stories and iconographies, successively adapted and translated, broadly circulated and served both as propaganda and tools of evangelization in different corners of the world. The context of the Tridentine reform saw the emergence of textual and rhetorical genres in which animals with anthropomorphic features occupied a cen-

 Jorge Flores, “Distant Wonders”.

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Fig. 1: Image of Ioseph Anchieta from the biography of Simão Vasconcellos, Vida do veneravel padre Ioseph de Anchieta da companhia de Iesv, tavmatvrgo do novo mundo, na prouincia do Brasil. Lisboa: Ioam da Costa, 1672. Online access through www.archive.org

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Fig. 2: Stamp of Ioseph Anchieta by Stephanus Coppa, Roma, eighteenth century [online access: http://pilarlojendio.blogspot.com/2013/05/jose-de-anchieta-josede-anchieta.html

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tral place. One of them was the exempla or exemplary anecdotes, brief narrations inserted in sermons or theological treatises that used animals as moral examples. Heirs of Aesop’s Fables and the medieval bestiaries, the exempla multiplied profusely between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic, promoting the development of a devout life and an “emblematic vision” of the living world. They constituted narratives oriented to the apostolic praxis and the reform of customs that rapidly adapted to the local contexts and languages.²⁴ The study of the circulations and adaptations of these materials over the long term have strong methodological and theoretical challenges from a temporal and spatial point of view. First, it approximates and puts in dialogue what has so far been the separated concerns of medieval, early modern and colonial histories about the construction of “reality”, “nature” ,the “world”, and so on. Second, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam remarked some years ago, it puts forward the discussion of the temporal and geographical roots of globalization, the very idea of “modernity” and the pre-established dichotomy that opposes center-periphery. Thus, decentering Europe (provincializing it) implies displacing the attention to the so-called margins (Asia and Latin America).²⁵ Missionary activity in the New World became a laboratory for developing the topic of animals in specific textual genres. I will just mention two types. The first is 17th century′s Natural history, philosophy, and moral theology, which gives continuity to and expands the tradition of medieval marvels, prodigies and the symbolism of animals, even though many of these ideas were supposed to have been overcome in late medieval ages. As Millones Figueroa points out²⁶, two central authors of this tradition are the Jesuits Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595 – 1658) and Athanasius Kircher (1602 – 1680), whose works circulated widely and were translated into several languages, even indigenous languages in the missionary context of both Latin America and Asia. For both Nieremberg and Kircher “nature” was a central concern. In the context of global missionary expansion, both reproduced a coherent view of the world (in the exegetical tradition) that was supposed to integrate new

 On the use of exempla in colonial Latin America see the recent research of Danièle Dehouve, Relatos de pecados, and the already quoted Thomas Brignon, Mba’e my˜mba pype, respectively devoted to the New Spanish and Paraguayan context. For a detailed study and repertoire of medieval exempla see Jacques Berlioz, and Marie A. Polo de Beaulieu, Les exempla medievaux; and Frederic Tubach, Index exemplorum. For an approach on the symbolism of animals see Simona Cohen, Animals as disguised symbols.  Cf. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected histories”.  Cf. Luis Millones Figueroa, “La intelligentsia jesuita”.

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elements and phenomena coming from the Americas into the existing framework. Millones Figueroa points to some common questions these works raised in relation to the general issue of mutability or immutability of nature: was the natural world created as it is now, including the unknown parts? What had happened to those species, such as the unicorn or the siren, mentioned by ancient authors? Had they disappeared? Could nature lose species without generating new ones? Were the animals of the New World different species to those already known or were they the same species that had experienced accidental variations? How did Noah managed to save all species?²⁷ Both in Curiosa y Ocvlta filosofía. Primera y segunda Parte de las Marauillas de la Naturaleza, examinadas en varias questiones naturales and in Historia Naturae, Maxime Peregrinae, Eusebio Nieremberg makes explicit his intention of describing the “very strange secrets of nature” (“rarísimos secretos de la naturaleza”) including Astronomical, unknown animals from the Indies, plants, medical properties, metals, stones, minerals “unraveling with erudition the many places of the Holy Scriptures”.²⁸ Nierembergs objective was not to exhibit an encyclopedia of the American natural world but to provide the symbolic keys of Christian knowledge to understand it. Diverse elements of the world were supposed to provide clues for reading the pre-established divine plan, as well as the persistence elements of the scriptures, such as the bird of paradise. For Nieremberg, the enigmatic nature of the New World was the lacking piece that would complete the fragmented map of biblical history. As Hendrickson has pointed out, Nieremberg searched for a spiritual exegesis of the natural world, deciphering the hand of the Creator in every corner of the mysterious new lands.²⁹ In Curiosa y Oculta Filosofía, Nieremberg also gives a very precise orientation to the use of natural elements, particularly animals, as metaphors of moral behavior. He writes that there are two ways to instruct on the principles of virtue and morality. One is teaching the material constitution, fabrication and composition of death animals, plants and other things. Other is through the intelligence and customs of animals. While the former way is as a painting or hieroglyph subject to interpretation, the latter is as an example or a exercise incarnated in practice.³⁰

 Cf. ibid., 37.  Quoted by Millones Figueroa, “La intelligentsia jesuita”, 29.  Cf. Daniel S. Hendrickson, Jesuit Polymath.  “Del primer modo nos enseñan como en cifra, la condición de algún vicio o virtud: no de otra manera, que cuando un Pintor hace un jeroglífico. […] Hay otro modo con que nos enseña la naturaleza la Filosofía Moral, que es con exemplo, en los mismos ingenios y costumbres de los animales, no tanto por señas, cuanto por práctica, para que agrandándonos de los unos, dis-

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Athanasius Kircher’s work was oriented to the same end. However, he argued that the mutability of nature was part of God’s divine plan. Animals could undergo transformations that affected them accidentally or purposefully. The causes for mutations could be the stars, the weather, imagining by the female during sexual intercourse, the imaginative creative union of a homogenous species or heterogeneous ones. In “The Ark of Noah” (1675), Kircher gave details about the universal flood and described the measures on the boat according to biblical data. He speculated how the various species would have fit inside. There was room for reptiles and quadrupeds on the boat; birds and fishes did not need to enter in it.³¹ In this book, as in another of his publications devoted to the history of human origins, “The Tower of Babel”(1679), Kircher develops a proper iconology that visualizes texts and offers vivid description of biblical models.³² An important point is that neither Nieremberg nor Kircher ever left Europe. Both developed teaching and research activity respectively in Madrid and Rome. However, they benefited from the Jesuits global network of information, exchanging letters and objects with missionaries from the Americas and Asia.³³ Both authors encouraged their fellow missionaries to look for signs of the bible everywhere they went and to send them information for reconstructing an image of the whole. Some of those missionary contemporaries, such as Simão de Vasconcelos, would become convinced that Paradise was located in South America.³⁴ Others, such as Alonso de Ovalle, who kept a close relationship with Kircher while he was procurator of the Chilean Jesuit Province in Rome, identified the symbolism of the cross codified in trees.³⁵ Others, like José de Anchieta and Manuel de Nobrega (1517– 1570) in Brazil or Ruiz de Montoya (1585 – 1652) in Paraguay, obsessively looked for the footprints of the Apostle Thomas, who was supposed to have preached in America before departing for his martyrdom in India. As Millones and Ledezma have pointed out “enigmas, prodigies and curiosities provided an appropriate context for the apology of the edifying and exemplary facts of the Society of Jesus. The placiéndonos de los otros, por las imágenes que vemos en ellos de virtudes o vicios, censuremos nuestras acciones semejantes con aprobación de las buenas, enmiendas de las malas.” Quoted by Thomas Brignon, Mba’e my˜mba pype, 72; Brignon emphasizes the eclectic character of Nierembergs intellectual legacy, which combines elements of biblical exegetical tradition, empirical observation inspired by travel literature, and works of an eminently apostolic nature.  Cf. Ibid., 40 – 41.  Cf. Pablo Chiuminatto, “Saber que se cree”.  On the correspondence between Kircher and Jesuits in South America see Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary scientists; Constanza Acuña, La curiosidad infinita.  Cf. Jean Delumeau, History of paradise.  Cf. Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica relación.

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Fig. 3: Cross shape tree from Alonso de Ovalle’s Histórica Relación del Reyno de Chile y de las misiones y ministerios que exercita en la Compañia de Jesús… Roma: Francisco Caballo, 1646. Online access through www.archive.org

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strange and fabulous was surrounded by an aura of veracity thanks to its apologetic purpose”³⁶ Missionary activity was part of the plan of God, and “martyrdoms, sacrifices and prodigious phenomena of nature were signs and proofs of a divine revelation”.³⁷ In 1767, Jesuit missionaries were expelled from all Hispanic Dominions and exiled in Europe, under the protection of the papacy. This event marked a turning point in missionaries’ writing. Missionaries from the whole continent, from Mexico to Chile, were exiled in the Pontifical states, where they wrote accounts and memoirs of their experiences as missionaries. Most of their writings were in reaction to the attacks of the enlightened philosophes on the Society of Jesus. Authors such as De Pauw, Robertson, and Buffon emphasized the superiority of European nature and claimed that American nature was degenerated. Against these positions the exiled Jesuits built arguments based on their own firsthand experience and observation, marking a major turning point in the conception of nature and the methodology for interpreting it. This was the moment when a new genre known as “Natural History” emerged.³⁸ One remarkable example of this genre is Catalan Jesuit José Jolis′ magnificent “Essay on the Natural History of Great Chaco”. In the introduction of the work Jolís writes: The portrait of the barbarians of America, described by me, will not be common and universal of all the peoples of the New World, but a particular one, that is to say, of those (peoples) of the province of the Great Chaco, who are many and not less savage or barbarian than others of the vast continent.³⁹

In another paragraph, directed against Cornelius De Pauw, whom he considered an ignorant “goose” that denied the existence of proper tigers in the Americas, he wrote: It does not seem that I am too arrogant if I assert, that there are true Tigers in America, where I have been for many years, and I have had the convenience of seeing and eating not a few in the Chaco Missions.⁴⁰

 Luis Millones and Domingo Ledezma (eds.), El saber de los jesuitas, 14.  Ibid., 14.  On the increasing importance of direct observation and experience in Jesuit writings of South America see Miguel de Asúa, Science in the vanished Arcadia; Guillermo Wilde, “Invención, circulación y manipulación”.  José Jolis, Ensayo sobre la Historia Natural, 43.  Quoted by Antonello Gerbi, La disputa, 277.

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Jolís’s words imply that the “natural world” previously regarded as an object of exegetic interpretation becomes a place for direct observation and analysis. The anecdote of the tiger demonstrates that nature was not populated by symbols but by real things that could be directly experienced. Experience is a central element of this type of text. Missionaries emphasized the fact that they had been in the field and had observed with their own eyes what they describe. Sensory experience, especially vision, played a central role in descriptions of the time, frequently enforced by the use of images and maps as proof. Other examples of missionary writing in the same period illustrate this conceptual turn. Jesuit Florian Paucke (1719 – 1780), from the region of Bohemia, wrote during his exile a wonderful account of the Chaco Indians, which included a series of very realistic paintings made by himself, trying to objectively depict the Indians’ daily life. Another Bohemian Jesuit, Ignaz Tirsch (1733 – 1781), who was a missionary in New Spain, also provided a wonderful collection of paintings depicting life in the northern frontier of the Iberian Empire.⁴¹ This moment seems to express an ideological turn in which animality separates (at least in theory) from humanity as two distinct objects of enquiry. It also seems to be a moment in which natural history separates from moral history, giving rise to modern naturalistic knowledge.⁴² However, the transition in question is not without ambiguities. The visual series of Tirsch (1733 – 1781) provides some clues in this regard. The visual framework of herbs and medicine does not seem to completely fit the dominant naturalistic trend of the time.⁴³ Besides, Tirsch’s knowledge of nature is marked by a certain degree of acceptance of the marvelous. For example, he follows the references of Miguel del Barco in an illustration of the pez mulher (woman fish), in relation to which he clarifies: “I did not see it”. This clarification is cru-

 On the figure of Tirsch and his drawins see Luis González Rodríguez, and María del Carmen Anzures y Bolaños (eds.), Ignac Tirs S.I. (1733 – 1781); Doyce Blackman Nunis, The drawings of Ignacio Tirsch. For a comparison between the drawings of Tirsch and those of Paucke see Simona Binková, “Las obras pictóricas”.  As some scholars have indicated, this textual genre marks not only the emergence of a naturalistic idea of nature but also a first separation between natural and moral histories as two separated genres that had been attached in the previous centuries. On this see Antonella Romano, “La experiencia de la misión”; Kristin Huffine, “Raising Paraguay from Decline”; Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas.  The entire collection of images by Tirsch can be accessed online. See Ignacio Tirsch, Misión de Santiago de las Casas (Baja California). Codex Pictoricus Mexicanus. Ca. 1770. Biblioteca Nacional de la República Checa. [http://v2.manuscriptorium.com/apps/main/en/index.php?re quest=request_document&docId=rep_remake81&mode=&client=] see also: [https://aviada.blog spot.com.ar/2011/08/ignacio-tirsch.html].

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Fig. 4: “Pez Mulher” according to Ignaz Tirsch’s representation from Codex Pictoricus Mexicanus, ca. 1770.

cial as it shows a solution to the latent contradiction between the belief in the marvelous and the faith in science. Tirsch, as several men of his time, had not completely freed himself from the ancient stories, but he needed to explicitly specify his place as an individual observer in the descriptions he makes. Magical and fantastic knowledge based on tradition cohabited with medical-botanical knowledge based on observation. Each kind of knowledge proved its effectiveness in particular situations of use and interaction. Beliefs about fantastic beings would not be completely discarded insofar as they were part of an ancient narrative tradition of travel. But they were accompanied by the important clarification: “I have seen it”, “I have felt it”. This is a pivotal moment in the conception of nature: the empirical and particular conception displaces and overcomes the general, abstract, universal, and revealed conception, which had dominated until this point. The preeminence of abstract knowledge over the practical had prevailed until the second half of the eighteenth century, but especially after the expulsion of the Jesuits, empirical knowledge acquires centrality. The valuation of practical knowledge is reversed, since the religious order had generally placed it in the background. Late development of observation techniques and technologies helped to accelerate this crucial transition in the following decades.

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Dumont, Louis, Essais sur l’individualisme: une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne. Paris, Seuil, 1983. Ellen, Roy and Katsuyoshi Fukui, Redefining Nature. Ecology, Culture and Domestication. Oxford, Berg, 1996. Fausto, Carlos, “Se Deus Fosse Jaguar: Canibalismo e Cristianismo entre os Guarani (XVI-XX séculos)”, Mana 11, 2, 2005, 385 – 418. Flores, Jorge, “Distant Wonders. The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 3, 2007, 553 – 581. Foucault, Michel, Las palabras y las cosas. Una arqueología de las ciencias humanas. México, Siglo XXI, 1999. Gerbi, Antonello, La disputa del Nuevo Mundo. Historia de una polémica. 1750 – 1900. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982. Harvey, David, Spaces of hope. Berkeley, Univ.of California Pr., 2000. Hendrickson, Daniel S., Jesuit Polymath of Madrid: The Literary Enterprise of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595 – 1658). Boston/Leiden, Brill, 2015. Hespanha, Antonio M., “Las categorías de lo político y de lo jurídico en la época moderna”, Ius fugit 3 – 4, 1994 – 1995, 63 – 100. Huffine, Kristin, “Raising Paraguay from Decline: Memory, Ethnography, and Natural History in the Eighteenth-Century Accounts of the Jesuits Fathers”. In El saber de los jesuitas, Historias Naturales y el Nuevo Mundo, edited by Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma. Madrid/Frankfurt, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2005, 279 – 302. Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling & Skill. London, Routledge, 2000. Jolis, José, Ensayo sobre la Historia Natural del gran Chaco. Resistencia-Chaco, Universidad Nacional del Nordeste: Facultad de Humanidades, [1784] 1977. Latour, Bruno, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris, Editions la Découverte, 1994. Melville, Gert, “Medieval Understandings of Foreign Cultures as Conditions for the Early Modern Takeover of America”. In From La Florida to La California. Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands, edited by Id. And Timothy. J. Johnson. Berkeley, The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013, 47 – 60. Millones Figueroa, Luis, and Domingo Ledezma, eds., El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Textos y estudios coloniales y de la independencia, 12). Madrid/Frankfurt am Main, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2005. Millones Figueroa, Luis, “La intelligentsia jesuita y la naturaleza del Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVII”. In El saber de los jesuitas, Historias Naturales y el Nuevo Mundo, edited by Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma. Madrid/Frankfurt, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2005, 27 – 52. Muldoon, James, “Medieval Canon Law and the Conquest of the Americas”, Jahrbuch für Gechichte Lateinamerikas 37, 2000, 9 – 22. Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio, De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno, Con introducción de Fernando Gil. Buenos Aires, Instituto Salesiano de Artes Gráficas-Instituto Bonaerense de Numismática y Antigüedades, [1705] 2010. Norton, Marcy, “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange”. The American Historical Review 120, 1, 2015,28 – 60.

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Ovalle, Alonso de, Historica relacion del Reyno de CHILE y delas missiones y ministerios que exercita en la Compañia de Jesus. A Nuestro Señor Jesu Christo Dios Hombre, y a la Santissima Virgen y Madre Maria Señora del Cielo y de la Tierra y a los Santos Joseph, Joachin, Ana sus Padres y Abuelos. Roma, Francisco Caballo, 1646. Pastoureau, Michel, Una historia simbólica de la Edad Media occidental. Buenos Aires, Katz Editores, 2006. Prieto, Andrés I., Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570 – 1810. Nashville, Vanderbilt Univ. Pr., 2011. Romano, Antonella, “La experiencia de la misión y el mapa europeo de los saberes sobre el mundo en el Renacimiento: Antonio Possevino y José de Acosta”. In Saberes de la Conversión. Jesuitas, Indígenas e Imperios Coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad, edited by Guillermo Wilde. Buenos Aires, Editorial SB, 2011, 133 – 154. Romero, José Luis, La revolución burguesa en el mundo feudal. México, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1989. Sebastiani, Silvia, “Las escrituras de la historia del Nuevo Mundo: Clavijero y Robertson en el contexto de la ilustración europea”. Historia y Grafía 37, 2011, 203 – 236. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia”. Modern Asian Studies 31, 3, 1997, 735 – 762. Surrallés, Alexandre, “Antropología escolástica en la América colonial. Ontología del humano y del animal entonces y derecho territorial indígena hoy”. In Autoctonía, poder local y espacio global frente a la noción de ciudadanía, edited by Gemma Orobitg and Gemma Celigueta (Estudis d’Antropologia Social i Cultural, 17). Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona., 2012, 109 – 130. Tirsch, Ignacio, Ignac Tirs S.I. (1733 – 1781). Pinturas de la antigua California y de México Códice Klementinum de Praga, edited by Luis González Rodríguez and María del Carmen Anzures y Bolaños. México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas/UNAM, 2015. Tirsch, Ignacio, Misión de Santiago de las Casas (Baja California). Codex Pictoricus Mexicanus. Prague, Biblioteca Nacional de la República Checa, XVI.B.18. Tubach, Frederic C., Index exemplorum; a handbook of medieval religious tales (FF communications 86, 204). Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969. Vasconcellos, Simão de, Vida do veneravel padre Ioseph de Anchieta da companhia de Iesv, tavmatvrgo do novo mundo, na prouincia do Brasil. Lisboa, Ioam da Costa, 1672. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, A inconstancia da alma selvagem. São Paulo, Cosac & Naify, 2002. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, Metafísicas caníbales. Buenos Aires, Katz, 2010. Warburg, Aby, The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the European Renaissance, Texts & documents. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. Wilde, Guillermo, “Invención, circulación y manipulación de clasificaciones en los orígenes de una antropología misionera”. In Luchas de clasificación. Las sociedades indígenas entre taxonomía, memoria y reapropiación, edited by Christophe Giudicelli (Colección Actas, 30). Rosario, Prohistoria Ediciones, 2018, 41 – 77.

