Book Review

Brownlash extremists and Texan Bush-men excluded, there is nowadays not much opposition to the idea that nature is something we need to care about. Environmentalism, only decades ago also a form of extremism, has become mainstream. However, its interpretation in practice is still contested. In Negotiating Nature, Alf Hornborg, professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden, and Gísli Pálsson, professor at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, have assembled a largely Scandinavian group of contributors to discuss the ongoing social practices vis à vis nature. Their common point of departure is that nature is today a partner in that discussion to a hitherto unknown extent. As Maarten Hajer claimed in The Politics of Environmental Discourse (Oxford, 1994) there is an "ecological modernization" making its way into the policy process. With their disciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, ethnology, and human ecology, the contributors to this volume do not wrestle too closely with the policy process. Rather the essays of this book center on different cultural manifestations of this ever-more politicized nature.

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The discussions among nature's users and practitioners, much neglected in neoclassical economic analysis, is quite relevant for a cultural analysis of the environment. Thus, the book purports to be as much about ecological argument as about culture, but it also raises the question about how environmental argument is embedded in culture. "Culture," with a capital C, has in anthropological discourse sometimes been equated with the Weltanschaung of an Ethnos. Here, we are made aware that this very general level of analysis is rarely relevant. Tim Ingold, in a concluding commentary, relates how Andrew P. Vayda's classic of human ecology, Environment and Cultural Behavior (Natural History Press, 1969), discussed non-Western (but not Western) societies as having had their cultures somehow shaped by their environment, thus making nature a prime factor in essentializing culture. Those were the days of seeing a strong, one-directional ecological influence on (pre-modern) human affairs.

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