Cultural Geography

only in its naming and categorizing of the world,

but also in the way that the label ‘science’ dis-

misses other knowledges as inferior or primitive.

Science judges itself on its own terms, proclaims

itself superior and legitimates its behaviour from

within the hall of mirrors.

The characteristics of being able to con-

sciously reason, be rational, and have intent and

purpose have been the most pervasive attributes

used to externalize society from nature, human

from animal and even man from woman

(Passmore, 1995; Plumwood, 1995). In review-

ing Eurocentric attitudes towards nature and

animals, Passmore (1995: 136) identifies two

leading traditions in ‘modern Western thought’:

• One is Cartesian in inspiration, where matter
  (including nature and animals) is inert and
  passive, and has no inherent powers of resis-
  tance or agency, and humans relate to it in
  order to reshape and reform it.


• The other is Hegelian, where the human’s task
  is to actualize nature and animals through
  art, science, philosophy and technology so
  that nature can be converted into something
  with which humans can feel ‘at home’
  and not as something from which they are
  alienated.

Although some contemporary philosophers chal-

lenge the hierarchical separation of humans and

nature, they often fail to get beyond their own

epistemological mirrors. For example, in contrast

to the relationship encompassed in the Dreaming,

Passmore writes:

No doubt, men, plants, animals, the biosphere form

parts of a single community in the ecological sense of

the word: each is dependent upon the others for its con-

tinued existence. But this is not the sense of community

which generates rights, duties, obligations; men and

animals are not involved in a network of responsibilities

or a network of mutual concessions. (1995: 140, our

emphasis)

Eurocentric discourses not only classify animals

as a part of nature, but also distinguish between

categories of wild and domestic or tame:

And the man gave names to the cattle and to the birds

of the sky and to all the wild beasts: Genesis 2: 19, 20.

(Plaut et al., 1981: 30)

Such categories are easily naturalized in

Eurocentric discourse, but they are better under-

stood as reflecting Eurocentric assumptions

about evolution and progress (Usher, 1995: 203).

Linear notions of progress and development see

humans progressing from a state of hunter-gatherer

through that of pastoralist to the pinnacle of

achievement as agriculturalists. Taming and

domesticating wild nature and animals –

civilization – is seen as a progression towards

more developed forms of society, away from a

primitive, wild existence as hunter-gatherers.

The opposition of civilized to primitive ascribes

characteristics of wild, untamed nature and ani-

mals to societies and people. This version of

Eurocentrism justified exhibition of humans in

‘wild’ animal exhibits in some nineteenth-

century zoos (Anderson, 1995: 292). Even in the

1950s, a wildlife refuge was created in Botswana

(the Central Kalahari Game Reserve) to contain

not only wild animals, but also wild Bushmen

(Wilmsen, 1995: 222)!

More recently, positive notions of wild and

wilderness as an escape, spiritual space and true

research domain (or of noble savage as original

conservationist or keeper of solutions) romanti-

cize an illusion of a wild based on originality and

authenticity, prior to and external from human

control and interference. Experiences of removals,

evictions, interventions, control and management

are silenced and ignored. Langton (1998: 9)

discusses the way Aboriginal people and their

land management traditions have been rendered

invisible by the application of notions of wilder-

ness to Australian landscapes. She refers to this

as a ‘science fiction’ that, like the legal fiction

of terra nullius(Australia seen as unoccupied

land in Eurocentric Australian law) arises from

‘the assumption of superiority of Western knowl-

edge over indigenous knowledge systems’

(1998: 18).

The nature/culture binary, however, is not uni-

versally acknowledged in human thinking. There

are multiple, shifting ways of organizing human

experience. Christie, for example, reflects on the

task of learning Yolngu-matha, the Aboriginal

language of north-east Arnhem Land in

Australia:

I failed as I struggled mentally to arrange all Yolngu-

matha names into a hierarchy. I assumed, for example,

that the distinction between ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ is a

‘natural’ one, an ontological distinction, a reality quite

independent of human attempts to make sense of the

world. But there is no Yolngu-matha word for either

‘plant’ or ‘animal’. (1992: 5)

Similarly, Scott contrasts the embedded and

naturalized ‘Cartesian myths of the dualities

of mind–body, culture–nature’ with Cree

epistemologies:

In Cree, there is no word corresponding to our term

‘nature’. There is a word pimaatisiiwin(life), which

includes human as well as animal ‘persons’. The word

for ‘person’, iiyiyuu, can itself be glossed as ‘he lives’.

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