Matthias Heymann

Investigating Environmental Coherence

Concepts for the Study of Society-Environment Relations Motivated by the challenges of environmental pollution and global climate and environmental change, “global environmental change” has in the past decades become a strong research focus, often shortly referred to as “global change research”. Recently, also environmental historians have contributed to global change research by investigating human-environment relations in the past. Environmental history only emerged in the 1970s and, strongly informed by rising environmental concern, quickly attracted considerable attention. An influential publication in the early times of environmental history, Carolyn Merchants book “The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution”, typically reflected the political ambitions and drive of many environmental historians as well as the conceptual challenges of this new field. Merchant argued that the Scientific Revolution created a hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress and a worldview that devalued female modes of knowledge production and practice in favor of male values of domination and control over nature that eventually led to ecological crisis.¹ Her book strongly inspired environmentalist- and feminist-minded historians. At the same time, it raised many questions. First, it used an essentialist concept of nature leaving historians with the problem what “nature” is. Second, the book developed a normative narrative. It distinguished good (careful) and bad (dominating) ways of life, good (female) and bad (male) values to develop historical arguments for environmentalist and feminist causes. Third, it provided a big picture and grand narrative with a teleological undertone: male dominance deteriorated the state of nature until its eventual “death”.² In fact, a few years later historians criticized the flood of “pollution histories”, accusatory narratives and badly founded and contested essentialist and normative concepts throwing the fledgling discipline into crisis.³ Environmental history eventually mastered the challenge by retreating from strong normative claims and essentialist visions of nature. It reverted to the critical scrutiny of his-

 Cf. Carolyn Merchant, Death of nature.  For a discussion of the book and its impact some 25 years after publication, see Carolyn Merchant, “Scientific revolution”, and further contributions in Joan Cadden, “Getting back”.  Cf. William Cronon, Uncommon ground; Cf. Joachim Radkau, “Unausdiskutiertes in der Umweltgeschichte”. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-012

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torical methodology and appreciated concepts such as “nature”, “environment” and others as historical constructions. With the discipline maturing, it quickly expanded, ventured into many diverse topics including new focus areas such as climate history and the history of natural disasters, gained self-confidence and formulated new ambitions.⁴ Historians claimed their share in global change research, arguing that “the role of humans is a key factor as a driving force, a subject of impacts, or an agent in mitigating impacts and adapting to [global environmental] change.” Historians’ competence was needed to improve the understanding of past and present environmental change.⁵ These ambitions raise the general question how historical human-environment relations can usefully be investigated. Historical scholarship on environmental change has applied a range of concepts, which mostly originate from the sciences, particularly the biological sciences. These include sustainability, conservation, adaptation, vulnerability, resilience and collapse.⁶ These ‘borrowed’ concepts offer great opportunities, but also have their pitfalls, as they carry predetermined meanings and impose restrictions to historical analysis and understanding. As indeed any concept they can be likened to torches, which produce a light beam that illuminates certain aspects of historical processes particularly well while leaving others in the dark. The downsides of these concepts include a conflation of scientific and historical meanings, a tendency to emphasize human responses to natural agency (rather than human agency), connotations of passivity and an undervaluation of the role of technological intervention and change. Furthermore, challenges of nature are much broader and more diverse than the challenges of contemporary environmental change. To help overcome some of these downsides I suggest and explore the concept ‘environmental coherence’. On one hand, societies gain knowledge from environmental experience and develop practices to cope with and adapt to environmental conditions. On the other hand, societies transform their environment in order to adapt it to cultural needs. It is a central element of this concept

 Cf. John McNeill, “Observations”; Richard White, “Environmental history”; Uwe Lübken, “Undiszipliniert”.  Cf. Poul Holm et al., “Collaboration”, 25.  For sustainability e. g. Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht; John R. McNeill, Something new; for conservation e. g. Brian Payne, “Local economic stewards”; Richard Judd, The untilled garden; for adaptation e. g. Adam Sundberg, “Claiming the Past”; Eleonora Rohland, Hurricanes; for vulnerability e. g. Greg Bankoff, “Constructing vulnerability”; Christian Pfister, “Vulnerability”; for resilience e. g. Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, Questioning collapse; Glenn M. Schwarz and John J. Nichols, After collapse; for collaps e. g. Jared Diamond, Collapse; Robert Costanza et al., Sustainability or collapse.

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to grasp both directions of interaction between society and environment: adjustment to and transformation of the environment. Societies have developed different forms and degrees of attachment to and knowledge about their environment. Environmental coherence describes the form and degree of such attachment and knowledge. It depends on environmental conditions and change, such as weather, climate, topography and ecology. At the same time, it depends on a vast array of cultural practices. These include the emergence and use of technologies and social institutions, the accumulation of experience and knowledge, ways of perceiving and of making sense of environmental conditions and cultural needs, the formation of beliefs and ideologies, traditions and norms, rituals and collective memories, which all inform how cultures relate to their environments. In this contribution I will attempt to provide a tentative description of the concept environmental coherence and put it in broader context. The first part of the paper will provide an exemplary discussion of the use of four science-derived concepts in historical research: sustainability, collapse, resilience and vulnerability. In a second part, shortcomings and disadvantages of these concepts will be analyzed from the perspective of a historian and the concept environmental coherence be developed. For an illustration of the concept environmental coherence serve two cases of culture-environment relations on marginal lands: the island of Strand at the German North Sea coast in the 17th century and Miami Beach, Florida, in the early 20th century. Both places experienced disastrous natural disasters, a fatal storm flood in 1634 on Strand and a gigantic hurricane hitting Florida in 1926, which provide a powerful lens to investigate environmental coherence of a premodern culture at the North Sea coast and a modern culture in Florida.

Writing History with Loaded Concepts? Concepts such as sustainability, conservation, adaptation, vulnerability, resilience and collapse serve as interpretative and narrative frames, help to master and reduce historical variety and complexity in a meaningful way, guide the selection and reading of sources, and shape narratives and stories. In addition, they provide baselines for comparative analysis and help to compare stories from different times and places, not least in relation to the present time. Sustainability, to take a simple example, yields a qualitative measure for stability and persistence of culture-environment relations and can, as historian Joachim Radkau argues, more or less consistently be applied across cultures, times and geog-

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raphies to serve as a basis for comparison.⁷ For the historian’s purpose, however, all these concepts come at a price. The torchlight character of these conceptual tools determines to a degree what we see and what we do not see, and puts restrictions on the perceptions of historians and the constructions of histories. These concepts carry the burden of their history. Historians, anthropologists and historical geographers appropriated them from the toolbox of scientists, namely ecologists, and carried with this intellectual treasure also significant baggage into the humanities, namely a conflation of historical sense and scientific meaning. Natural and social scientists use concepts such as sustainability, vulnerability and resilience for an assessment of social-ecological systems by ascribing to them a consistent qualitative property measure, which is usually deemed valid across time on the time scale of interest. A marginal landscape subject to regular droughts, to take an example, is characterized by assigning a certain descriptive measure of vulnerability. Bangladesh, to take an example, is regarded a state particularly vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels. This attribution of vulnerability carries the bias of being more or less static. It downplays historical change. Not coincidentally, researchers in the humanities such as environmental historian Greg Bankoff and historical geographer Georgina Endfield explicitly emphasize that vulnerability is historically constructed and subject to change in time.⁸ Attributing a measure to human societies by gauging vulnerability or resilience vis-à-vis environmental stresses introduces another challenge: the tendency of putting the focus on human responses to natural agency rather than broadly on human agency. The ahistorical quality of these concepts inconveniently matches with the connotation of defining passive states rather than active processes. While adaptation in its contemporary sense is understood as human interventions in response to environmental stresses, adaptation in history has often played out as processes of adapting environmental conditions to human needs. Historians appropriate these originally ahistorical concepts and strive to make them historical. Likewise, they construct new meanings by conceiving them as active processes instead of (more or less) static states and by emphasizing interactions of human and environmental agency.⁹ This is, in one sense, historical research at its best, because it adds differentiation and complexity to these concepts. It promises to enhance understanding and contributes to shed-

 Cf. Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht; also see Timo Myllyntaus et al., “Sustainability”.  Cf. Greg Bankoff, “Constucting vulnerability”; cf. Georgina Endfield, Climate and society.  Cf. Robert Costanza et al., Sustainability or collapse; Daniel R. Curtis, Coping with crisis.

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ding better light on the human dimension of environmental change. This is, in another sense, however, close to a fight against wind mills, because scientists keep to their established conceptions and have a much louder voice in the theatre of global change research. Academia, after all, is not simply an effort of knowledge accumulation to which historians can add their lot, but a contest in establishing power and supremacy in the making of meaning. This is a challenging condition for a minority group such as historians, especially if they cannot claim priority ownership to these conceptual tools. A most problematic baggage that concepts originating in the sciences often carry, is the scientific reductionism ingrained in them. Bearing largely ahistorical meanings is an example of that reductionism. Further arguments have been made. When the acclaimed ecologist, geographer and anthropologist Jared Diamond presented a sweeping account of societal collapse in history¹⁰, scholars in the humanities have responded with outspoken critique. Anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee collected accounts critical of Diamond’s arguments in an anthology.¹¹ In their introduction the editors provide the following explanation. “[S]tudying collapse”, they suggest, “is like viewing a low-resolution digital photograph: it’s fine when small, compact, and viewed at a distance but dissolves into disconnected parts when examined up close.” Past social and environmental change, they argue, is characterized by complexities, which are passed over when investigated from a birds-eye view like Diamond does. Due to this approach, Diamond gets many details wrong and his main argument fails: Closer scrutiny shows “that societal collapse seldom occurs […] When closely examined, the overriding human story is one of survival and regeneration”.¹² Historian Eleonora Rohland has recently raised similar issues for the case of the concept adaptation. She explains the origins and long history of it in the sciences and its wide use in a variety of disciplines which has rendered it blurry and ambiguous. A recent, particularly powerful framing of it originates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which according to her applied a grossly oversimplifying conception of adaptation as a linear event-response narrative. Environmental and disaster historians have adopted the term, but either “used adaptation simply synonymous with ‘adjustment’” or refrained from using it altogether. Rohland concludes:  Cf. Jared Diamond, Collapse.  Cf. Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, Questioning collapse.  Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, “Why we question”, 3 – 5. See also Jospeh Tainter, “Archaeology”; Glenn M. Schwarz and John J. Nichols, After collaps; Ronnie Ellenblum, The collapse, 12– 19.

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And indeed, the present-day applications of the term, most notably in climate change and hazards research, still seem to impose restrictions on the process under study that render the concept – in its present form – inoperable for historical research.¹³

Bias and baggage of concepts deriving from its scientific origins is, however, only part of the charge. Bankoff has raised another issue and pointed to the fact that concepts such as vulnerability, resilience and adaptation have been infused with western notions of safety, order and normalcy, which are problematic to project on non-western societies and, potentially, also societies of the past.¹⁴ These concepts are, in addition, of recent origin and infused with contemporary perceptions and meanings that are projected onto the past. The current popularity and widespread use of terms such as sustainability, resilience, vulnerability and adaptation across a broad range of disciplines clearly derives from contemporary concerns about societal impacts of climate and environmental change. These concepts carry normative expectations about present needs and future tasks and come with the mission to make societies more sustainable, and less vulnerable, more resilient to environmental stresses and fitter to adapt to changing environmental conditions. These meanings and the normativity it bears restrict openness to the past. They inform interests and trajectories of research and threaten to put blinders or straightjackets to the historians mind. Notably, all these concepts put a focus on severe environmental challenges such as caused by climate change and natural disasters. Sustainability represents an argument for perseverance and stability of food production, subsistence and culture against the backdrop of threatening changes of environmental conditions; vulnerability asks about the susceptibility of severe damage and societal failure under such conditions; resilience and adaptation, on the other hand, reflect societal capacities of adequate responses to environmental disruption. Probably not coincidentally, research in environmental history has recently seen a surprisingly strong interest in the historical investigation of natural disasters.¹⁵ Human-environment relations, however, are arguably more diverse and broader than the purview of contemporary obsessions with environmental disruption. Challenges of nature and the environment and the perceptions of it proved very diverse and multifaceted in history and ranged from the prevailing mundane impositions of day-to-day weather and climate to very rare extreme stresses caused by earthquakes and volcano eruptions.

 Eleonora Rohland, Hurricanes, 39 – 40, 48.  Cf. Greg Bankoff, “Rendering the world unsafe”.  See e. g. the review by Uwe Lübken, “Undiszipliniert”.

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Investigating Environmental Coherence Caveats with concepts are ample and any researcher’s ordinary business. When I developed interest in the history of human-environment relations and was drawn into reflections like those presented above, I felt the need for a fresh conceptual start. My considerations eventually led me to the term environmental coherence, which in the way I conceived of it promised to express much better than other concepts what I had in mind. Two historical cases of societies settling on marginal, flood-prone lands and two extreme cases of natural disasters, a storm flood in 1634 and a hurricane in 1926, serve as starting points for investigating environmental coherence.¹⁶ The first case is the story of the island of Strand at the North Frisian North Sea coast located in what is today the uppermost north of Germany. Inhabitants along the North Sea coast were well acquainted to violent storms and floods. Generations of inhabitants developed knowledge, practices and traditions to cope with the risk of storms over a period of many centuries. Dike building and dike maintenance ranked very high in the organisation of communal life. Complex codes about the rights and plights of dike maintenance and ways to resolve conflicts about the share of burden had evolved. Houses of rich inhabitants were built on dwelling mounts, and in cases of violent storms with a high risk of flooding, it was a common habit for the area’s inhabitants to gather at these estates. Rituals and practices were also adapted to the danger of storm floods. When a storm flood occurred, the shocked people prayed to God, undertook religious processions, worshipped saints, collected sacred items and visited sanctuaries and churches. Putting the guilt on the people living along the coast served an important purpose. It ensured that the people felt responsible for their own safety. The night from October 11 to 12, 1634, on the island of Strand proved disastrous. A strong storm from northwest pushed the waters high on the tidelands, the so-called Watt, which surrounded the island. The combination of the vigorous storm and a new moon caused a dangerous springtide, which broke the dikes at 44 sites in the course of the night. The water flooded the major part of the land, at some places by more than four meters.¹⁷ More than 1,300 houses and 28 windmills were lost. All 21 churches suffered heavy damages. Almost the whole of the year’s harvest was destroyed. More than 6,000 people on the island

 More detailed descriptions of these cases are given in Matthias Heymann, “Natural disaster”; and Id., “Naturkatastrophen”.  Cf. Boy Hinrichs, “Die Landverderbliche Sündenflut”, 84.

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lost their lives, which accounted for around three quarters of the total population. So did an estimated 50,000 cows, sheep and pigs.¹⁸ As much of the land was below sea-level, the floodwaters could not recede. They remained. A renovation of the dikes and reclamation of the lost land failed due to a lack of everything: manpower, money, equipment, food. The island of Strand was lost forever. Only three smaller islands – Pellworm, Nordstrand and Nordstrandischmoor – remained. The second case leads us little less than 300 years later to the coast of Florida. At the beginning of the 20th century, large parts of southern Florida consisted of swamps and marshland full of red mangroves, mosquitoes and alligators. It was the railroad magnate Henry Flagler who helped to clear the way for human occupation of this land. In the late 19th century, he built a railroad from Jacksonville in the North of Florida to Miami, and in 1905 even to Key West in the far south. This railroad was a daring enterprise. It took seven years, cost some 20 million Dollars and involved as many as 40,000 workers with about 700 killed during hurricanes, which hit Florida in 1906, 1909 and 1910. What became Miami Beach was at that time a slim strip of sand off the coast line, 200 feet wide and adjacent to a swamp of mangroves filling up Biscayne Bay. In 1910 the automobile magnate Carl Fisher purchased 200 acres of sand on this land and systematically developed it for tourism. He financed the clearing of mangroves in Biscayne Bay in 1913, engaged in building the Dixie Highway from upper Michigan to southern Florida and later helped to construct across Biscaya Bay to reach Miami Beach. Fisher was well aware of the potential value of waterfront property. In 1917 he started to create artificial islands in Biscayne Bay. Miami Beach and a rising number of artificial islands proved very profitable real estate in a beautiful location attracting increasing numbers of tourists. By the early 1920s, land speculators flooded Biscayne Bay and the so-called Venetian Islands were built. By 1931 24 km² of artificial land had risen out of Biscayne Bay. The total property value in Miami Beach increased from 250,000 Dollars in 1915 to 44 million Dollars a decade later. By 1926, Miami Beach had 50 hotels, nearly 200 apartment blocks and over 800 private homes.¹⁹ In the early morning of September 19, 1926, at about 2 am, a particularly violent hurricane crashed onto the south Floridian coast. A 4.5 meter high surge flooded Miami Beach and parts of Miami. The ‘Big Blow’, as the Great Miami Hurricane was called, shattered houses, tore roofs from buildings and tossed ships on the land. Miami Beach was devastated. A Red Cross report listed 373 deaths

 Cf. Guntram Riecken, “Flutkatastrophe”, 41.  Cf. Paul S. George, “Miami”, 22– 36.

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and 6,381 injured; 4,725 homes were destroyed, 9,100 damaged and 25,000 people without shelter after the storm. Damages were enormous and reached a loss equivalent to more than 100 billion dollars today.²⁰ Both these cases reveal a lot about human-environment relations. The people on the island of Strand as the real estate developers in Florida created a human habitat with significant technological intervention. The Strand ancestors had lived along the North Sea coast for many centuries, whereas the Floridians had colonized the Floridian coast within a few years. People on Strand had built knowledge, institutions and technology to master a marginal landscape, subject to heavy storms and flooding, whereas most Floridians were not even aware of or, those who knew better, ignored the risk of hurricanes. Settlers at the North Sea coast transformed their landscape with the help of hands, shovels and horse carts, whereas Floridians used powerful, heavy machinery. Mentalities also differed strikingly. The people of Strand lived with respectfulness for nature and God, whose forces subdued them regularly, whereas Floridian developers self-confidently reshaped their environment and concealed hurricane risks, because it threatened their profitable business. Finally, the moral implications of catastrophe differed greatly. The people on Strand believed in divine admonition. Humans were seen as the perpetrators of disaster, which God made happen due to their lapses. Nature, instead, was perceived as a victim to human immodesty. People in Florida argued with reversed causality. Nature was perpetrator, while the victim was man and his belongings. Historians Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison have described the modern mindset as a narrowing of perspective. The rise of scientific and technological knowledge since the 16th and 17th centuries encompassed a deprivation of the moral content of knowledge.²¹ The cases of Strand and Miami Beach suggest that it also encompassed a deprivation of environmental coherence. Technological potency greatly increased the degree of interference in the environment. It enabled the creation of technological landscapes that led to a loosening of the connection between humans and the processes occurring in their environment. Technology, however, is only part of the explanation. Sets of beliefs and mentalities provide another clue to understanding differences in environmental coherence. While the people of Strand lived according to personal knowledge and practices deeply embedded in traditions, collective memories and moral convictions of many generations, people in Florida were new to their land, without knowledge, traditions, memories and local experience. Respectfulness towards

 Cf. Jay Barnes, Florida’s hurricane history, 126.  Cf. Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison, Hubris and hybrids.

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environmental conditions and natural forces was an inherent part of mentality and social organization along the North Sea coast, whereas the developers in Florida boasted self-confidence and trust in the power of man. Caution and fear seemed an important part of collective memory and everyday experience on Strand, whereas it was deliberately eliminated from the Floridian consciousness. These cases provide an illustration of dimensions of environmental coherence. First, environmental coherence is a qualitative, descriptive, non-normative concept, based on micro-historical analysis with explicit consideration for local practice, knowledge and tradition. Second, the concept seeks to facilitate the integration of knowledge on many levels such as (a) the material history of technological artefacts and technical and environmental change, (b) the cultural and social history of institutions, practices and social relations and (c) the history of ideas and knowledge with consideration for scientific and technological knowledge, tacit and personal forms of expertise as for beliefs, ideologies and collective memories. Third, it portrays human-environment relations as interactions of societies and environments. A causal nexus between action and reaction, between cause and consequence, is analyzed in both directions. Both societies and environments are constructed as agents of change. Fourth, it is aimed at offering the opportunity of comparative investigation of human-environment relations in different cultures, contexts and periods of time to help to put the wealth of knowledge about it in relation and broader perspective.

Conclusion The history of human-environment relations is, I argue, a research domain in which a re-consideration of conceptual tools is appropriate. The stories of Strand and Miami Beach could be framed with the help of established concepts such as adaptation, vulnerability and resilience. These concepts, however, seem narrow and peculiar to do full justice to complex historical cases like these. Each of these concepts directs attention in only specific directions that appear strongly informed by contemporary environmental concerns. Environmental coherence represents a broader, overarching concept that helps to create distance from present concerns. It is not meant to replace other concepts altogether, but offers openness, new directions and a comprehensive, fresh look. It enlarges the historians’ choice; and it holds the additional attraction, that historians can claim undisputed ownership. This concept provides guidance to historical research, but doesn’t prescribe preconceived meanings. It digests historical diversity and complexity and doesn’t impose scientific reductionism. While it does not immediate-

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ly talk to the preoccupations of global change researchers, it still offers the chance to enhance understanding of human-environment relations and environmental change. The investigation of environmental coherence is admittedly still preliminary and vague and so far lacks application, investigation, testing and trial. A yet unexplored feature of environmental coherence is its twin character to the established concept of social cohesion. According to an OECD definition, a cohesive society works towards the well-being of all its members, fights exclusion and marginalization, creates a sense of belonging, promotes trust, and offers its members the opportunity of upward mobility.²² Both environmental coherence and social cohesion appear to be descriptive tools to investigate how diverse elements in complex settings fit and match with each other and facilitate different degrees of stability, certainty and security.

Bibliography Bankoff, Greg, “Rendering the World Unsafe, ‘Vulnerability’ as a Western Discourse”, Disasters 25, 2001, 19 – 35. Bankoff, Greg, “Constructing Vulnerability: The Historical, Natural and Social Generation of Flooding in Metro Manila”, Disasters 27, 2003, 224 – 238. Barnes, Jay, Florida’s Hurricane History. Chapel Hill, The Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1998. Cadden, Joan, “Getting back to the Death of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant”, Isis 97, 2006, 485 – 533. Costanza, Robert, Lisa J. Graumlich and Will Steffen, eds., Sustainability or collapse? An integrated history and future of people on earth. Cambridge, MIT Pr., 2007. Cronon, William, ed., Uncommon Ground, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York, Norton & Company, 1995. Curtis, Daniel R., Coping with Crisis: The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-Industrial Settlements. Farnham, Ashgate, 2014. Diamond, Jared M., Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York, Viking Pr., 2005. Ellenblum, Ronnie, The collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean, Climate change and the decline of the Easts, 950 – 1072. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2012. Endfield, Georgina, Climate and society in colonial Mexico: A study in vulnerability. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. George, Paul S., “Miami: One Hundred Years of History”, South Florida History 24, 1996, 22 – 36. Hård, Mikael and Andrew Jamison, Hubris and hybrids: A cultural history of technology and science. New York, Routledge, 2005.

 Cf. oecd, Perspectives, 17.

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Heymann, Matthias, “Natural disaster and environmental coherence: Lessons from a storm flood and a hurricane”, In Weather, Local Knowledge and Everyday Life, edited by Christina Barboza and Vladimir Jankovic. Rio de Janeiro, MAST, 2009, 99 – 106. Heymann, Matthias, “Naturkatastrophen und Environmental Coherence: Versuch einer Einordnung am Beispiel von Flutkatastrophen auf der Nordseeinsel Strand und in Miami Beach”, In Die Hamburger Sturmflut von 1962. Risikobewusstsein und Katastrophenschutz aus zeit-, technik- und umweltgeschichtlicher Perspektive, edited by Martina Heßler and Christian Kehrt. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014, 61 – 82. Hinrichs, Boy, “Die Landverderbliche Sündenflut. Erlebnis und Darstellung einer Katastrophe”, In Flutkatastrophe 1634; Natur, Geschichte, Dichtung, edited by Boy Hinrichs, Albert Panten and Guntram Riecken. Neumünster, Wachholtz, 1985, 81 – 105. Holm, Poul et al., “Collaboration between the natural, social and human sciences in global change research”, Environmental Science and Policy 28, 2013, 25 – 35. Judd, Richard, The untilled garden: Natural history and the spirit of conservation in America, 1740 – 1840. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2009. Lübken, Uwe, “Undiszipliniert: Ein Forschungsbericht zur Umweltgeschichte”, H-Soz-u-Kult (14. 07. 2010), http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/2010 – 07 – 001 (last accessed 28 April 2017). McAnany, Patricia A. and Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning collapse, Human resilience, ecological vulnerability, and the aftermath of empire. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2010. McAnany, Patricia A. and Norman Yoffee, “Why we question collapse and study human resilience, ecological vulnerability, and the aftermath of empire”, In Questioning collapse, Human resilience, ecological vulnerability, and the aftermath of empire, edited by Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2010, 1 – 17. McNeill, John R., “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History”, History and Theory 42, 2003, 5 – 43. McNeill, John R., Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World. New York, Norton, 2000. Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York, Harper & Row, 1980. Merchant, Carolyn, “The Scientific Revolution and the Death of Nature”, Isis 97, 2006, 513 – 533. Myllyntaus, Timo, Minna Hares and Jan Kunnas, “Sustainability in Danger? Slash-and-Burn Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century Finland and Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia”, Environmental History 7, 2002, 267 – 302. OECD, Perspectives on Global Development 2012: Social Cohesion in a Shifting World (Paris, OECD Publishing, 2011), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/persp_glob_dev-2012-en (last accessed 28 April 2017). Payne, Brian, “Local economic stewards: The historiography of the fisherman’s role in resource conservation”, Environmental History 18, 2013, 29 – 43. Pfister, Christian, “The vulnerability of past societies to climatic variation: A new focus for historical climatology in the twenty-first century”, Climatic Change 100, 2010, 25 – 31. Radkau, Joachim, “Unausdiskutiertes in der Umweltgeschichte”, In Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? Positionen, Themen, Analysen, edited by Manfred Hettling et al. München, C.H.Beck, 1991, 44 – 57.

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Radkau, Joachim, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt. München, C.H.Beck, 2000. Riecken, Guntram, “Die Flutkatastrophe am 11 Oktober 1634. Ursachen, Schäden und Auswirkungen auf die Küstengestalt Nordfrieslands”, In Flutkatastrophe 1634; Natur, Geschichte, Dichtung, edited by Boy Hinrichs, Albert Panten and Guntram Riecken. Neumünster, Wachholtz, 1985, 11 – 64. Rohland, Eleonora, Hurricanes in New Orleans, 1718‐1965, A History of Adaptation. PhD thesis, Univ. of Bochum, 2014. Schwartz, Glenn M. and John J. Nichols, eds., After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies. Tucson, Univ. of Arizona Pr., 2006. Sundberg, Adam, “Claiming the Past: History, Memory, and Innovation Following the Christmas Flood of 1717”, Environmental History 20, 2015, 238 – 261. Tainter, Joseph, “Archaeology of overshoot and collapse”, Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 2006, 59 – 74. White, Richard, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York, Hill and Wang, 1995. White, Richard, “Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature”, Pacific Historical Review 70, 2001, 103 – 111.

Cultural Spaces

Ana María Vara

Nature, Inequality and Protest A Latin American Discourse on Natural Resources and its Dialogue with Social Theory

Introduction In Latin America, nature has been at the center of ignited disputes since colonial times. Different conceptualizations of nature usually underlie these disputes, as part of wider and more complex matrixes of thought. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the region was going through a series of structural changes – mostly related to the informal insertion of the region as part of the British and then the American Empire – it emerged an anti-imperialist discourse that focused on denouncing the appropriation of natural resources and the abuse of nearby communities by foreign actors. This discourse was created by Latin American intellectuals loosely linked to leftist networks – most notably, anarchism, socialism, and communism – with the explicit purpose of denouncing and making visible the already dominant British imperialism and, most importantly, the growing US imperialism in the region. In the beginning, the discourse was constructed in newspapers and magazines, and soon thereafter in novels, short stories and poems. Actually, since the 1920s and 1930s, it may be said that a specific kind of non-fiction literature represented the bulk of the corpus that contributed to installing it in Latin America’s cultural landscape. This discourse offers a deliberately simplistic narrative on Latin American countries’ history that involves four elements: a natural resource; an exploited local group related to this resource; a foreign, imperialist actor that benefits from the exploitation of both nature and human beings; and a local accomplice – usually, the economic and political elite, including the national government. The story that links these elements is one of extreme mistreatment of both nature and human beings, in turn conceptualized as fragile and exploitable until eventual exhaustion. We have described this discourse, and called it ‘neocolonial counter-discourse on natural resources’, since it evokes colonial times in order to denounce a current neocolonial situation. It has an antiimperialist, Latin Americanist orientation, and talks about nature in a way that resonates with the environmental discourses which would become dominant from the 1950s on, described as almost exclusively originated in central countries. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-013

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In this article, we will address the persistence with only little variance of this discourse in Latin American cultural landscape – particularly, but not only, in social protests – throughout the twentieth century and well beyond into the twenty-first century, and try to explore plausible explanations for this persistence. Our main hypothesis has to do with its ability to account for certain structural political and economic constraints the region has faced and continues to face in a simple, understandable yet passionate and mobilizing way. In order to test our hypothesis, we will analyze how this discourse somehow dialogues with some theoretical frameworks in social theory which can be useful in describing some structural aspects that have historically plagued the region, such as established environmental discourses, like those characterized by John Dryzek; ‘the curse of natural resources’ thesis; and novel theoretical frameworks developed by Latin American social scientists like Eduardo Gudynas and Maristella Svampa, with core notions like ‘extractivism,’ ‘neo-extractivism’, and ‘commodities consensus’.

Words and Frames In order to understand the creation, diffusion, and recurrent presence of this discourse in Latin American contemporary history, it is important to dedicate some time to explain key theoretical concepts. First of all, we have to be aware that the context of emergence of this discourse is related to a moment of social unrest in Latin America, one of contentious politics, described as a specific way of doing politics that involves collective making of consequential claims by groups of social actors, on other groups of social actors. Governments may take part in the discussion, either as a claimant, an object of claims, or a third party to the claims.¹ Actually, we can say that in the early decades of the twentieth century, Latin American countries were going through a cycle of contention, defined by Tarrow as “a phase of heightened conflict across the social system”, and characterized by a number of aspects. Among the most important ones, Tarrow mentions the rapid diffusion of protest across society, innovation in the forms of protest, intensification of the interaction between claimants and authorities, and, more importantly for our case, “the creation of new or transformed collective frames”.²

 Cf. Doug Mcadam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, “Comparative perspective on contentious politics”, 261.  Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 142.

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In contentious politics, as in most aspects of social life, the construction of meaning plays a central role in contributing to make the situation understandable and communicable. Borrowing from Goffman, Snow et al. use the word ‘frame’ and ‘framework’ to designate “’schemata of interpretation’ that enable individuals ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label’ occurrences within their life space and the world at large”. Frameworks give meaning to events, and in doing so, they help social actors “to organize experience and guide action, whether individual or collective”.³ Another important theoretical category in relation to the discourse we are dealing with, is the notion of master frame, coined to designate a recurrent framework, that is, a framework that is stable enough to navigate the cycle of contention and even to survive it, reappearing in one or more subsequent cycles. As Tarrow puts it, “cycles of contention are the crucibles within which new cultural constructs born among critical communities are created, tested and refined”. These master frames then “enter the culture in more diffuse and less militant form, where they can serve as sources for the symbols of future movements”.⁴ But early on in this article we have used the word “discourse”, and we need also to define it. This term has a long and complex history, which is beyond the scope of this article. We will focus on only two precise definitions of “discourse”. One comes from literary studies, and was developed by Roberto González Echevarría. He talks about three “hegemonic discourses” in Latin American narrative: the “legal discourse” during colonial times; the “scientific discourse” during the nineteenth century and until the 1920s; and the “anthropological discourse”, between the 1920s and the publication of the novels Los pasos perdidos, by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, and Cien años de soledad, by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez in 1967. González Echevarría defines “hegemonic discourse” as one “backed by a discipline, or embodying a system, that offers the most common description of humanity and accounts for the most widely held beliefs of the intelligentsia”. The popularity and authority of a hegemonic discourse are important in order for it to become commonsensical, a way of understanding the world for the members of a given community: “Prestige and sociopolitical power give these forms of discourse currency”, comments González Echevarría. On the contrary, when these discourses lose value over time and are abandoned, they become “merely stories or myths, voided of power in the present”.

 David A. Snow et al., “Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation”, 464.  Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement. Social Movemets and Contentious Politics, 146.

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There are three additional aspects in this characterization we would like to address. The first one has to do with the ability of hegemonic discourses to shape “reality”, in a way that ends up being transparent, imperceptible, to members of the community; that is, these discourses are thoroughly appropriated and become part of “the real”. In this way: “the individual finds stories about himself and the world that he or she finds acceptable, and in some ways obeys”, as González Echevarría puts it. The second aspect has to do with the three hegemonic discourses this author describes in Latin American history, which, according to his characterization, come “from outside” the region. Contrary to this, we understand the discourse we are dealing with is created in the region, on the basis of a reflection on the history of the region, resignifying elements taken from leftist doctrines, such as anarchism, socialism, and Marxism.⁵ And there is a third final aspect in González Echevarría’s definition we would like to discuss, and has to do with the adjective “hegemonic”. In our case, we find that it may be possible to claim the discourse we are dealing with is “hegemonic” since it is an interpretive framework that has a powerful influence on a wide variety of social actors in Latin America during a long period of time (so far, more than one hundred years). However, we find more suitable to label it as “anti-hegemonic”, since it is associated with alternative, antisystemic movements. That is the reason why we named it “counter-discourse on natural resources”. Among the authors involved in its creation, we have pointed at Rafael Barrett, a Spanish intellectual who may be considered an early figure of the Spanish Generation of 98; and many novelists and short-story writers, like the Peruvian poet and novelist César Vallejo, the Ecuadorian novelist Jorge Icaza, the Uruguayan short-story writer Horacio Quiroga, and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén.⁶ We have described this discourse as a master frame of Latin American scope, and Latin Americanist, created in the early decades of the twentieth century, with recurrent presence in subsequent cycles of protest in the region: during the 1960s and 1970s, that is, around the Cuban revolution; and after the 1990s, during the cycle of environmental protest the region is currently going through.⁷ As we have just said, this discourse has a narrative matrix of four elements. The crucial one is a natural resource perceived as very valuable, somehow related to local or national identity, that sparks the interest of a greedy foreigner. It may be sugar cane in Cuba, oil or exotic woods in Ecuador, different  Cf. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 41.  Ana M. Vara, Sangre que se nos va. Naturaleza, literatura y protesta social en América Latina.  Id., “Riesgo, recursos naturales y discursos: El debate en torno a las tecnologías y el ambiente en América Latina” and “Un discurso latinoamericano y latinoamericanista sobre los recursos naturales en el caso papeleras”.

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minerals in Chile and Peru, bananas or other fruits in Central America, cocoa or coffee in Brazil, meat in the Pampas. Many times this resource is compared to gold or silver, with a double purpose: to stress its high value, and to evoke colonial times. In relation to this resource, there is always a population that usually inhabits the area, and that is enrolled in cultivation or mining in dire conditions. This means they are doubly or triply exploited: because they are deprived of their valuable resource; because they are prevented from providing for themselves since they are taken away from their traditional labor; and because they are turned into oppressed, sometimes even enslaved workforce. Many times this population is a native ethnic group or a population deliberately introduced as forced labor, like black people from Africa. In this schema, nature and human beings are somehow equated since both are treated as mere resources, and abused accordingly. Both face the risk of exhaustion, even of extinction. Rafael Barrett accuses in his pamphlet on the exploitation of yerba mate, published in 1908, a crucial piece in the creation of this discourse: “they have sacked the land and exterminated the race”.⁸ The metaphor of blood that some texts evoke is usually in relation to this equation of the natural and the human victims. As in the poem “Cane” (Caña), by Nicolás Guillén, originally published in 1930: “The black man / next to the canefield. // The Yankee / over the canefield. // The earth / under the canefield. // Blood that goes out from us”.⁹ If nature and local populations are the victims, the guilty actors are both human. There is a greedy, abusive non-national, either European or, most usually, American: a “yankee” or “yanqui”, an appellative that in this context is charged with derogatory notes, sometimes becoming accusatory by itself. Americans are sometimes also called “gringos”, but this word has more ambivalent uses, not all of them with negative connotations. By the greedy foreigner’s side, there is usually a local accomplice; that is a national, who opens the door to the foreigner, accompanies and helps him, and shares the profits with him. The local accomplice is no less abusive or cruel; many times this actor is actually in charge of repression. It is clear by now that the narrative that links these four elements is one of extreme abuse, of exploitation. Since the local accomplice is usually a local authority, like the national or local government, the only way out of the situation is rebellion. And there may come, again, the metaphor of blood, but this time in relation to repression.

 “han saqueado la tierra y exterminado la raza”, writes Rafael Barett, Lo que son los yerbales, 52.  “El negro / junto al cañaveral. // El yanqui / sobre el cañaveral. // La tierra / bajo el cañaveral. // Sangre que se nos va.”

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As a collective action framework, this discourse performs perfectly well in terms of Benford and Snow’s classic description. It is certainly a “diagnostic framing”, in which there is a proper “identification of the source(s) of causality, blame and/or culpable agents” required to mobilize supporters. Obviously, the culpable agents are the foreign actors and the local accomplices. This discourse also performs well in terms of a “prognostic framework”, since it articulates “a proposed solution to the problem, or at least a plan of attack, and the strategies for carrying out the plan”. In this sense, the discourse usually proposes rebellion in order to expel the foreigner and overthrow the national government. It also works well as a “motivational framing”, since it “provides a ‘call to arms’ or rationale for engaging in ameliorative collective action”.¹⁰ As these authors highlight, a good motivational framing may include “the construction of appropriate vocabularies of motive”, and this is certainly the case with our discourse, that is usually somehow evoked by the words “ransacking” (saqueo), “depredation” (depredación), and “pillage” (expolio). In terms of emotions, an aspect that the study of social movements is increasingly paying attention to, this discourse is filled with passion, indignation and rage. As we have said, although created in the early decades of the twentieth century, this discourse reappeared in subsequent cycles of contention, changed and unchanged at the same time. If during the first cycle of contention in the region, the stories told involved one resource, one people and one country – as illustrated by Guillén’s poem “Cane” with sugar cane, black men and Cuba –, during the second cycle many Latin American stories were compiled and equated in a unique narrative. A good example can be found in this strophe of Guillén’s poem “The flowers grow high” “Crecen altas las flores”, published in 1963 when he was already some kind of official poet of the Cuban revolution. It was written as a response to the US president John F. Kennedy Alliance for Progress: But since we have forests and coffefields, iron, coal, oil, cupper, canefields, (which in dollars means lots of millions) it doesn’t matter if we are quechuas or motilones. They come to help us achieve progress and expect us to give them our blood in return.¹¹

 Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing processes and social movements”, 616 – 617.  “Pero como tenemos bosques y cafetales, / hierro, carbón, petróleo, cobre, cañaverales, / (lo que en dólares quiere decir muchos millones) / no importa que seamos quechuas o motilones. /

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Another revealing literary example of this second cycle comes from the opening pages of an emblematic essay by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Las venas abiertas de América Latina), published in 1971: Latin America is the region of the open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European —or later United States— capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.¹²

Open Veins could actually be considered not only the emblematic text that evokes this discourse, but an emblematic text of Latin American anti-imperialist discourses at large.¹³ Therefore, it comes as no surprise that during the Summit of the Americas in April 2009 Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez gave US president Barack Obama a copy of it (in Spanish), during their much expected first encounter, after the clashes between Chávez and former US president George W. Bush. During the third cycle of contention, after the 1990s, our discourse again suffered a small change, focusing more explicitly on the environment, by now a subject of concern by itself. We could actually say that Latin America is going through a cycle of environmental contention, characterized by resistance to different forms of mining (open pit, uranium, lithium mining), risky industries (such as pulp and paper production), risky facilities (high voltage lines, gas lines), large-scale energy projects (particularly, dams and nuclear technology, but also oil extraction), industrial agriculture with genetically modified crops and pesticides, among others. Currently, we can find our discourse working as a master frame evoked in slogans such as “No to the contaminating looting” (No al saqueo contaminante), “Water is more valuable than gold” (El agua vale más que el oro), “Quilish mountain is not for sale: we have to defend it” (El Quilish no se vende, se defiende), “They are looking for gold” (Vienen por el oro), “I shall not sell out the rich legacy of the Uruguayan people at the

Vienen pues a ayudarnos para que progresemos / y en pago de su ayuda nuestra sangre les demos”.  “Es América Latina, la región de las venas abiertas. Desde el descubrimiento hasta nuestros días, todo se ha transmutado siempre en capital europeo o, más tarde, norteamericano, y como tal se ha acumulado y se acumula en los centros de poder. Todo: la tierra, sus frutos y sus profundidades ricas en minerales, los hombres y su capacidad de trabajo y consumo, los recursos naturales y los recursos humanos”. Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina, 2.  Cf. Ana M. Vara, “Las venas abiertas de América Latina, emblema del discurso antiimperialista”.

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low price of necessity” (No venderé el rico patrimonio de los uruguayos al preco vil de la necesidad), a quotation attributed to the Uruguayan founding father José de Artigas, “They sell us glass beads” (Nos venden espejitos de colores). In all of these slogans, we find mentioned or tacitly evoked (and easily traceable) the elements of our discourse, with predominance of the natural resource, and a more protagonist role attributed to the local population, that is more often depicted as a ready-to-fight social group instead of as a victim (as it was the case in the origins of this discourse).

The Environment Takes Center Stage At this third wave of contention in Latin America, the counter discourse on natural resources sounds very much like an environmental discourse, such as those described by John Dryzek. This author defines a discourse as “a shared way of apprehending the world”, that is “embedded in language”, and that helps those to subscribe it “to interpret bits of information and put them together into coherent stories or accounts”. So far, this definition of discourse does not depart much from that of González Echevarría’s, and this is good for our argument: there are important coincidences between literary studies and sociological discourse analysis in terms of the kinds of texts that may contribute in the construction of a discourse. And there is another important aspect in which both definitions agree: for these two authors, a discourse range of impact is quite wide, from everyday talk to theoretical approaches. As Dryzek puts it, “Discourses construct meanings and relationships, helping to define common sense and legitimate knowledge”.¹⁴ This sounds very much like the notion of a “hegemonic discourse” in González Echevarría’s view. Among the environmental discourses characterized by Dryzek, we can find some which may be interesting to contrast with our discourse. For example, we see many coincidences with the ‘survivalism’ discourse, which depicts a dystopian view of the future. Some of the basic entities recognized or constructed by this discourse are quite similar to those of the counter discourse on natural resources. For survivalism discourse, there is a ‘finite stock of resources’, that is, a natural world that is limited in terms of its carrying capacity. The assumption behind this understanding of the natural world is that ecosystems are precious, fragile and eventually exhaustible. Therefore, those have to be preserved from the careless or abusive acts performed by humans. Survivalism discourse also as-

 John Dryzek, Politics of the Earth. Environmental Discourses, 9.

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sumes that between humans and the environment there is conflict, and that there is a hierarchy which must be resolved through the careful control by humans. But there is also interdependence: if this discourse talks about survival, it is about nature’s and humans’ survival, just like in ours. Key metaphors are also similar in both discourses: the possibility of ‘overshoot’ and eventual ‘collapse’ described by Dryzek as an essential component of survivalism discourse can be found in our discourse’s concern for the eventual exhaustion of the natural resources. In the same vein, the idea of a commons, that is, nature understood as something that is over there for anyone to make (good) use of it, that is not private but communitarian property, is also quite similar in the two discourses —although with an important limit in our discourse, where nature is seen as communitarian property only for nationals. The images that incarnate these metaphors, however, are different. In survivalism discourse we find the lilly pond to refer to the commons, and the spaceship Earth to refer to the global ecosystem. In our discourse, as we have seen, we find the image of blood to refer both to the natural resource and the local exploited population; that represents an emphasis on the common aspects between nature and humans. And there are other important differences between the two discourses. In survivalism, all humans are deemed equally prone to abuse (or, if enlightened, to take care of) nature. Instead, in our discourse, the abusive actors are the dominant foreigners, who are not concerned with the future of nature, since they do not intend to stay; their only motive is greed. Those who do care for nature are those who live there, those who are deemed as legitimate ‘owners’ of the natural resources, and whose fate is linked to it: local populations. In our discourse, there is an important emphasis on territoriality, and on the inextricable relation between nature and local populations. The counter discourse on natural resources can also be compared to the ‘green consciousness’ discourse described by Dryzek, which, contrary to survivalism, has a utopian orientation. Both talk about ‘unnatural practices’ that may damage the environment. The assumptions about the relationship between humans and the environment also are quite similar: that there is some kind of equality between nature and humans, which has been violated. That means that humans are not necessarily negative to the environment: both could coexist, under conditions of careful treatment. Additionally, in the green consciousness discourse there is, as in ours, two visions of humans: some may be good to the environment, same may not. But, as we have just said, in our discourse the differences between the two are almost essentialist: foreigners are abusive, locals are careful. What is interesting to note is that, according to Dryzek’s description, the green consciousness discourse appeals to emotions such as passion. This is an aspect that reminds us of certain affects present in our discourse.

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It is significant that the counter discourse on natural resources shares important aspects with two discourses that point at exactly opposite visions of the future: while survivalism predicts catastrophe and collapse, green consciousness is full with optimism. Of course, both discourses stress different aspects, and somehow entail different speech acts: survivalism is a warning, while green consciousness implies a call to action. Therefore, these two discourses may be thought of as complementary and subsequent: first there is alert, then actions are taken. In any case, while there is despair in survivalism, hope is the predominant affect in green consciousness. How does this relate to the comparison with the counter discourse on natural resources? We think these opposite argumentative orientations of the survivalism and the green consciousness discourses can be accommodated in terms of our discourse. As we have seen while talking on the diagnostic, prognostic and motivational functions of our discourse, and also taking into account that it has a narrative matrix, it is easy to understand that different stories can be told with the same basic elements. If there is no rebellion, both the natural and the human resources may be exhausted: this story and outcome resonates with survivalism dystopian vision of the future. If there is rebellion, two main outcomes may occur. One is defeat, which implies a negative result, that is, exhaustion much in the same way as with no rebellion. The other possible outcome is of course victory, which implies a protection both of nature and humans. It is by no means negligible that, while survivalism may be considered basically a prognostic framing, green consciousness may be better understood as a motivational framing. In terms of environmental history – a new specialization in historical studies – the history of Latin America has been described in ways that are quite compatible with the narrative told by our discourse. Although we do not intend to go deep into this argument, there are some eloquent quotations from Shawn William Miller’s book An Environmental History of Latin America. The first one seem to allude to the region colonial and neocolonial stages without making a clear distinction between the two, just as our discourse does: “For much of Latin America’s history, the world economy has treated the region as a basket of natural resources that have been packaged and shipped to satisfy the consumption of richer foreign nations.”¹⁵ And there is a second one, that talks about humans and nature in a way that somehow equate them in terms of both being threatened and in need of protection, while tacitly admitting that the needed protection would only be the result of protest and fight: “In Latin

 Shawn W. Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America, 220.

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America, the struggle for nature has spontaneously attached itself to the struggle for economic and social justice”.¹⁶ And even more. Somehow contradicting certain visions that accuse environmental activism in Latin America – and, more broadly, in developing countries – as a strategy to use nature in order to protect people, Miller suggests that what may have happened is exactly the opposite: “in Latin America many fights are as much about access to natural resources – clean water, fertile land, forest resources – as they are about saving them”.¹⁷

On Blessings and Curses: Changing Visions It may not be a coincidence that, while talking of developing countries, the current vision of the social sciences on the role played by natural resources in development is quite problematic. Although the discussion has not reached a definitive consensus, the dominant view in the social sciences has changed from that of being a blessing to that of being a curse. This latest view, based on “the observation that countries rich in natural resources tend to perform badly”¹⁸, has been revealingly named “the curse of natural resources”, and characterized by different authors. Significantly, this view first emerged while analyzing Latin American countries economic performance during the interwar period in the twentieth century. While initially this situation was attributed to the ups and downs in commodity prices – being the region so much dependent on natural resources as a source of income – further studies showed that “the curse of natural resources is a demonstrable empirical fact, even after controlling for trends in commodity prices”, as Sachs and Warner put it.¹⁹ The paradox that natural wealth may end up to be a liability instead of an asset in terms of development can also be found in a revealing quotation from Open Veins, which, as we have said, may be considered an emblematic text of our discourse. Of course, Open Veins, as our discourse, attributes this situation to the intervention of others in the region, those who benefit from it: For those who see history as a competition, Latin America’s backwardness and poverty are merely the results of its failure. We lost; others won. But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing […]. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and

   

Ibid., 215. Ibid. Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “The curse of natural resources”, 827– 828. Ibid. (emphasis in original).

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their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.²⁰

Additionally, this vision is also compatible, at least to a certain extent, with new theoretical frameworks developed in Latin America; particularly, the notions of ‘new extractivism’ and ‘neoextractivism’, as if these new theoretical frameworks represented a specification of the resource curse general framework. Although it is out of the reach of this paper to thoroughly analyze the relationship between the resource curse and these new theorizations, let us just mention that of the seven categories of causes to account for the resource curse identified by Rosser in a review, three clearly point at aspects that resemble those pointed at by the new extractivism framework. In the first place, those that emphasize the role of the State (State-centered perspectives, in Rosser’s classification); but also those that emphasize the role of economic structure (structuralist perspectives); and those that emphasize “the role of foreign actors and structures of power at a global level” (radical perspectives).²¹ One of the authors that made key contributions to these new theorizations in the region is the Uruguayan scholar and essayist Eduardo Gudynas. His “Ten urgent theses on the new extractivism” describe a situation in which the exploitation of natural resources in the region is seen as the continuation of a historical process in which the State, the economic structure, and the role of the global economy play a role.”Extractivism” is defined as “those activities that involve a large volume of natural resources, [which] are not processed (or only limitedly), and are exported”.²² The first thesis states that, in spite of recent political changes in the region, extractivist sectors “continue being important” for the economy of the region. The second talks about a “new style of extractivism” that is going on under progressive governments; one in which the State has a more active role (third thesis). This new situation is “functional” to the global economy, and keeps the region in a “subordinated position” (fourth). There is  “Para quienes conciben la historia como una competencia, el atraso y la miseria de América Latina no son otra cosa que el resultado de su fracaso. Perdimos; otros ganaron. Pero ocurre que quienes ganaron, ganaron gracias a que nosotros perdimos: la historia del subdesarrollo de América Latina integra, como se ha dicho, la historia del desarrollo del capitalismo mundial. Nuestra derrota estuvo siempre implícita en la victoria ajena; nuestra riqueza ha generado siempre nuestra pobreza para alimentar la prosperidad de otros: los imperios y sus caporales nativos. En la alquimia colonial y neocolonial, el oro se transfigura en chatarra, y los alimentos se convierten en veneno”. Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina, 16 – 17 (emphasis in original).  Andrew Rosser, The Political Economy, 13 – 17.  Eduardo Gudynas, “Diez tesis urgentes sobre el nuevo extractivismo”, 188.

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a persistence of territorial fragmentation, of enclaves, which implies that foreign actors have taken control of vast areas in the subcontinent (fifth). The productive processes continue to be oriented at increasing competiveness and profits under classic efficiency criteria, which implies the externalization of social and environmental impacts (sixth), and the same or worse social and environmental impacts with ineffective mitigation measures (seventh). The new role of the State implies, economically, that it appropriates more profits, mostly used in social programs (eighth); and conceptually, that extractivist activities are accepted as ‘fundamental engines’ of economic growth (ninth). Essentially, Gudynas considers this new extractivism as “A new ingredient of a contemporary, South American version of Developmentalism” (tenth).²³ For this view, development is a mirage, and those who believe that the exploitation of natural resources can lead to development (understood mostly in material terms, close to consumerism) are simply deluding themselves, and encouraging a bad sort of development: “maldesarrollo”, in an expression used by Viale and Svampa.²⁴ Svampa is another influential author much quoted in relation to these regional theorizations. She talks about a “neoextractivist style of development”, defined as: “a pattern of accumulation based on the overexploitation of natural resources, most of them non renowable, and on the expansion of internal frontiers towards once considered ‘unproductive’ territories”. She also coined the expression “commodities consensus”, that echoes the infamous Washington consensus of the 1990s, which she describes as an economic system based on “a large scale export of primary goods”. To her, neoextractivism is also a territorial phenomenon, since it “creates a vertical dynamics that breaks into territories and affects regional economies”. Neoxtractivism also has a heavy impact on nature because it “destroys biodiversity”, but also because it “deepens land grabbing, as it induces displacement of rural, campesino and aboriginal communities, and exerts violence on citizen decision-making processes”.²⁵ That is, for Svampa, neoextractivism affects both nature and people, and has a for export orientation. Not surprisingly, these regional theorizations compatible with the resource course framework evoke certain crucial elements of the counter discourse of natural resources. As we have just seen, as in our discourse, in the new extractivism framework there is a foreign actor that takes advantage of the natural wealth, but in this case it is loosely characterized as the global market, while the most active

 Ibid., 221.  Cf. Enrique Viale and Maristella Svampa, Maldesarrollo.  Maristella Svampa, “Consenso de los Commodities”, 34.

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role in the exploitation is attributed to a national social actor, specifically, the State. This view is quite critical of progressive governments in the region, the so called “pink tide” represented by the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay that were elected after the 2000 collapse, an aspect that deserves a better discussion than that we can afford to devote to it in this paper.

Conclusion In this paper, we have addressed the persistence with only little variance of a Latin American, Latin Americanist discourse in the region cultural landscape through the twentieth and into the twenty first century, and explored our main hypothesis to explain this: that this discourse persistence has to do with its ability to account for certain structural political and economic aspects that have also been pointed at by theoretical notions and frameworks. Additionally, we have shown that this discourse is well suited to perform the functions required from a collective action framing: diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational. But we would like to go one step further. It is worth exploring, even if briefly, the causal relation between our discourse and the novel regional theorizations. It might well be the case that the former may be an inspiration for the latter. If we pay attention to a relatively early characterization of the notion of extractivism focused mostly on mining, we find some very telling ideas and expressions that point at a plausible genealogy. In a book published in 2009, Maristella Svampa and Laura Antonelli talk about the “extractivist paradigm”, and say that it “has a long and dark history in Latin America, [which was] marked by the creation of colonial enclaves, highly destructive of local economies, and directly related to the enslavement and impoverishment of the population”. The quotation clearly evokes our discourse, particularly in Galeano’s rhetoric tones. But there is more. The quotation continues and the comparison with colonial times gets more vivid: “The symbol of this culture of pillage has been Potosi, in neighboring Bolivia, which from the sixteenth century on filled the coffers and contributed to Europe’s early industrial development”. After this quite explicit comparison, the authors describe the current situation of the region as follows:

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It is quite clear that in the late years of the twentieth century, and in a context of a changing model of accumulation, there is an increasing expansion of projects aimed at controlling, extracting, and exporting natural goods on a large scale.²⁶

The authors consider open-pit mining “a kind of explicit model”, in which the crudest logic of economic sacking and environmental depredation collude with regional landscapes characterized by a great power asymmetry, that seem to evoke the unequal fight of David and Goliath.²⁷ In addition to a description of current open-pit mining as a kind of extreme exploitation much in the guise of colonial times, we find three of the most characteristic terms of our discourse, which we emphasized in the quotations: “pillaje” (expoliación), “sacking” (saqueo) and “depredation” (depredación). It seems then that in relation to the novel theorizations in the region we could reformulate the question that underlines our paper, and present it in terms of a causal relation: which comes first? Several hypotheses, not necessarily contradictory, come up. The first one implies that both the master frame and the theorizations could have been inspired by the same discourse, widely found in the cultural landscape of the region. But there are three more hypotheses that deal with the fact that activists and social scientists have interacted directly and indirectly during the current cycle of environmental protest in the region. It could be the case that the theorizations were inspired by the re emergent master frame. But also that the master frame reappearance could have been facilitated by the theorizations that evoke the subjacent discourse. And lastly, it could also be the case that the interactions between activists and social scientists could have caused the reemergence of the master frame as well as the interest in working more dedicatedly on the theorizations. We think this reformulation of our main, tacit question gives our reflection a broader and deeper scope.

Bibliography Barrett, Rafael, Lo que son los yerbales paraguayos. Montevideo, Claudio García Editor, 1926. Benford, Robert D., “‘You could be the hundredth monkey’: collective action frames and vocabulary of motives within the nuclear disarmament movement”, Sociological Inquiry 67, 1993, 409 – 30. Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow, “Framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment”, Annual Review of Sociology 26, 2000, 611 – 639.

 Maristella Svampa and Laura Antonelli, Minería transnacional, 15.  Cf. Ibid., 20.

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Dryzek, John, The Politics of the Earth. Environmental Discourses. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Pr., 2005. Galeano, Eduardo, Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2003. González Echevarría, Roberto, Myth and Archive. A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1990. Gudynas, Eduardo, “Diez tesis urgentes sobre el nuevo extractivismo. Contextos y demandas bajo el progresismo sudamericano actual”. In Extractivismo, política y sociedad, edited by Centro Andino de Acción Popular and Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social, Quito, CLAES, 2009, 187 – 225. Gudynas, Eduardo, “Desarrollo, extractivismo y postextractivismo”. Seminario Andino: Transiciones, postextractivismo y alternativas al extractivismo en los países andinos, Lima, 16 – 18 May 2012. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, “Comparative perspectives on contentious politics”. In Comparative Politics. Rationality, Culture and Structure, edited by Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2009, 260 – 290. Miller, Shawn W., An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2007. Rosser, Andrew, The Political Economy of the Resource Curse: A Literature Survey, Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2006. Sachs, Jeffrey and Andrew M. Warner, “The curse of natural resources”, European Economic Review 45, 2001, 827 – 838. Snow, David A. et al., “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation”, American Sociological Review 54.4, 1986, 464 – 481. Svampa, Maristella. “‘Consenso de los Commodities’ y lenguajes de valoración en América Latina”, Nueva Sociedad 244, 2013, 30 – 46. Svampa, Maristella and Laura Antonelli, Minería transnacional, narrativas del desarrollo y resistencias sociales. Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2009. Tarrow, Sidney, Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1998. Vara, Ana M., “Riesgo, recursos naturales y discursos: El debate en torno a las tecnologías y el ambiente en América Latina”, Tecnología y Sociedad 1.1, 2012, 47 – 88. Vara, Ana M., Sangre que se nos va. Naturaleza, literatura y protesta social en América Latina. Sevilla, Editorial CSIC, 2013. Vara, Ana M., “Un discurso latinoamericano y latinoamericanista sobre los recursos naturales en el ‘caso papeleras’”, Revista Iberoamericana. América Latina-España-Portugal 13.52, 2013, 7 – 26. Viale, Enrique and Maristella Svampa, Maldesarrollo. La Argentina del extractivismo y el despojo. Buenos Aires, Katz Editores, 2014.

Barbara Göbel

Contested Natures Cultural Valuations of Nature and Environmental Practices in the Puna de Atacama (Northwestern Argentina) In the last decades, two developments positioned the interactions between indigenous people and their environment – or, to put it in more general terms, natureculture relations – in the centre of political debates and societal controversies: on the one hand, the general perception of an all-embracing commodification of nature showing the close transregional interdependencies between the environment and capitalist economy, and, on the other hand, an broader recognition of the diversity of environmental knowledge and practices, in particular the importance of indigenous concepts of nature. We all face the daily experience of an accelerated expansion of capitalism, which left no territory in the world, even the most remote one, without its influence. Due to the unprecedented growth and spatial extension of extractive industries (exploitation of minerals, oil and gas) and agribusiness in Latin America, regions that have always been at the periphery of the Nation State such as the Chaco, Amazonia or the Andean highlands have been incorporated into broader global production chains and trade networks. Together with the export of minerals, oil, gas or agricultural products such as soybean or palm oil, from these regions, also nature is exported. The tangible flows of commodities and agricultural products go along with invisible flows of ecosystem goods and services such as soil, nutrients and water. The present phase of economic globalization is characterized by an encompassing globalization of nature. It connects peripheries and centres in unparalleled ways, builds new extractive landscapes and exposes local populations living in the neighbourhood of mining projects or largescale mono-cropping to an increasing degree to environmental costs and risks. At the same time a broader societal recognition exists that there are multiple cultural ways to conceptualize nature and to use natural resources. This acknowledgement of the diversity of indigenous ontologies, knowledge and practices of nature has been fostered by the development of politics of indigeneity as well as the establishment of international legal frames and legal practices regarding indigenous people (e. g., Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention ILO 169, 1991), cultural diversity (e. g., UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 2005) and the environment (e. g., UN Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-014

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In the following I want to illustrate some of the implications of both developments by making reference to indigenous atacameño communities in the Puna de Atacama (northwestern Argentina) and the transformation of their livelihood.¹

“You Have to Exploit Luck”: HumanEnvironmental Relations in the Puna de Atacama The Puna de Atacama comprehends the Provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca in northwestern Argentina has historically been at the periphery of the provincial and national state. This is related to the fact that it is one of the most arid sectors of the Andean highlands. The area is characterized by the prevalence of salt lakes, volcanoes, and a scattered grass and shrub vegetation. Water resources are very scarce. Precipitation are very rare and fluctuate enormously from one year to another. For many families livestock breeding and pastoralism are still of great economic and cultural importance. Herds are composed of lamas, sheep and goats and comprise on average around 200 animals.² The dense and complex relations between the atacameños and their herd animals are very close. Lamas, sheep and goats are not set outside the human sphere, but are considered as being members of the household and part of the household’s social networks. They have human-like features and abilities, an own agency, personhood and individuality. The anthropomorphization of the herd animals also involves the exchange of vital forces between people and animals and the transmission of momentary physical and emotional conditions. However, these notions of proximity and consubstantialization between people and herd animals do not imply that the latter have no economic value. Atacameños stress that they keep lamas, sheep and goats not just for pleasure (“de ganas”), but because they want to use their meat, fat, blood, milk, wool or hides.³ But like other members of the household the herd animals cannot fulfil their economic functions in a satisfactory way if they are not happy or do not feel comfortable and well. Well-being – of herd animals as well as of humans – is expressed with the words “estar tranquilo”, meaning a well-balanced mental and

 Ethnographic and historical information on the Puna de Atacama is based on long-term fieldwork in the Departamento Susques, Province of Jujuy I realized in the context of several research projects between 1991 and 2017. I thank DAAD, DFG, BMBF and Fondecyt for the generous support of my research.  See also Barbara Göbel, “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 223 – 225, 229.  Ibid., 229, 230.

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physical state.⁴ It is important to underline, that this notion of well-being differs from essentialistic ideas of “vivir bien” or “buen vivir” as indigenous alternatives to western concepts of development.⁵ “Estar tranquilo” is considered to be an ideal mental and physical condition, humans and herd animals seek to achieve, knowing at the same time that it is a state which can only ever be maintained for a quite limited length of time (in the same way as happiness is not a permanent but rather a momentary status). Not the idea of stable harmony but rather the daily experience of instabilities requiring interactive engagements with the animated components of the environment characterize interactions between atacameños, herd animals and the environment.⁶ From the perspective of the pastoralists nature is more a “Mitwelt” than an “Umwelt”, a co-world, rather than a detached surrounding environment. Pastoralists have to move with lamas, sheeps and goats in an environment impregnated with manifold dangers (“peligros”, “problemas”) such as drought, hail, strong rainfall, foxes, pumas, fright (“susto”) or curse (“hechizo”, “maldecio”).⁷ All these dangers can upset the mental and physical corporal balance of people and herd animals and threaten their health and even their life. The identification, explanation and handling of these environmental risks are subject to extensive cultural elaboration. In daily discourses and practices atacameños address tensions, frictions and infectious disruptions emanating from their environment; in particular from those animated components of the environment which have an agency on their own, as it is the case with “pachamama”, Mother Earth.⁸ These conceptualizations of nature contradict the picture of a harmonious and well-balanced relationship between humans and nature which is drawn in many studies of indigenous people in the Andes.⁹ Coping with environmental risks is a matter of central importance in the atacameños’ life. To handle environmental risks atacameños basically combine two strategies. One strategy is to build-up as much experience as possible on how to adequately take care of herd-animals. Experience – “experiencia” – comprehends knowledge transmitted from one generation to another as well as knowledge gained through practice over the course of time. But it also involves

 Ibid., 231; Id., “Identidades sociales y medio ambiente”, 280 – 281.  Compare, for example, Gustavo Endara (ed.), Post-crecimiento, 235 – 311.  Barbara Göbel, “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 231– 233.  Ibid., 231.  Ibid., 231– 233.  See, for example, Denise Arnold and Juan Yapita de Dios, Río de vellón; Joseph Bastien, Mountain of the condor; Peter Gose, Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains; Jeanne Isbell, To Defend Ourselves; Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky.

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commitment, which means emotional and performative engagement with herd animals, pastoral activities, and interactions with the environment, in general. In particular the herdswoman’s experience is regarded as crucial for the herd animal’s welfare and thus also for its productivity and reproductive success. The other strategy for handling risks is to accumulate and take care of “suerte” or luck-potentials. The term “suerte” is used in Andean rural areas exclusively in connection with resources – agricultural crops, herd animals or minerals¹⁰ – which are considered to have a life on their own and therefore develop in unforeseeable ways. As their growth fluctuates enormously these resources are considered to be uncontrollable. “Suerte” addresses economic success in dealing with these unpredictable resources. It is always quantifiable and materially visible. Thus, the accountability is an important trait of “suerte”. In the case of animal husbandry “suerte” means “multiplico” (multiplication). This comprises an adequate productive yield (quantity of meat, fat, wool or milk) and a sustainable reproductive success (survival of offspring after the first year of live). It is a basic notion of the inhabitants of the Puna de Atacama that a lama, sheep and goat inherits a good constitution and a positive reproduction potential not only from its animal-parents but also from its human owner, “dueño”. “Suerte” is thus a potential which is exchanged between humans and animals when a strong tie, a socially recognized relation, is built up. At the moment when a particular animal is assigned to a human person the “suerte” passes from this person to the animal. After the transfer the “suerte” is materially recognizable in certain body parts of the animal, but it is also visible through “multiplico”, either by means of the existence of productive and reproductive success or its absence. However, “suerte” potentials are not distributed equally among humans. Unlike experience, “suerte” cannot be acquired. It is rather an innate ability, which a person either possesses or does not. Some have, for example, a skilful hand for the economic success with lamas, they have “suerte” with lamas, whereas others do not have it. Lamas assigned to these persons with “suerte” are highly likely to be productive and to bear young which survive the first year, while this is unlikely for the others. Therefore, it is crucial for a household to put as many of the herd animals as possible in the possession of persons with “suerte”, for only in this way the household, in particular the chief herdswoman in charge of the lamas, sheep and goats, can face impending risks from a good starting posi-

 Barbara Göbel, “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 235 – 243; Id., “You have to exploit luck”, 37– 53; see also Pascale Absi, Les ministres du diable; and Carmen Salazar-Soler, Supay Muqui; who show, that minerals are considered in the Andes to be living veins.

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tion – the accumulation of a large basic stock of production and reproduction potentials.¹¹ The chief herdswoman has less influence on the subsequent development of the herd, but at least she has begun the game with good cards. In order to know who in her close family or in her broader social network (e. g., “compadrazgo” relations) has “suerte” and with which type of animals, at different life-stage rituals related to growth (birth, baptism, coming through of the first tooth, first haircut at 3 – 4 years, confirmation at 14 years, when children enter adulthood, and marriage) the chief herdswoman hands over animals in order to test the productive and reproductive success, the “suerte” potential, of that specific person. If, for example, she transfers a young sheep to a close family member or a godchild (“ahijado”) and this sheep develops well, from then on he or she will frequently receive sheep. To assign somebody as owner (“dueño”) of a herd animal establishes a specific tie between animal and human, it does not imply specific rights on the animal or that it is taken out of the herd. However, the “suerte” potentials accumulated within a household are not static, but always in a flux. Depending on the adequateness of the behaviour of household members they can grow, but also shrink or even disappear. An arbitrary use of resources (“usar de ganas”), not guided by the premise of immediate necessity and respect (e. g., use more water than necessary or kill more wild animals than needed), or a too strong anxiety to achieve economic success can unleash the anger of “pachamama”. This is why the strategic accumulation of “suerte” potentials in a household has to be accompanied by intensive relational work with the animated components of the environment, in particular with Mother Earth. Atacameños conceptualize “pachamama” in myriad, sometimes ambivalent ways. She is conceived of as both an abstract entity that maintains life cycles, through its power to create, support and destroy life, as well as in concrete forms. They think that “pachamama” possesses human qualities and dispositions. Like human beings she has identifiable needs (e. g., hunger, thirst), intentions (e. g., to protect her own herd-animals vicuñas, pumas, foxes), emotions (e. g., anger, sadness, happiness) and memory (e. g., historical record of the performance of household members). In the same way as human behaviour also her actions and reactions are ambivalent, uncontrollable and can have positive as well as negative effects for humans; what contradicts widespread notions of “pachamama” as an always benevolent and harmonious spiritual mother of indigenous people. The pastoralists see no contradiction between these  A statement often made by herdswoman in the Puna de Atacama is: “I live from the “suerte” of the other” (“Vivo de la suerte de los demás”) or “You have to exploit luck!” (“Hay que aprovechar la suerte!”); Barbara Göbel, “You have to exploit luck”, 37– 53; Id., “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 236 – 237.

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human characteristics of “pachamama” and the belief that she is localizable in different material components of the environment as springs, hollows in the ground, sand dunes or the peaks of mountains. There are a whole range of behavioural norms and ritual practices regarded socially as contributing to a wellbalanced relationship with Mother Earth. Their goal is to remove as best as possible tensions, imbalances or fissures in the tightly woven network of interaction and mutual affectedness between humans and “pachamama”. Atacameños stress that “pachamama” is an autonomous person. She has an agency on her own and has an ambivalent personality with positive as well as negative effects for humans and herd-animals. Therefore it does not make any sense to try to control her. Rather it is important to build and maintain strong ties of communication and exchange with “pachamama”, in order to be able to understand her behaviour, to capture her signs and to take her actions into account in daily decision-making. A strategic interwovenness between humans and “pachamama” exist, in which realm rituals are not considered to be detached from economy. They are addressed as relational work, investments that are necessary for achieving economic success with animal husbandry.¹² How are these conceptualization and practices related to anthropological debates on the interactions between indigenous people and their environment? The analysis of human-environmental relations is at the core of social and cultural anthropology since the establishment of this field of knowledge as a discipline.¹³ In the history of anthropological theory we can roughly differentiate between perspectives emphasizing the role of the environment for framing culture such as evolutionary anthropology and ecological anthropology and those focusing on the cultural representations of nature such as cognitive anthropology, structural anthropology or symbolic anthropology.¹⁴ In order to overcome the dualism between nature and culture at the bases of both perspectives, theoretical and methodological discussions have centred in the last decades on the mutual interdependencies between the human and the non-human sphere. They want to  Ibid., 37– 53; Id., “Identidades sociales y medio ambiente”, 280 – 281; Id., “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 234– 246.  See Carole Crumley, Elizabeth Van Deventer and Joseph J. Fletcher, New Directions in Anthropology and Environment; Philippe Descola and Gisli Pálsson (eds.), Nature and Society; Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory; Benjamin Orlove “Ecological Anthropology”, 235 – 273; Astrid Ulloa, “Concepciones de la naturaleza en la antropología actual”, 213 – 233.  See Aletta Biersack, “Introduction”, 5 – 18; Philippe Descola, The Society of Nature; Id., Beyond Nature and Culture; Arturo Escobar, “Constructing Nature , 46 – 68; Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Conrad Kottak, ”The New Ecological Anthropology”; Benjamin Orlove, “Ecological Anthropology”, 235 – 273.

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go beyond perspectives that highlight unilaterally either the impacts of environmental factors on cultural phenomena or the effects of cultural processes on nature. Culture and nature, societies and environment are no longer addressed as ontologically separable spheres organized in hierarchical ways. Many anthropologists rather emphasize the co-constitution of nature and culture, their interdependencies and mutual affectedness.¹⁵ Extending the classical anthropological argument that each society has its specific forms of perceiving, knowing, representing nature and its particular ways of interacting with the environment, they show that there are different ontological modes of socialization of nature which – depending on the concrete context – co-exist, partially overlap or are confronted in conflictuous ways. There is clearly no singular, unique and universal concept of nature; rather there are multiple “natures”. Taking into account a relational perspective a broad spectrum of anthropological literature describe how in many indigenous groups interactions between humans and non-humans are impregnated by the logic of reciprocity and and are characterized by constant transformations.¹⁶ For example, animals and plants have human behaviour and are regulated by social norms, while humans can turn in certain contexts into animals. One example is the “señalada” in the Puna de Atacama, one of the central rituals with herd-animals. That means, in these indigenous societies not only humans but also non-humans are considered to be integrative parts of social webs of conviviality. The so called “ontological turn” in anthropology has sensitize for the multiplicity of ways to conceptualize nature, insisted on taking different ontologies seriously and drawn attention to the asymmetries of power that are inherent in intercultural – specifically inter-ontological – relations.¹⁷ However, it addresses less local diversity, overlapping and hybridizations in conceptualizations of nature and resource use.

 Cf. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Philippe Descola, The Society of Nature; Id., Beyond Nature and Culture; Id., Gisli Pálsson (eds.), Nature and Society; Arturo Escobar, “Constructing Nature”, 46 – 68; Id., “Whose Knowledge, Whose Nature?”, 53 – 82; Eduardo B. Viveiros de Castro, “Images of Nature and Society”, 179 – 200; Id., A inconstância da alma selvagem.  Cf. Philippe Descola, The Society of Nature; Id., Beyond Nature and Culture; Id., “¿Humano, demasiado humano?”, 16 – 27; Barbara Göbel, “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 221– 250; Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Enrique Leff, Racionalidad ambiental; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Images of Nature and Society”, 179 – 200; Id., A inconstância da alma selvagem.  For an overview on the ontological turn in anthropology see Martin Holbraad and Morton A. Pedersen, The Ontological Turn.

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Multiciplicty of Environmental Knowledge – Epistemological Conflicts Ethnographic studies undertaken in the relational theoretical and methodological frame have illustrated the diversity of human-environmental relations and emphasize the epistemological relevance of indigenous knowledge and practices. They also reveal the persistent invisibilization and displacement of situated, performative and orally transmitted forms of knowledge¹⁸, as it is the case with the knowledge practices of the inhabitants of the Puna de Atacama. Because of its extreme climatic and risky environmental conditions, the inaccessibility of the region and the dispersion of its few inhabitants, the Puna de Atacama has always been at the periphery of the Nation State. It was considered to be an almost empty territory with no value on its own. Related to this, traditional economic practices of the indigenous population, their social organization, mobility patterns and environmental knowledge have been hidden for a long time.¹⁹ National and provincial governments started several attempts to develop the Puna de Atacama, many of them quite unsuccessful. In the late 1990s, for example, they sent agronomists or agricultural technicians to this part of the Andean highlands, in order to organize meetings with the communities, enhance productivity of animal husbandry and make the overall herd management more efficient. The interactions between development experts and local population can be regarded as “inter-cultural encounters” (or dis-encounters). Due to inequalities in power positions and divergent cultural notions communication between agronomists or agricultural technicians and atacameños takes place neither on an equal footing nor on common conceptual grounds. Although both groups speak Spanish, they do not only communicate in completely different ways, but also did not understand each other.²⁰ For the development experts environmental risks and their negative effects can be made controllable through investments of technology, the application of scientific knowledge, as well as the transfer and implementation of husbandry

 See, for example, Roy Ellen, Peter Parkes and Alan Bicker (eds.), Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and its Transformations; Arturo Escobar, “Constructing Nature”, 46 – 68; Id., “Whose Knowledge, Whose Nature?”, 53 – 82; several contributions in Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge and James McCarthy (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology.  See Barbara Göbel, “Identidades sociales y medio ambiente”, 268 – 270; Fanny Delgado and Barbara Göbel, “Departamento de Susques”, 81– 104.  Cf. Barbara Göbel, “Risk and Culture in the Andes”, 193 – 217.

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practices from more developed regions. They regard the local cultural handling of risks as irrational behaviour which does not make any economic sense at all. Whereas they stress discontinuities between nature and culture, the inhabitants of the Puna de Atacama do emphasize in their environmental notions and practices continuities between the human and the non-human spheres. However, the differences between the development experts and the atacameños do no lie in emphasizing or de-emphasizing the economic value of livestock, but in a distinct cultural contextualization of this economic value. While for the development experts, lamas, sheep and goats, are basically production units, the pastoralists perceive a herd animal as a complex whole with manifold qualities. As the interactions between atacameños and development experts show, knowledge about, access to or control over natural resources is mediated by social hierarchies and power asymmetries. Hegemonic notions of nature and capitalistic valuations of resources re-signify, replace or even erase local knowledge patterns and appropriation practices. Hence, as the contestation of the expansion of mining projects in the salt-lakes of the Puna de Atacama highlight, environmental conflicts are also disputes over environmental knowledge and the valuation (“Inwertsetzung”) of nature. Beyond that, as my studies in the Puna de Atacama showed, concepts, visions and notions of nature are not static but are themselves the results of particular historical contexts, political and economic configurations as well as cultural experiences.²¹ Local environmental knowledge and practices change due to factors such as the expansion of capitalist economy into peripheral rural areas as, for example, the Puna de Atacama, the emigration of young people, growing urbanization or the modification of lifestyle and consumption patterns.

Economic Globalization and the Globalization of Nature Since the 1990s two interconnected processes with multiple and reinforcing, often irreversible effects have gained an unprecedented dynamic: economic globalization and globalization of nature. As the recent controversy on the con-

 See, for example, Barbara Göbel “Identidades sociales y medio ambiente”, 267– 296; Id., “Dangers, Experience, and Luck”, 221– 250; Id., “La minería de litio en Atacama”, 177– 189; but also Roy Ellen, Peter Parkes and Alan Bicker (eds.), Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and its Transformation.

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cepts of “capitalocene” and “anthropocene” illustrate²² both processes so far have been analyzed rather in parallel tracks than focussing on their mutual entanglements. The ongoing accelerated expansion of capitalistic economy is characterized by the emergence of new markets and transnational “actors” and the transformation of production chains, commodity circulation and financial flows. It is coupled with an unprecedented intensification of both, the exploitation of natural resources and incorporation of so far peripheral territories into capitalistic economy. The encompassing commodification of nature causes displacements and re-territorializations, processes David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”²³. Many countries of Latin America, including Argentina, have followed in the last decades a development model based on the extraction and export of natural resources (minerals, oil, gas) as well as agricultural products (e. g. soybean, palm oil). A “commodity consensus” existed (and exists) in Latin America independently from the governments’ political orientation.²⁴ The great expansion of extractive industries in the region, in particular during the so called “commodity boom” between approximately 1994 and 2013, has been fostered by high commodity prices and growing global demands for natural resources, in particular of emerging economies such as China and India, whose growing urbanized middle classes follow lifestyles that consume a lot of nature.²⁵ Extractive projects are often contentious and go along with conflicts between social movements, corporations, and the state.²⁶ Their benefits, costs and risks are unequally distributed, in a social, a spatial and a temporal sense. Although extractive industries such as the mining projects on the salt lakes of the Puna de Atacama can generate additional income for local households, because of their negative environmental impacts they can also put at risk future development op-

 See Virginia Acosta García, “La incursión del Antropoceno”, 8 – 15; Philippe Descola, “¿Humano, demasiado humano?”, 16 – 27; Jason Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?; Astrid Ulloa, “Dinámicas ambientales”, 58 – 73.  See David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism”, 63 – 87.  See Maristella Svampa, “Consenso de los Commodities”, 30 – 46; but also Anthony Bebbington and Denise Humphreys Bebbington, “An Andean Avatar”; Denise Humphrey Bebbington and Anthony Bebbington, “Post-what?”, 17– 38.  Cf. Kalowatien Deonandan and Michael L. Dougherty, Mining in Latin America; Barbara Göbel and Astrid Ulloa, Extractivismo minero en América Latina; Carlos Monge, Los efectos del boom.  Cf. Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury, Subterranean Struggles; Kalowatien Deonandan and Michael L. Dougherty, Mining in Latin America; Barbara Göbel and Astrid Ulloa, Extractivismo minero en América Latina; Barbara Göbel, Manuel Góngora and Astrid Ulloa (eds.), Desigualdades sociaoambientales en América Latina.

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portunities. They might reduce the wellbeing of next generations, what raises questions of intergenerational justice.²⁷ Whereas, for example, transnational companies make profit out of the exploitation and export of natural resources and the state gains tax revenues from extractive industries, particularly those rural populations that depend to a considerable extent on the environment for their livelihood – as it is the case for indigenous people in the Puna de Atacama – are affected by the development of extractive projects in their territories. Contrary to urban populations they have to cope with the costs and risks related to these projects.²⁸ In addition to the extensive and encompassing appropriation of natural resources and land we also face profound global environmental changes. The manifold, often irreversible effects of climate change or biodiversity loss have magnified in the last decades, the frequency and range of hazards and catastrophes uncertainties have augmented. The “Lebenswelt” of indigenous communities living in such fragile and risky environment as the Puna de Atacama have become much more vulnerable as they are increasingly exposed to both dimensions of the fast-growing globalization of nature, the expansion of extractive industries and global environmental change.²⁹ In the context of this unprecedented globalization of nature we face a crisis of conventional development models. The recognition that nature is not an everlasting resource allowing unlimited growth thanks to technological improvements triggered a search for alternative development models which take planetary boundaries into account, consider to a greater extent cultural diversity and multiperspectivism and aim at reducing persistent inequalities. New frameworks such as “green economy” and “circular economy” want to achieve an environmentally sustainable and socially more inclusive development without renouncing to economic profit and growth, whereas more radical proposals as degrowth criticize the basic principles of capitalism as the main driving forces behind environmental depletion and persistent inequalities.³⁰ “Buen vivir”, “vivir bien”,

 Cf. Ibid.; Carlos Monge, Los efectos del boom.  Cf. Barbara Göbel, “La minería del litio en la Puna de Atacama”, 135 – 150; Id., “La minería del litio en Atacama”, 167– 193.  See Enrique Leff, Racionalidad ambiental; Astrid Ulloa, “Environment and Development”, 320 – 331.  See Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (ed.), Mehr geht nicht!; Ullrich Brand and Markus Wissen, Imperiale Lebensweise; Thomas Fatheuer, Lilli Fuhr and Barbara Unmüßig, Inside the Green Economy; André Gorz, Auswege aus dem Kapitalismus; Tim Jackson, Wohlstand ohne Wachstum; Peter Lacy, Jakob Rutqvist and Philipp Buddemeier, Wertschöpfung statt Verschwendung; Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Intelligente Verschwendung.

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“sumaq kawsay” or “suma qamaña” are key concepts used in international political debates to position alternative perspectives from the Global South that contest western linear ideas of progress and hegemonic nature-culture dualism. They comprehend material, spiritual and social wellbeing achievable through an equitable conviviality of diverse cultures as well as a harmonious and not a disruptive relation towards nature. “Buen vivir”, “vivir bien”, “sumaq kawsay” or “suma qamaña” are regarded as being deeply rooted in Andean indigenous cosmology and are often combined with essentialistic notions of “pachamama”, Mother Earth, as a life-sustaining indigenous deity.³¹ The contradiction between the political construction of an indigenous development model from above – as is it, for example, the case of Ecuador and Bolivia – and the reliance on extractivisim as the main economic strategy are strongly critized by indigenous organizations and environmental NGOs.³² Indigenous activists rather insist in placebased development perspectives that strengthen autonomy, political self-determination and territorial control and look for economic alternatives to extractivism.³³ They emphasize that local cultural knowledge and practices have to be taken into account. In order to understand the globalization of nature in more encompassing ways transregional interdependencies, power configurations and knowledge asymmetries have to be taken into account.³⁴ The risen daily experience of interdependencies between the local, subnational, national and transnational levels and the unequal configurations of growing time-space compressions³⁵ provides a hitherto unknown global prominence and political significance to the relation between indigenous people and their environment. In the last decades several international legal frames and policies were established that closely connect local cultural practices with the conservation of nature. One example is the

 For further details, see Gustavo Endara (ed.), Post-crecimiento, 235 – 311.  Ecuador (in 2008) and Bolivia (in 2009) included in their respective national constitutions (Ecuador in 2008) and Bolivia (2009) these concepts. Nevertheless, both countries rely on extractivism as the main strategy for economic development. For a critical assessment of the contradictions between politicial discourses and economic practices in the Andes see Anthony Bebbington and Denise Humphreys Bebbington, “An Andean Avatar”; David Cortez and Heike Wagner, “El buen vivir”; Gustavo Endara, (ed.), Post-crecimiento, 235 – 311; Denise Humphreys Bebbington, Anthony Bebbington, “Post-what?”.  See, for example, Astrid Ulloa, “Environment and Development”, 213 – 233.  This is highlighted by many of the contributions in Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge and James McCarthy, The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology.  See Marianne Braig, Sérgio Costa and Barbara Göbel, “Soziale Ungleichheiten und globale Interdependenzen in Lateinamerika”; Barbara Göbel, Manuel Góngora and Astrid Ulloa, Desigualdades sociaoambientales en América Latina; Anna L. Tsing, Friction.

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UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992) with 196 countries as contractual partners. CBD is the first international environmental convention to acknowledge the relevance of indigenous knowledge for the preservation of the environment and the maintenance of biodiversity. Other international agreements underlying the close relations between indigenous people and their territories, highlighting the role of local cultures for sustainable resource management as well as emphasizing the importance of cultural diversity for the protection of the environment are, for example, the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001), the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005), the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2016) or the Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO, 1991) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries. In particular this last convention plays a key role for the international recognition of specific rights of indigenous people on territories and resources. Out of the merely 22 countries that have ratified ILO 169 so far, 15 are from Latin American and the Caribbean. The ratification of the convention in this region of the world went along with constitutional reforms and new legislation on a national and subnational level. Argentina ratified ILO 169 in 2000 after an amendment of its constitution in 1984 that recognizes in article 75 for the first time indigenous communities and their historical rights to their traditional land. Provinces had to adjust their constitutions to this legal frame. These legal developments opened up new, albeit small spaces of negotiation for indigenous communities. The constitutional recognition of indigenous people in Argentina triggered a process of communization and ethnification in the Puna de Atacama. Traditionally, the household – called “familia” – is regarded as the central unit of production, consumption and social reproduction. Different to other parts of the Andes, community structures have not been very pronounced; for example, no communal pastures or waterholes existed and community identity was quite weak. Between 2000 and 2001 several indigenous atacameño communities (“comunidades aborígenes atacameñas”) were created with an explicit ethnic identity, a specific organizational structure and a particular legal status. In order to be able to demand property rights atacameños demarcated on the basis of the households’ traditional land use communal territories. Between 2002 and 2008 government granted some indigenous communities of the Puna de Atacama land-titels. In the long struggle for ethnic recognition specificties of the landscape (high-altitude desert with scattered vegetation and salt-lakes, wild animals as pumas, suri, and vicuñas, etc.) and characteristic traits of the pastoral lifestyle play a central role. Nature transformed into one of the key arenas to fight for ethnic recognition, greater participation and compensation for extrac-

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tive projects. More essentialistic positions of culture-nature relationships emerged, new discourses of Otherness, indigeneity and cultural difference. The resignification of the notion of “pachamama” illustrates this process of consolidation of an homogenous indigenous cosmovision on nature. Local perceptions of “pachamama” as an ambivalent personality with benevolent as well as disruptive effects for humans and herd-animals have been partially replaced by more politized Pan-Andean concept of “pachamama” as an genuine indigenous life-principle with solely positive effects. Whereas pastoralists address the tensions, frictions and dangers in their interactions with “pachamama”, political indigenous discourses emphasize the altruism and encompassing generosity of Mother Earth. Contrary to local indigenous concepts in the Andean highlands, they characterize the relations between indigenous people and “pachamama” as full of harmony, spirituality, altruism and equilibrium. “Pachamama” is presented as an indigenous alternative to the exploitation of nature and accumulation of western capitalism. This new strategic essentialism shows that nature is contested: it is not an apolitical entity but a social construction with deep political implications. The development of green economy and sustainable lifestyles in the Global North triggered in the last years the dynamic expansion of salar mining in the Puna de Atacama. The salars of the so-called “lithium triangle” that comprise Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia), Salar de Atacama (northern Chile, IIa Región) and many smaller salt pans in northwestern Argentina (Provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca) hold around 70 % of world largest brine reserves of lithium. Lithium is a key resource for the production of batteries required for the transformation of the energy matrix with a higher percentage of renewables (solar and wind energy) and the development of electric transport. However, the development of “carbon-reduced” lifestyles in the Global North produces “unsustainabilities” at the place of origin of the resource in the Global South.³⁶ Lithium mining develops in fragile ecosystems. The salars and their surroundings are of great importance for local economic strategies as salt extraction and animal husbandry. They are also of relevance for indigenous identities and a key reference of local history. In the last years international tourism developed in the region. Tourist agencies have positioned the Puna de Atacama as a pristine and exotic landscape. In particular, salt-lakes became an attraction for tourists. The expansion of mining in the salars is increasingly contested by the atacameños. They fear negative environmental impacts, in particular on the few water resources, loss of territorial control and the displacements of their tradi-

 Barbara Göbel, “La minería de litio en Atacama”, 167– 195.

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tional economic strategies, in particular pastoralism and salt extraction. They also see the tourism at risk as mining infrastructure disturbs the image of the salt-lakes as a pristine wilderness. However, the extractive projects also provide job opportunities and new demands for economic services. An even more important, they also open new political spaces for the local indigenous population to negotiate recognition, participation and compensation. The arenas of negotiation between indigenous organizations, mining companies and the State (at its different levels and sectors) are characterized by cultural diversity; they are polilogic settings, in which divergent notions and experiences of nature are displayed. But they are also deeply unequal configurations. Gains, costs and risks of lithium mining are distributed in unequal ways (in a spatial and a temporal sense). Great power asymmetries exist between atacameños, the companies and the State with regard to negotiation capabilities and the possibilities to participate in decision-making processes. One of the main complaints of indigenous people in the Puna de Atacama is that they do not have sufficient information about mining projects and their impacts. They do not have access to knowledge about alternatives development scenarios. In spite of the presence of different environmental practices and modes of socialization of the non-human sphere, there is no place for the complexity of local forms of knowledge and local practices. They are persistently excluded in the negotiations and debates on the future of the region.³⁷ Local population in the Puna de Atacama are more and more faced with an increasing commodification of nature in their territory. Therefore conflicts on lithium mining can be regarded as spaces of dispute over different valuation logics and valuation practices of nature.³⁸ Arenas of negotiation highlight the hegemonic imposition of the extraction and transformation of certain materialities of the salar by the mining company and the displacement of other valuations of the salar and its surrounding. And also makes evident the persistent hierarchies between scientific knowledge, expert knowledge and local knowledge.

Final Remarks At the beginning of this contribution two developments were addressed that positioned the interactions between indigenous people and their environment

 Cf. Barbara Göbel, “La minería de litio en Atacama”, 167– 195.  For an overview on current debates on valuation pragmatics see David Graeber, Towards an Anthropology of Value.

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in the centre of political debates and societal controversies: on the one hand, the globalization of nature, and, on the other hand, the recognition of the diversity of environmental knowledge and practices. The previous, place-based, analysis of some aspects of these developments and their implications on the ground highlighted some epistemological challenges. One challenge is how to avoid the trap of essentialism. The recognition of the multiplicity of notions of nature, should avoid the essentialization of difference, the essentialization of the “Other”. Culture is not a coherent container of stable meanings and norms. It is rather multifacetic, mouldable, and profoundly ambigous. Culture is a polilogical process; meanings are produced, reproduced and negotiated through praxis. Depending on the concrete context of social interaction, certain perspectives, knowledge, values, norms or symbolic representations emerge, while others are superseded. The other challenge is to achieve a more differentiated and encompassing understanding of the relation between economy and culture, or, to put in more specific terms, between interest and meaning. We have to re-position to a greater extent the economic dimension in our analysis of indigenous communities, in order to complement the focus on identities, cosmovision or symbolic representation of many studies in the Andean highlands. This will allow us to comprehend better the profound transformation of household economies due to extractivism, local valuation disputes, the economy of politics of indigeneity and the perception of time-space compressions related to globalization. The last challenge, I would like to mention is the paradox between conviviality and inequality, that means the co-existence of difference in unequal context. This requires a multidimensional perspective on inequalities that goes beyond the traditional focus on class difference, and takes other social factors such cultural, gender or age differences into account. In addition, the transregional interdependencies of local and regional inequalities have to be considered. This position is the environment in the center of the debate on sustainability, development and inequality.

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Holbraad, Martin and Morton A. Pedersen, The Ontological Turn. An Anthropological Exposition (New Departures in Anthropology). Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2017. Humphreys Bebbington, Denise and Anthony Bebbington, “Post-what? Extractive Industries, Narratives of Development and Socio-environmental Disputes Across the (Ostensibly Changing) Andean Region”. In New Political Spaces in Latin American Natural Resource Governance, edited by Havard Haarstad. New York, Palgrave McMillan, 2012, 17 – 38. Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London, Routledge, 2000. Isbell, Jean, To Defend Ourselves. Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Illinois, Waveland Pr., 1985. Jackson, Tim, Wohlstand ohne Wachstum. München, oekom verlag, ²2013. Kottak, Conrad P. “The New Ecological Anthropology”, American Anthropologist 101, 1, 1999, 23 – 35. Lacy, Peter, Jakob Rutqvist and Philipp Buddemeier, Wertschöpfung statt Verschwendung: Die Zukunft gehört der Kreislaufwirtschaft. München, Redline Verlag, 2015. Leff, Enrique, Racionalidad ambiental. La reapropriación de la naturaleza. México, Siglo XXI, 2004. Monge, Carlos, Los efectos del boom de las industrias extractivas en los indicadores sociales. Lima, Natural Resource Governance Inst., 2016. Moore, Jason, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA, 2016. Orlove, Benjamin S., “Ecological Anthropology”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 9, 1980, 235 – 273. Perreault, Tom, Gavin Bridge and James McCarthy, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London, Routledge, 2015. Salazar-Soler, Carmen, Supay Muqui, dios del socavón: vida y mentalidades mineras. Lima, Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2006. Svampa, Maristella, “‘Consenso de los Commodities’ y lenguajes de valoración en América Latina”, Nueva Sociedad, 244, Marzo – Abril 2013, 30 – 46. Tsing, Anna L., Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, Princeton Univ. Pr., 2001. Ulloa, Astrid, “Concepciones de la naturaleza en la antropología actual”, In Ecología y paisaje. Miradas desde Canarias, edited by Sergio Toledo Prats. La Orotava, Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, 2009, 213 – 233. Ulloa, Astrid, “Environment and Development: Reflections from Latin America”, In The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge and James McCarthy. London, Routledge, 2015, 320 – 331. Ulloa, Astrid, “Dinámicas ambientales y extractivas en el siglo XXI: ¿es la época del Antropoceno o del Capitaloceno en Latinoamérica?”, Desacatos 54, mayo-agosto 2017, 58 – 73. Urton, Gary, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky. An Andean Cosmology. Austin, Univ. of Texas Pr., 1981. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo B., “Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 1996, 179 – 200. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo B., ed., A inconstância da alma selvagem. São Paulo, Cosac & Naify, 2002.

Pablo Wright

“Hi, My Little Grandson, What’re You Looking for?” Close Encounters with the Owners of Nature in the Argentine Chaco Qom/Toba World

Introduction In this article, I explore different first-person accounts in which Qom/Toba individuals encountered powerful beings associated with what the Western culture defines as nature or the “natural world”. As I could record in my fieldwork among the Argentine Chaco Qom indigenous peoples, for them all what exists is inhabited by a handful collection of powerful beings that one way or another bestows haloik (power) to humans to perform almost all daily activities¹. The Qom regard these beings as non-humans or jaqa’a (other, strange)², and many of them “owns” (i. e., take care of) certain geographical, spatial domains as well as specific activities³. Humans can meet them not only in daylight, but also in dreams, and in both cases, they are conceived of as real and meaningful encounters. Throughout the text I will present these experiences of encounters I am grateful to the institutions that funded my research: the Argentine National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET), the University of Buenos Aires, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., the Fundación Antorchas, and the Temple University Graduate School. I deeply thanks Teresa Benítez, Vicente Tami’, Alejandro Katache, Alberto Ñogochiri, Teresa Aquino, Vicente Segundo and Angel PitaGat for their kind help to share with me their knowledge and wisdom in the field.  I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 1981 and 2010 among the Takshek Qom, also known as Eastern Toba of the Formosa Province. The Qom people were former nomadic hunting-gathering bands that inhabited the Argentine Chaco region who settled down in sedentary “communities” forced by the Argentine government’ policies of colonization and modernization through the military occupation of their territories towards the end of the XIXth century. The phonological notation of Qom language is adapted from Pablo Wright, “Being-in-the-dream”, xvii.  A key native category to understand the linguistic coding of Qom ontology.  All the indigenous peoples of the Chaco region share this notion of the owners of “nature”. Cf. José Braunstein, “Dominios y jerarquías”; Anatilde Idoyaga Molina, Modos de clasificación en la cultura Pilagá; Alejandro López, “Las Señas”. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-015

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with Owners and the interpretation my interlocutors carried out about them, in which their world view is reproduced but also contested according to the historical processes of the peripheral modernity that traverse their life. From a conceptual perspective nurtured by Western existential philosophy and phenomenology, and a political economy of cultural symbols,⁴ existentially speaking, body and world have a mutual relationship of constitution. Through it, the ‘world’ appears as a bottom-rock upon which ‘objects’ emerge as such; a horizon of possibilities of existence(s). Any ‘object’ appears as a given when it enters into that structure composed by the body and the horizon called ‘world’. Ultimately, ‘world’ is not an object itself, but what allows us to perceive objects. For, humans live in a world with which they forge a tight structure. Phenomenologically conceived, any world supposes certain kinds of entities, objects, events and relationships. It is a historically constructed set of assumptions that, through socialization, shapes our understanding of reality. This paper intends to present the Qom view of the world, providing a philosophical and anthropological perspective in the intercultural conversation about the nature of “nature”. In it, traditional patronizing words quite used in the Western commonsense, such as magic, superstition, belief vis-à-vis knowledge must be disregarded for good, if we are trying a mature intercultural dialogue between social-historical worlds. The Qom never developed a concept of nature as separated from the human realm as occurs in the Western notion of nature. For the latter, rooted in the Judeo-Christian traditions that nurtured science philosophically, nature is not only separated ontologically from the human, but this division allows the emergence and endless practice of ideologies of control, exploitation and transformation of it. Through my ethnographic research among the Formosa Province Takshek Qom, linguistically a Guaykuruan group, “nature” both as a word and as a concept is completely absent in the Qom language let alone in their worldview. Here I propose that, instead of “nature”, there is “world”. In this context, the idea of world, or as the Qom refer to as enawak (all, all there is), hima’ (all) is a rough approximation to, in some contexts, what science consider as nature. To illustrate Qom’s view of enawak, I will show the features and the role of a certain kind of beings known as Owners. Almost in every corner of the world, there is an owner, a powerful being that controls living species as well as weather phenomena and human activities. “Behind” almost every phenomenon, there is an  See, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Filosofía y las Ciencias Humanas; Michael JACKSON, Paths toward a clearing, 1– 18; Id., Minima Ethnographica, 1– 3; Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things, 37– 55; Pablo Wright, “Being-in-the-dream”, xviii-xix. John and Jean COMAROFF, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 3 – 45.

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owner. They are powerful agents with whom humans must develop meaningful relationships to carry out their everyday activities. From an analytical standpoint, this kind of beings, specifically their shape and function, are closely related to the whole historical processes the Qom, and all the Chaco region native peoples, have gone through. In this sense, their encounter with White colonists, and Catholic and Protestant Christianity⁵, can be identified in the non-human shape of the Owners. In short, this conceptual framework combines a phenomenological approach with a historical symbolic standpoint, which allow our existential hermeneutics of the Qom world.⁶

The Qom world My ethnographic inquiries were carried out almost always with elders; they are socially defined as men and women that know. Indeed, any exploration of these matters among youngsters would lead me inescapably to situations in which, showing a humble posture, they defined themselves as “new” (dalaGaik), visà-vis the elders, called togeshek (ancients) therefore unable to answer my questions. Their knowledge usually refers to ancient times where the world was quite different from now. The corpus of lore that refers to it is called jaGaikipi l’aqtaGanaGak (words of the Ancient Ones). And many of them had experiences of the old hunting and gathering activities in the monte (forest), a meaningful place of encounters with a plethora of powerful beings of non-human nature, included in the native category of jaqa’a. These first-person accounts in the world not only reinforced this view of things, but, on the other hand, it actualized it through the subjective experiences lived by concrete individuals. In turn, the latter widened Qom society defined the properties, shapes, beings and objects of the world the way. The Qom world seemed to be a set of topoi, beings, properties, and values all tied up together. Briefly put, in “topographic terms” my interlocutors agreed on picturing it in two ways: (1) as a sort of rounded island of earth in the middle of an immense sea; (2) as a multi-level structure. One was a view from “above”, while the other followed a “horizontal-vertical” axis. However, both included additional angles that made them puzzling and fascinating for a science-oriented eye. In the first case as an island, the portion of dry earth in which humans live is known as delek. Its boundaries are called loga’ na ‘alwa (the end of

 Cf. Elmer S. Miller, Los tobas argentinos.  Cf. Pablo Wright, “’Yo tengo un don’”.

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earth), a term that appeared ambiguous. On the one hand, it referred to the edge of delek, where the sea starts. On the other, it meant a place westward, in which earth and sky meet. The West is called pigem, a term that also alludes to “sky”, and hawit, which means also “afternoon”. So far, a whole world map, orally displayed, was simultaneously an ontological topography. Within it, there were general distinctions such as humans vs. jaqa’a, meaning non-human. In addition, another pair of terms indicated a distinction that echoes the above mentioned: shiaGawa (lit. human shape, an individual) vs. shigijak (lit. animal, animal shape, wild). To sum up, there was a sharp distinction between the world as an island of dry earth and its aquatic boundaries; they divided human and non-human realms. In addition, even though the Qom are classified as shiaGawa–meaning both human nature and/ or human-shape, non-human beings can adopt different shapes, like shigijak, shiaGawa, plants (nañigishik), wind, rainbow, or as mixed beings. In fact, their shape has metonymic connections with their realm of origin, and with the context in which they meet with humans. The world as a multilayered structure, within a vertical-horizontal scheme, is better known in the Toba literature.⁷ This version basically recognizes three different planes: ‘alwa (earth), ka’ageñi (below), and pigem (sky); each able to have subdivisions. Earth houses humans and other living beings. Within it the Qom people identify discrete regions, such as Field or Prairie (ne’enaGa), Forest (hawiaq), Palm-grove (chaesat), Swamp (qa’im), and Water (e. g., river, ponds, and brooks) (‘etaGat). Night (pe) appears as a discrete realm too, though it is not clear if it belongs or not to the terrestrial plane. As a matter of fact, spatially it “happens” in the earth; but the Qom act and talk about it as a cosmological realm of its own; a separate region built upon a temporal texture. The belonging to each cosmological realm or subdivision not only implies differences in shape, habits, and morphology but also in ontology. Nominal suffixes -l’ek (masc.) and lashi (fem.) express linguistically the belonging to a discrete realm. A sexual polarity is recognized in almost all the existing beings. In this regard, beings that inhabit the Sky are named respectively pigeml’ek or pigemlashi. For instance, the Mother of the Storm and Lightning usually is classified as pigemlashi; those that live at the Night are pel’ek or pelashi. General plural is marked adding the suffix -pi. Humans are basically ‘alwal’ekpi (inhabitants of earth). Generally, each domain and its subdivisions have non-human entities that control the living beings and natural phenomena within it. They are called

 Elmer S. Miller, Los tobas argentinos, 36 – 40; Edgardo J. Cordeu, “Aproximación al horizonte mítico de los Tobas”, 75.

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indistinctly looGot (owner), lta’a (father) or late’e (mother); these forms also mean “big size”. For example, the Owner/Father of the Ostrich is called mañigelta’a; his realm is the Field. On the other hand, any being that showed abnormal traits can be classified into the category of jaqa’a. Indeed, as referred to before, the beings living in the “end of earth” are designed this way because of their big size and remote dwelling; both traits are clear signals of radical alterity and power. The most general category seems to be ‘human/non-human’. The latter includes an ample range of entities/activities. The Qom not only map them out to have a picture of the world, but also to live and interact with them in it. Humans expect to have a contact with any of these beings, at least once in their lifetime, to receive power and knowledge. Among the Formosa Qom, power is called mainly haloik; other expressions are l’añaGak and napiishik. The link established between humans and non-humans is a key issue in Toba cosmology. Terms such as hichoGoden (he blessed, he felt pity on me, he loves me) and wo’o da n’achek (it was a gift, it was luck) synthesize their usual state of expectation toward the non-human realm. Humans have a series of entities that can be roughly translated as “soul”. Indeed, for example, the lki’i is a sort of image-soul that leaves the body during dream or after death. Shamans possess lowanek, a class of “auxiliary spirits”, which are regarded as part of the shaman’s person, yet they can live “outside” or “inside” him. Seemingly superior hierarchically to lowanek, the ltawa (his helper) or ltaGaiaGawa (his companion of conversation) are those powerful beings that give lowanek to shamans. This distinction shows a fluid conception of power, and its relationship with actual beings is flexible. It seems apparent that it presents problems for a Western, fixed notion of person.⁸ Powerful figures of lamoGoñi–the word referring to the mythic times when the world was radically different from the current one are usually depicted as nanoiknaGaik (lit. transformers, shape-shifters) they could change their shape at will and produce extraordinary events. In some contexts, they may contact humans through dreams. The capacity to shape-shift is a conspicuous sign of power in the Qom world, and all the powerful beings manifest it in different contexts in which they interact with humans. Another proof of their powerful nature is ndage, which can be translated as “sign”, which means any unusual trait in their body that indicates this condition. My interlocutors told me that they can appear in daylight (nachaGan), in visions (nloGok) or in dreams; these contexts are regarded as real and meaningful experiences of life. In this sense, then, Owners can appear to humans under different forms, but always indicating their

 Cf. Silvia Citro, Cuerpos significantes; Florencia C. Tola, Yo no estoy solo en mi cuerpo.

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identity through shape, clothing, behavior, and spatial location. The very act of manifestation is understood as a gift (n’achek) to humans, notwithstanding the sense of fear that such an appearance may produce. And their capacity to shapeshift is a proof of power. In this sense, humans with power can also shape-shift their form or appearance (loGojaGak) at will. All power received from the jaqa’a beings allow, among other things, this fluidity of forms. A key term that uncovers the will to donate power to humans is hichoGoden (felt pity on me, he blessed).

Close Encounters Close encounters with the Owners starred by many of my Qom interlocutors can illustrate what has been said about the nature and properties of their world and the kind of relationships humans establish with its inhabitants. Almost in all cases the equation looGot (owner)-lamaGashek (subordinate) is apparent, linking the powerful beings usually defined as salliaGanek (rich), on the one hand, and humans, seen as poor and humble in power terms (choGodaq), on the other. As it will be seen throughout the cases, Owners show up before humans, offering them power through a gentle request that replies a kinship tie connecting elders with youngsters, which show the ontological structural asymmetry that connects humans with the powers-that-be in the Qom world. On one occasion, Alberto Ñogochiri, from the La Primavera community, known as “master of snakes” for his skills to tame and catch them harmlessly, also a gifted hunter and musician, told me that his dad had the power of araGanaqlta’a, the Father of the Snakes. And, although he hasn’t asked him any power, his dad willingly wanted to give it to him. After telling it, his dad’s shamanic helper or lowanek told him that Alberto, as a sort of proof, should touch a living yarará.⁹ As he succeeded doing it, the Owner of the Snakes would show himself in dreams. Alberto dreamed about a man who had clothing of color white, green, yellow, brown and trousers made of snake leather, just like a person (shiaGawa). He then spoke to him and said: ’adchoGoden na laqaia, ‘adchoGoden ka qoml’ek, ‘adchoGoden ka doqshil’ek, ‘adchoGoden ka negetolek, ‘adchoGoden ka ‘awal (“you have to help your brother, you have to help the Qom, you have to help the White people, you have to help the children, you have to help your grandchildren”). Since then, Alberto had the power to understand snakes, could communicate with them, and neither could bite him. This power also allowed him to heal snakes’ wounds. After this blessing (hichoGoden), he was blessed also by a powerful being

 Bothrops alternatus.

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from the Field, while he was once hunting in the surroundings of La Primavera. In the solitude of the forest, he started to hear a whistle at a certain distance. As he followed it, he met a man wearing a white poncho like a wealthy farmer, grasping a shining long cane, accompanied by two women. The man asked him: nek ‘amitaike (“what are you looking for?”). Ñieptak (“I’m hunting”), he replied. Then the man continued: hajem lootalek ne’ena mañik, chiaGañigo, qojo, enawak nal’ek ne’enaGa, hajem lamaGashek ñi Dapichi’, hajem eda’ Qadawaik (“I’m watching over the ostrich, the deer, the birds, all the inhabitants of the field, I’m Dapichi’s subordinate, I’m Qadaqaik”). Again, he asked Alberto: what’re you looking for?” To what he replied, “I’m mariscando” (hunting). The two women, who wore colorful dressing, like Qom party girls, told him “we’re shigitaGae” (playful), and he received power to sing and play music.¹⁰ The daylight meeting or nachaGan, with the Owner of the Field and the Owners of playful activities, and the nocturnal one with the Owner of the Snakes, allowed him to become a learned hunter, to control snakes, to be a performer, and to cure the sick bitten by any Ophidian. However, he always was aware of obeying the hunting principle stated by the Owners, by which a hunter avoids killing more than he needs, otherwise either he or some relative could suffer a disease sent by angry Owners. In the same vein, Alejandro Katache, born in Misión Tacaaglé, a conspicuous shaman (ki’oGonaq), would tell me that when he was a young man hunting in the monte, he saw Qadawaik, as a shiaGawa, like a rich White estanciero (farmer) with fancy clothes. From his neck, many animals were hanging, among them a snake. To complete the scenario, he was riding a chiaGañigo(wild deer). Then Qadawaik asked: heiga, na cheaka’ague? (“Hey, what’s up, where ’re you going?”). Alejandro replied: aha, aha, ñiachek, da’aqtaGan qancheta’ague, aha mitaike anoq, nek ‘awetaike taepnek, moGosaGan, mañik, kos, jolo’, dapik tesaGalta’a” (“yeah, yeah, thanks, thanks, I’m looking for my food, I’m looking for armadillo, capybara, pig, tapir, honey”). So, then the Owner said: ne’ena qonoq…hajem shetaike jachoGoden, hajem ‘anem ka hanoik Qadawaik ka nachena ‘am, Qadawaik hajem ‘achoGoden (“The food I’ll look for to help you, I’ll give you some power from Qadawaik, I’m Qadawaik want to bless you”). Afterwards, the Owner went into the monte. Alejandro was bestowed the power to hunt and to heal, a distinction that is almost meaningless for the Qom while any and every power (haloik) received from the Owners, and for that matter, from all jaqa’a beings, implies an ample  Dapichi’ is a powerful being from the sky, who is associated with the Pleiades. During the times of the Qom nomadic bands, it played a key role in the New Year’s renewal of life cycle and was conceived of as the Owner of the Sky (looGot na pigem). See also Alejandro López and Agustina Altman, “The Chaco Skies”.

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range of abilities and skills. In the cases of Alberto and Alejandro, it opened channels of communication with the living beings of the world, and because of that, to be able to have ltaGaiaGawa and the entities known as lowanek. Among the Owners of the terrestrial plane, the most powerful was No’wet, considered the epitome figure from which humans could receive power. He oversaw all living species and atmospheric phenomena of this plane. While his “standard” shape was that of a strange hairy humanoid with red eyes, as we will see later, he could show up under the form of any of his plane’s inhabitants. In this regard, Angel PitaGat, also from MisiónTacaaglé, gave me a detailed account of the way No’wet established ties with the Qom in an amazing drawing. So, he made a black, hairy being with red eyes that was shaking hands with a man, dressed as a hunter. Defined by Angel as the main Owner of all plants and animals of the Forest, Field, and Water, No’wet was calling him to come by. Later, he asked him: heiga iwalolek, nek ’alotaeke (“Hi, my little grandson, what’re you looking for?”). He answered aha da n’achek kone salotaeke ke’eka hanoq qata nshetaeke de’eda jaGachoGoden (“Indeed, I’m looking for a gift, some food and I would like to receive something from you”). Then No’wet “felt pity on him” and shaking hands, lent him haloik. In becoming No’wet’s son, or lamaGashek, he showed him all the species with which he could have a special relationship and understanding (jawan). Indeed, he was shown three snakes, the ostrich, the Field’s man, NwaGanaGanaq (the Owner of Palm Trees), the turtle, the crow, the owl, the tiger, and the armadillo. As it can be noticed in these examples, the Qom world displays for a foreign Western view, elements derived from the abovementioned processes of colonization and evangelization (both Catholic and Protestant). Powerful beings display complex textures, which symbolically condensed this historical experience. The White occupation of the former Qom territories by the National Army, forced nomadic bands to settle down since 1900. New experiences of the richness of White people and the “sophistication” of their cultural goods, embodied in the image of farmers, impacted upon the Qom cultural imagination, as well the new role granted to the figures of God, Jesus, Virgin Mary, Angels, Saints, and the Bible. The Qom pantheon began to be ruled by God, or Qarta’a (Our Father), also called Ñita’a Dios (Our Father God). God ruled as looGot na piguem (Owner of the Sky), while Jesus as His lamaGashek (subordinate), seen as a mighty healer. Priests and pastors were perceived as possessing haloik, which awakened the curiosity and fear of shamans. Despite the introduction of Western ways of life and organization proper of a modern state, the Qom world is traversed by the beings, objects, events, and forces mentioned above and co-inhabiting it in complex and polysemic ways. Moreover, the Qom modernity includes multiple existential registers that apply

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pragmatically depending upon the political, cultural and economic forces in dispute. In relation with this, I was told by my Qom friends interesting and symbolically meaningful analyses of the changes occurred in the world. Indeed, once Tomasa Pérez, the most powerful female shaman I’ve ever known, from Misión Tacaaglé, told me that before the first Whites showed up in the region, No’wet had prevented the Qom, “people are about to come”. Some people heard that No’wet had hidden deep within the forest. Not much later, Whites and the Government appeared. However this situation might be understood, it is apparent that No’wet was not gone for good. Since, at least, the time of the Franciscan Fathers (c.1900), that found Misión Tacaaglé and Misión Laishí in Eastern Formosa province, from the fluid realms of power, new jaqa’a beings started appearing to humans. Non-human beings not only taught the Qom to perform activities such as hunting, gathering, music, or sports. Under the figure of the Owners, they bestowed haloik to fulfill activities related to the colono life. Certainly, No’wet had expanded his worldly appearance. For instance, Qadawaik, mentioned above by Alejandro Katache, looked like a rich farmer, a foreman, a salliaGanek; he controlled all wild animals; sometimes it could appear also as a large whirlwind, allowing him to understand the messages carried by nal’at (the wind). In other contexts, Alejandro named him as Sancharol; at the sound of his voice, all animals would gather around him. He also mentioned the existence of Waloqlta’a (Father of the Cotton), who would appear like a bearded person, always bathing because he was an agricultor (agriculturist). He taught people how to work in the field to have a successful harvest. As mentioned before, No’wet under the appearance of Qadawaik, Sancharol, Ne’enaGal’ek, or HawiaGal’ek, displayed his skills to the Mission’s colonos. It was customary to be “blessed” to play cards, gambling, or being saltante, cosechero, and shigitaGaik. Saltante, which signifies literally, “a robber”, implied skills to enter alien houses to steal goods, or to trespass private property without being detected. Cosechero, a harvester, could carry out his/her job fast and tireless. Ultimately, shigitaGaik could master playful activities, i. e. nmi’ dancing, singing, and being a charming person. Once, old Vicente Segundo from Misión Tacaaglé, told an amazing story. One night an old man was starving and did not know what to eat. When he went to sleep, he dreamed about No’wet, who told him that he had to sow a seed: “tomorrow you’ll find out, I’m going to show it tomorrow, it serves as food”. Next day, following No’wet’s hints, he went to the monte and found pumpkin seeds scattered all over the ground. After collecting them, he left. Soon after he found corn seeds in the field and did the same thing. Then he saw a burning monte; when the field was clean, he sowed as No’wet had indicated. In addition,

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the old man was told: now keep all the seeds very well; when Dapichi’ (the Pleiades) appear in the sky you have to sow. This No’wet was the Sower and Owner of all plants that grow in the field. At one time in Misión Tacaaglé Teresa Benítez and her husband Vicente Tami’ were talking about their hunting experiences in the forest. Our conversation stressed their deep knowledge about plants and animals. Then she recalled an episode that shocked them: she and Vicente would go fishing, and suddenly they saw a woman in the middle of the water. “She had a long hair with a star. It seemed to navigate; a noise [of a motor] was heard. Her head shone. And she didn’t do anything to us; [later] we had a great catch”. They understood their encounter as lucky, because the woman, a non-human being from the “sea”, as they told me, had given an incredible catch; they had received n’achek, a blessing, a gift, a grace.

Final Words The Takshek Qom people of Eastern Formosa province consider that they must articulate with the world to have a normal life. In this sense, they unfold close ties with the world, i. e. “nature” which is a dimension plenty of intentional beings and entities –even what we Westerners regard as “the impersonal forces of nature”.¹¹ These relationships may have manifold readings, because if anything good shows up, it relates to what we regard as the beyond. On the other hand, it seems that from their viewpoint, all can be near or faraway indistinctly. Dimensions of existence show surfaces defined as complex, would-be unexpected, sometimes ominous. But when n’achek (gift, grace, blessing) occurs, usually originated in the Owners, the robust words of natamen (pray) must be said, to be grateful, and to let the circle open for future epiphanies. All my interlocutors

 Due to lack of space, I did not deepen into the current discussions about the so-called Amerindian perspectivism, as labeled by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which for him seems to synthesize a whole different picture of the world vis-à-vis Western naturalism. Based upon Amazonian ethnological research, he would propose a “universal” model applicable to indigenous societies worldwide characterized by animism. In the case of the indigenous cultures of the Chaco region, it seems to have problems to account for their ontological horizon. For an interesting discussion of it, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”; Alejandro López and Agustina Altman, “The Chaco Skies”, 70 – 74; Florencia C. Tola, Yo no estoy solo en mi cuerpo; Pablo Wright, “Perspectivismo amerindio”. For another viewpoint on ontology, see John Palmer, La Buena voluntad wichí.

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mentioned here understood their experience as such. Signs are expected; once occurring, they must be acknowledged. Two situations that consistently appeared in my approach to the Qom world were expressed by the terms n’achek and hichoGoden (it felt pity on me, I was blessed). Both indicate an attitude of humility before any manifestation of the non-human realm that can show up anytime – sometimes auspicious, sometimes ominous. According to the Qom moral standards, humbleness guarantees always that non-humans relate to people in good terms. However, it is the power of the world itself that is ambiguous; thus, many times it depends on how humans dispose of it that confers its moral valence. People are always expecting the arrival of n’achek from the whole world, no matter its sectors. In this regard, it seems that everybody monitors him/herself in relation with the world, reading signs of it or in the experiences of dreaming, vision, and personal encounters. And, relying on what this monitoring process might indicate, they behave accordingly, performing some tasks, avoiding others; moving or resting, and so on and so forth. For, they seem to relativize their categorical imperatives as to how the person/community-world Gestalten appears to evolve now. That is one of the reasons of several misunderstandings about their behavior vis-a-vis the Whites’ own expectations and the bureaucratic way of doing things in a linear and secular conception of time and agency. Because mass media and technological devices are almost the only devices we have at hand “to know what’s going on”, we could hardly be open ones to a different way of coping with/reading the course of events! For the Qom, instead, “the body knows” and informs; so, does the world¹². HichoGoden is usually meant by a person who has been contacted by a nonhuman being and received haloik. The same perspective is found among the members of the Qom churches, whose collective, native name is Evangelio ¹³. A structural nexus between humans and non-humans seems to persist after the evangelization. God’s blessings are n’achek; if “He feels pity on me”, then I can say Dios hichoGoden. For, God acts as the mightiest Owner of all there is. Common words signal analogous experiences despite differences in representation. Nevertheless, this gives room also for incorporating new historical experiences that create novel cognitive-symbolic categories. However, they can only be understood over the wider cultural horizon of the Qom modernity. It is through “blessing” from the non-human level that humans finish or complete their existential make-up. As all of us, they also feel incomplete, but

 Cf. Kenneth Kensinger, “The body knows”.  Pablo Wright, “Being-in-the-dream”, 444– 445.

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not existentially “thrown”; at best, they are naturally “powerless”, an instance they face with circumspection. The Qom regard luck and fortune a gift from non-humans; anything good that happens is due to them and must be acknowledged. Luck in agriculture, hunting, desk work, politics, in the field or in the city, hospitality, friends’ generosity, for instance, is interpreted as n’achek. Humans are never regarded as powerful as the jaqa’a beings. So, there is a structural asymmetry that separates each other. However, human and non-human agencies are tied up dialectically. To sum up, close encounters with the world, as it was shown in this paper, are key life experiences for the Qom. Far from the Western myths of individualism, rational choice theories, nature as disengaged from the human, and secularization, they regard the openness towards the world’s manifestations as essential, both in the bygone days of the ancients and currently. In this sense, if there were a basic Qom existential cipher, it may be pointed out that all that appears to humans, all what presents itself to them, exists. There is no illusion of mind nor false consciousness. Presentation-as-always-true; and presentation-aspower, might be assessed as a Qom philosophy of existence, within which “nature” is the worldly dimension of that potentiality essential for a meaningful human life.

Bibliography Braunstein, José, “Dominios y jerarquías en la cosmovisión de los matacos tewokleley”. Scripta Ethnologica, 2, 2, 1974, 7 – 30. Citro, Silvia, Cuerpos significantes: Travesías de una etnografía dialéctica. Buenos Aires, Editorial Biblos, 2009. Comaroff, John and Jean, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, Westview Press, 1992. Cordeu, Edgardo J., “Aproximación al horizonte mítico de los Tobas”, Runa. Archivo para las Ciencias del Hombre, 12, 1 – 2, 1969 – 70, 67 – 176. Idoyaga Molina, Anatilde, Modos de clasificación en la cultura Pilagá. Buenos Aires, CAEA editorial, 1993. Jackson, Michael, Paths toward a Clearing. Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana Univ. Pr., 1989. Jackson, Michael, Minima Ethnographica. Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. Chicago/London, The Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1998. Kensinger, Kenneth M., “The Body Knows: Cashinahua Perspectives on Knowledge”. Acta Americana 2, 2, 1994, 7 – 14. López, Alejandro M., “Las Señas: una aproximación a las cosmo-políticas de los moqoit del Chaco”, Etnografías Contemporáneas 4, 2017, 92 – 127. López, Alejandro M. and Agustina Altman, “The Chaco Skies. A Socio-cultural History of Power Relations”, Religion and Society: Advances in Research 8, 2017, 62 – 78.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, La Fenomenología y las Ciencias Humanas. Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2011. Miller, Elmer S., Los tobas argentinos. Armonía y Disonancia en una sociedad. México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1979. Palmer, John H., La buena voluntad wichí: Una espiritualidad indígena. Las Lomitas, Grupo de Trabajo Ruta 81, 2005. Stoller, Paul, The Taste of Ethnographic Things. The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1989. Tola, Florencia C., Yo no estoy solo en mi cuerpo: cuerpos-personas múltiples entre los tobas del Chaco argentino. Buenos Aires, Editorial Biblos, 2012. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, “Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4, 3, 1998, 469 – 488. Wright, Pablo, “Being-in-the-dream”. Postcolonial Explorations in Toba Ontology. Ph.D. Dissertation, Temple Univ., 1997. Wright, Pablo, “Perspectivismo amerindio: notas antropológicas desde una crítica postcolonial”. In Religión, Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, edited by Juan Mauricio Renold. Rosario, Editora UNR, 2016, 139 – 150. Wright, Pablo, “’Yo tengo un don’. Hermenéutica y antropología de la religión: entre la escucha y la sospecha de los símbolos”. In Religión: estudios antropológicos sobre sus problemáticas, edited by Juan Mauricio Renold. Buenos Aires, Editorial Biblos, 2015, 65– 85.

Rolando Silla

The Jealous Mountain Range I In Spanish and English language the word nature is related to two main concepts: as something existing beyond what is human and as essence. In the first, nature lacks self-will, it is not capable of creating sense and its reason and development have no connection with what is human; it has its own authentic laws which are homogeneous, universal. To describe, know and control the way these laws work is the scientist’s obsession; to exceed the state of nature is the civilization’s pride. Thus, what is known as the state of nature is opposite (and previous) to the Social Contract. The nature becomes something we need to fight for, and culture should transcend it. As regards the second concept, as essence, nature consists on what is outside or inside us, and so it is what we actually are: our nature. Here, the nature of something is what makes it have a Being, a clear identity, distinct and more importantly stable. The being opposite to nature is outrageous. As social scientists, we do not feel comfortable with either of these concepts. On one hand, we are always worried about not being trapped in essentialist conceptualizations; so we state that an essence of humanity may not exist. As nature that is out there, we consider it real but we do not feel responsible for it, since it may only concern the scientist coming from the natural sciences. If we study the nature, we just study what we consider its subjective human aspect: How do the different groups – embedded in culture – represent nature? As expressed by Bruno Latour¹, many cultures (having varied levels of perception of reality regarding science while all of them are respectable and tolerant, and this shows certain paternalism), only one nature (the one established by the western science). Both positivism and relativism would have the same key parameter, and so we run the risk of stating there is a real nature (the scientist’s) and a merely representational one (the others’). In this article, I would like to express the way I deal with nature. Something strange, since it is supposed that as an anthropologist I should know about society or culture rather than nature. Knowing about nature implies, in the current field of anthropology, certain disbelief upon biologism. It results from the fact that anthropologists have a relationship of double bind with natural sciences,  Cf. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-016

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as we are used to either being servile or denying it. We tend to think that natural sciences develop better theories and conceptualizations based on a strict methodology. In such a way, some colleagues take a subordinate position trying to imitate it, and many times even admitting that they will never be like them. Paraphrasing Dipesh Chakrabarty², natural sciences turn out to be hyperreal for us. The other alternative is to deny it, and it is possible to even state unquestioningly that, for example, there is no connection between what is organic and the linguistic capacity, and that absolutely everything regarding the human being has a cultural or social origin. There is no doubt that who work with human beings have a main problem: subjectivities. There is no objective and measurable basis to understand, for example, the feeling and certainty of a shepherd living in the mountain range of Neuquén that he has been possessed by the devil. And what is even worse: this ‘belief’ is not neutral, it affects his daily life and that of his environment. It produces events. The reference to the symbolic aspect and its effectiveness helped us understand these types of phenomena. But, at the same time, we have forgotten the matter; not only the world’s matter but also our body’s, and we categorically consider nature and culture, mind and body to be opposite. The reality of the human aspect – regarding the human mind, its desires, its fantasies – would be unlike the reality of science, since it can understand the human aspect considering its anatomy, physiology, and especially today, its genetic code. Moreover, they would not be symmetrical realities because the first is subjective (and quite false) and the second, objective (thus, real). Hence, we establish a very important principle, both in the social sciences and the natural sciences: that what is real exists outside the society and the human aspect. There is no doubt that this original division let us develop our field autonomy, to think of a specific subject, the social one and the cultural one, but it also prevented us from debating about the rest of the science.

II My career as an anthropologist started in 1995. I needed to write an academic degree thesis, I was affected by a personal issue and I had received Rosana Guber’s advice, with whom I had worked for many years. For these reasons, I decided to leave Buenos Aires and travel to Zapala city in the province of Neuquén to do a brief field research about the relationship between citizens and military officers. There, I was astonished, as I perceived that the civilians used to speak

 Cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 27.

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about ghosts, dinosaurs, UFOs and witchcraft rather than about something so relevant to me: their relations with the officers in a context of boundaries tensions between Argentina and Chile and our ‘democratic awaking’. Another aspect that called my attention was that, although I was staying in a city, the presence of Mapuches was significant – I thought they lived in the rural areas. I found that many people were related to this ethnic group and there were a lot of life experiences told by people who were not indigenous; they were about entities whose origin is traditionally considered by specialized literature to come from the Mapuches. So, was Zapala a modern city? Did I have to analyze it through the parameters of sociology considering concepts such as State, civil society, social class, the theory of conflict, etc.? Or was it traditional so I had to use a holistic approach that is typical of anthropology? A long time later, I found that Latour said something I regret not mentioning before: “The modern project [as opposite to tradition and to what is not considered western] can only be sustained by those who refrain from doing any empirical research”.³ Then, between 1996 and 1997, I worked for an oil company (YPF S.A.), for which I had to assess the damages caused by oil drilling operations in the Mapuches community of Painemil. This community is located, like Zapala, in the Patagonian plateau of the province. In this occasion, my field research took about five months distributed in different seasons of the year so that we were able to see the annual breeding cycle. At that very moment, the concept of nature started to become a relevant question to me. Simply because the environment was not considered uniformly by the Mapuches, the technicians and managers from YPF, or even those who were supposed to defend the Mapuches’ interests. Much of what represented the environment or nature to these people meant culture to the Mapuches. Among other damages, the drilling had caused the extinction of the choike (rhea). Moreover, one of the aspects considered by the Mapuches as part of their culture was hunting (by means of using boleadoras, not firearms) these animals to use their meat and other parts for different purposes. Was it possible to separate the choike, as something whose origin was in nature, from the Mapuches’ (cultural) activities? Was this division useful to understand the situation? Was it better to analyze previously whether there was a local distinction between nature and culture? If so, where did it go through? How did it work? But that was not the end of my questioning. On one hand, it was confusing if there existed the same type of division between nature and culture, and on the other, I did not know the relevance of that aspect that we call supernatural; we

 Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, 60.

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are used to considering it as symbolic, related to representations and part of the culture. What I discovered at that moment from experience, and I started to conceptualize years later, was that the Painemil ‘believed’ in certain entities, but these were not always perceived by everybody. One night in the house of Lonko Maximino Painemil, while we were having dinner outdoor next to the fire, the people who were there heard a noise that I was not sure of having heard: ‘Who is laughing?’ Tránsito asked. He was one of Maximino’s sons in law. They started to make jokes about the possible author. Elisa, Tránsito’s wife, said it must have been Luis, a neighbor. The others said it can’t have been him. I am not sure if they also said that I was to blame as well. I had just arrived from Añelo, the nearest town, on foot at night. In one of the research papers I had read about the Mapuches it was written that the witches come at night. I never asked the Painemils about it, nevertheless, it worried me. Over the conversation, Tránsito told me that I could take a shorter way that leads to Añelo. I did not know whether it meant they were just giving me directions to go faster or something else I did not understand. I answered that I knew it, but in order to take that shortcut I should cross the river, there was no bridge and I had no intentions to walk in the freezing water. They answered that the river level was low. Then, Tránsito said: ‘the old woman crosses the river and her legs don’t get wet’. Then, when we finished having dinner, they took some musical instruments and started playing and singing. Suddenly, while Tránsito was playing the guitar, he took a look behind. I did not know why because I had heard absolutely nothing. ‘Now, you got scared!’ Another daughter of Maximino’s said. He replied that the noise came from a flock of sheep. Then, they stopped making jokes, but some of them were still laughing. Tránsito asked Tito, a Maximino’s peasant employee, if he remembered that in El Manzanar, where they had worked on the fruit-and-vegetable growing activity, there was an old man known as a quite ‘cushe’ (witch). He recalled that one night he had gone to see him and found him covered with a blanket and without his ‘lonko’ (head). ‘Don’t be silly!’ said one of Maximino’s daughters, laughing. ‘And what was his head doing?’ The conversation ended quite abruptly and we all went to sleep. They never mentioned that topic again in front of me.

Some years later, somewhere else in Neuquén, in a rural area but not indigenous, while I was talking with María about witchcraft, I told her what had happened in the Painemil’s community. I told her they had heard the ‘tue tue’, but I had not. By means of an almost ethnological consideration, she answered that to be able to hear it, as she could, I had to live there for some time, approximately a year. Furthermore, Daniel, a teacher who was born in Buenos Aires but has been living for a long time in a rural area of the province, and was very little interested in witchcraft but was a fan of ornithology, tried to give me a naturalist explanation to the situation by telling me that maybe the ‘chonchon’ or ‘tue tue’ in fact

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was the chucho or caburé, a diurnal bird seen in autumn or in winter. We saw one standing on a poplar branch at the beginning of May. The caburé is unusual for having the eyes drawn in its nape, so it is difficult to know if he is really looking at you. Zoology consider it from the family of the Glaucidium.⁴ Thus, taking into account what I learnt from the inhabitants of the area, I reached two absolutely different interpretations of the fact. The fact itself took place. But there was something else: I had heard nothing, but they did hear it. So, what should an entity like the ‘tue tue’ be associated with? Technically, it was part of the symbolic world, the one connected to representations. But practically, it had a sensitive side: at least, some people heard it. It seemed to be part of the environment. These reflections made me rethink many of my statements regarding religion, beliefs and supernatural issues. In my collected data, and not only among indigenous people or rural communities, but also in urban areas as Zapala, there appeared a series of entities and phenomena that were not related to what could be defined as religion, neither in an institutional sense nor as a field completely separated from the natural world, the environment. Then, I was determined to make a description respecting the distribution of the native world itself and not thinking that what I know is ‘natural and real’ and what I do not know, ‘supernatural’ in connection with beliefs and therefore false or true just in its symbolic effectiveness. Without supposing that the western and modern world is divided into different spheres and the others’ world (Mapuches or shepherds labeled as not western and traditional) would be a whole, a unity between culture and nature, among political, financial and religious spheres. I started to think of the possibility of different types of ontologies and epistemologies, words stolen from the philosophers’ crystal box to assess them in the social sciences field, especially anthropology. Exactly as stated by authors like Gregory Bateson, the beliefs that people have about the kind of world where they live will determine the way they see it and behave in it, and their ways of perceiving and behaving will determine their beliefs about its nature.⁵ Hence, their epistemological and ontological assumptions become self-validating. It is necessary to explain what ‘represents data’ for these people, what they consider to be typical of human beings and what is seen as ‘built’ or artificial, and so belonging to the sphere of people’s action and responsibility. By doing so, there would not exist particular or universal cultures, or a universal nature, but ‘natures-cultures’; these are the only possible basis for comparisons. They are alike because they all form, at the same time, divine and not human

 Cf. Tino Narosly and Yzurieta, Guía para la identificación, 145.  Cf. Gregory Bateson, Stepts to an Ecology or Mind, 344.

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persons, and none of them live in a world of symbols that are arbitrarily imposed. All of them make a distinction between what will have to be a group of symbols and what will not have to be it.⁶ Actually, entities like the ‘tue tue’ would be contradictory regarding reality or symbolism, rather than being part of them, since even the inhabitants are not completely sure of their existence and powers. In Neuquén, nobody doubts about the existence of a goat or a horse, but they do it when referring to the existence of witches, the UFOs or the real power of saints. The Mapuches and shepherds from Neuquén are relativistic, as Otavio Velho says: “relativism would not be just an academic stance if its meaning was interpreted by the typical social actors and many of the beliefs found did not have the apparent strength”.⁷ In opposition to what is stated by authors like Alfred Schütz⁸, we will analyze later that people do not always stop doubting in their lifetime.

III It has been a permanent attempt of phenomenology to have essence and existence joined together again, according to the principle that states it is only possible to understand humanity and the world through facts. To Maurice MerleauPonty, we have always existed together with the world, before reflecting; therefore, we should have that naive contact with the world again, considering the challenge to develop an exact science but worried about the world lived rather than the objective world. If I can talk about dreams and reality, if I wonder about imaginary things and real ones, and doubt about reality, it means that this distinction has been made by me before the analysis. These actions mean that I have a previous and vivid experience about what is real and imaginary.⁹ Therefore, there might be a human being in the world, inserted and launched to it, rather than someone discovering the world. Perception is not the capacity of the human being to discover through a process of trial and error what exists outside himself, but the background where all the acts are highlighted and which all the acts presuppose. So, the world is not, for example, what the inhabitants of Neuquén (Mapuches or peasants) think, but what they live. Although we are ‘open to the world’ and we communicate with it, it does not belong to us be-

   

Cf. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Otavio Velho, Besta Fera, 176. Cf. Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers, 146. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, 16.

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cause it is endless.¹⁰ This is the reason why my informants, open to a world and lifestyle different to mine, could see and hear things that I could not. As the world unity, theirs and mine as well, is formed before being formulated by knowledge and in an expressed act of identification, it is lived as if it had already been done; this is the reason why I found it difficult to appreciate entities like the ‘tue tue’. If we recognize the conscience itself as a world project, destined to a world that it neither embraces nor possesses completely, but toward it is always directed¹¹, we could consider María’s opinion: I could not hear the tue-tue as they were able to because somehow, I did not take part of their world of life. So, we could state that to perceive an object or event is to feel what it provides, and there is no limit a priori to what can be perceived. While we are living, we can see and discover new things in the world; so I might, one day, perceive the entities from Neuquén. According to Tim Ingold’s words, we could say that we learn to perceive a culture appropriately, not by means of getting programs or conceptual frameworks of sensory data organization in a high order of representations, but for doing successful activities daily that imply knowing and responding constantly to the environment aspects. To learn means the education of attention rather than the transmission of information. This cannot be separated from the person’s life in the world and, in theory, it could last a lifetime.¹² In this way, Maria’s suggestion – to live for a long time there – could have let me learn to perceive their world of life, similarly to the way they do it, as a ‘positioned subject’. ¹³ Nevertheless, we should take into account that the ability to perceive or not a ‘cultural object’ of this kind – an experience manifestation through which the natives consider themselves as objects¹⁴ – is not the result of just belonging or not to a certain culture world of life. The transcendent character of certain objects is given by the fact that not everybody can perceive it, either being part of the natives’ cultural world or not. Both María and her husband said that in the river there was an alive piece of leather which could move along the river, ‘grab’ a careless person and make him drown. She had seen it, but her husband did not manage to, although he had spent long hours waiting where other people said it used to appear. The simple ‘acculturation’ mentioned by Carol Laderman¹⁵ to be part of these perceptions might not be enough or a

     

Cf. Ibid., 16. Cf. Ibid., 17. Cf. Tim Ingold, The perception of the environment, 166. Cf. Robert R. Desjarlais, Body and Emotion, 24. Cf. Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm”, 15. Cf. Carol Ladermann, “The Embodiment of Symbols”, 192.

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necessary condition, as these entities do not belong to either believing or having certainty, but to doubting. For this same reason, in many occasions, these stranger’s perceptions precisely confirm, through certain cultural intersubjectivity, the exceptional objects. While I was staying in Zapala, I had to visit a military regiment located at a few kilometers from the city in a small town. It was 5:30 pm and the streets were empty. As I had to wait there until the time to enter the garrison, I stayed in the park where there was only a rental car in a corner. You could just hear the background sound made by the trees leaves moved by the wind. Suddenly, a boy came to me and asked for money. I gave him some coins, and he stayed talking to me. His way of expressing was different to that of an urban person, even to one from Zapala. His language was Spanish, but his way of structuring the phrases was not like mine. His spatiality was also different. He was standing so close to me that I thought he was violating my space. He touched my jacket and my bag asking what I needed them for. Someone might have thought he wanted to rob me, but apparently it was not his intention. In my thoughts, I related it with a family I had seen a few days ago in Zapala, as the three members of the group, who were outside an office waiting to meet the mayor, were too much close to one another. I felt uncomfortable, so I left toward the garrison although it was still very early for the interview. Once I was back in Zapala, I told Susana, one of my informants from the city, how strange I had found that small town. She was a kindergarten teacher and could be considered from the urban middle class. She immediately answered it was due to the fact that the place was the male witches’ area, the ones who work for the evil. Then, I told her about the boy from the park. She told me that the kid might be quite insane. I had thought about it as well, but I said I simply considered it to be related to another way of communicating, since it belonged to a rural culture, different to mine. She did not agree and tried to calm me down saying that the male witches would not do any harm to me for having visited the town only once. That was the end of the conversation, but from that day on, Susana’s relatives used to ask me what I thought about that town. Undoubtedly, my perception of it as a strange town was interpreted as a sign proving that there lived the witches. The stranger’s perception, mine, was another proof of the event they doubted. Precisely, the natives know that a stranger do not share their beliefs, their culture, they know that his embodiment is not like theirs. Therefore, why and how did he feel that something strange was happening?

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IV Tim Ingold states that the inhabited world does not contain objects but things. This position, originally supported by Martin Heidegger, considers that the thing is not formed material; thus, for example, a tree is not an object, but a certain concurrence of living strands: “a parliament of lines”¹⁶. If we want to study our participation and all the things that are contained in the world-life, we cannot reduce it to a model or freeze it in time, since we are always in a process of evolution. The world, thus, is not finished. Everything (human beings, animals, plants, rocks, cars, etc.) is immersed in this world, it is in permanent development and has different dynamics. Consequently, there is the issue of the entities agency inhabiting the world and how to address it without having animist and vitalist positions. Ingold states that the things forms are not imposed from outside on a substrate of inert material, but they are constantly generated and dissolved in the streams of the material through the interface between the substances and the means surrounding them. Therefore, the things are active not for being imbued with agency, but because of the way they are trapped in these streams of the world of life.¹⁷ According to this view, anthropology is not just the study of what is human, but the study of the relations between the human and the non-human throughout lifetime (although Ingold does not like this category because he finds it too generic). I think that Ingold’s position is more related to the point of view of whom are inserted not only in a social relations web, but also in the environment, shared by human beings and other things as well, like the tue-tue, the living piece of leather or a mountain range. ‘Today there are strong winds and a very cold weather’. Etelvina said. Then, she told me the people were saying that the climate was harsh because a boy was lost in the mountain range. The Police and Gendarmerie were still looking for him. She explained that there was bad weather when the Chileans crossed the mountains or when someone climbed the Domuyo, the highest hill of the region. I told her that when I lived in the Painemil community, in the Patagonian plateau, from there I could see the Auca Mahuida, a very jealous hill. It was said that if it was climbed by people from somewhere else, it might cause terrible storms and heavy snowfalls. Etelvina did not agree; she said that it was believed – they were not sure – the terrible weather happened when any person crossed, no matter whether he was native or not. Then, this belief was confirmed by her husband. In Zapala, I had also heard about the mountain range’s jealousy, but they explained that by the end of February, when autumn started, the shepherds went down from their veranada (taking the animals to the high summer grazing grounds) in the mountain range. This was the

 Tim Ingold, “Bringing Things to Life”, 4.  Cf. Tim Ingold, “Materials against materiality”.

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reason why the mountain got furious and caused the heavy winds and cold. ‘The mountain range is jealous, it doesn’t want them to leave’, they said.

The latest research work on historiography and anthropology over the ArgentineChilean boundaries has emphasized that, whereas to both countries, the Andes mountain range was considered a natural international boundary, to the mountain settlers from both sides, it has been for centuries the centre of economic and cultural relations rather than a boundary or a barrier. It should also be considered that, to the settlers, the mountain range has feelings as well, and they are related to how the area is used by natives or strangers. Therefore, we could reconsider the political aspects and the question of power in connection with the notion of nature. To feel provides an experience through which we receive active properties rather than dead qualities. It is the quality of a vital value, its significance is firstly understood for us, for our bodies.¹⁸ The mountain range – objectively inert and dead: the Andes mountain range, the Domuyo, the Auca Mahuida and other mountains, rivers and lakes – Is to the settlers something active, it is not available or is just raw material; it can be given feelings like being jealous of the strangers, getting angry, creating storms and taking people’s lives, as it happened to the lost boy who was found dead a few days later. Now, considering my dialogue with Etelvina again, we will see that her world is not radically far away from mine. It is totally the opposite as she thinks she knows my own values. For this reason, she denied thinking that the mountain range is jealous; when she uttered ‘it is said’, she wanted to get closer to my world, as I was a university man from Buenos Aires. While feeling vulnerable, she did not want me to consider her ‘ignorant’ or ‘superstitious’, so she easily passed from one kind of classification of the world to another. So, what is called as ‘cosmologies’ or ‘representations’ by anthropologists like me is known as ‘world-life’ by the people we study. The important thing here is not that we are naturalist, and we think the mountain range is inert whereas the shepherds and Mapuches are animist and they think the mountain range has will and so it ‘has agency’, but the real thing is that what both conceptions state are ways of explaining the materials flow and that life is not in the things, but the things are in the stream of life.¹⁹ As human beings, we move, feel happy or get angry, and the mountain range, although is not human, is not completely inert; it is necessary for whom lives there or needs to cross it to be aware of its movements and

 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, 73.  Cf. Tim Ingold, “Materials against materiality”.

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development, otherwise he, for example, could die frozen beneath one of its storms.

Bibliography Bateson, Gregory, Stepts to an Ecology or Mind. Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale/New Jersey/London, Jason Aronson Inc., 1972. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008. Csordas, Thomas J., “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology”, Ethos 18 – 1, 1990, 5 – 47. Desjarlais, Robert R., Body and Emotion. The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Ingold, Tim, “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials”, Realities. Working Paper 15, 2010, 1 – 14. Ingold, Tim, “Materials against materiality”, Archaeological Dialogues 14 – 1, 2007, 1 – 16. Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London/New York, Routledge, 2000. Laderman, Carol, “The Embodiment of Symbols and the Acculturation of the Anthropologist”. In Embodiment and Experience. The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, edited by Thomas Csordas. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 241 – 262. Latour, Bruno, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris, Gallimard, 1945. Narosky, Tino and Dario Yzurieta, Guía para la identificación de las aves de Argentina y Uruguay. Buenos Aires, Vázquez Mazzini, ²1993. Schütz, Alfred, Collected Papers, vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. Velho, Otávio, Besta Fera: recriação do mundo. Rio de Janeiro, Relume-Dumará, 1995.

About the Authors D’Acunto, Nicolangelo Storia Medievale Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Brescia, Italy Di Sanza, Silvia del Luján Philosophy Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Fernández, Jorge Eduardo Philosophy Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Göbel, Barbara Social and Cultural Anthropology Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin, Germany Heymann, Matthias History of Technology and Environment Aarhus Universitet Aarhus, Danmark López, Cristina Philosophy Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Melville, Gert Medieval History Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Germany Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert Sociology Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Germany

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110579765-017

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About the Authors

Ruta, Carlos Rafael Philosophy Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Scavino, Dardo Philosophy, Latin American Studies Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour Pau, France Silla, Rolando Anthropology Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Vara, Ana María Science and Technology Studies Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Weigand, Rudolf Kilian Medieval German Literature Katholische Universität Eichstätt Eichstätt, Germany Wilde, Guillermo Anthropology CONICET/Universidad Nacional de San Martín Buenos Aires, Argentina Wright, Pablo Anthropology CONICET/Universidad de Buenos Aires Buebos Aires, Argentina