Page 107 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

environmentalists’ prescription exact unacceptable tolls on human beings... (1997,
p. 5)

Wenz continues to argue that traditional gatherers endow nature with divine qualities and ‘are

more reverential than exploitative’, thus resembling what many environmentalists advocate

(Wenz 1997, p. 8). Wenz’s argument seems a retort to Garrett Hardin’s 1968 infamous essay

The Tragedy of the Commons, wherein Hardin argues that each individual, acting in his/her

own interest will not act for the good of the whole in relation to common resources unless

constrained. Wenz’s argument may well be a response to the Romantic tradition of protecting

a pristine nature against the destructive forces of the human, but it also espouses notions of

Romanticism and Essentialism in the description of indigenous connections to the

environment.

In the 1990s Gísli Pálsson and Phillipe Descola (1996, pp. 1-2) raised several

important questions regarding alternative models to a nature/culture binary.

Do non-western cultures offer alternative models for rethinking universality and
the issue of moral attitudes towards non-humans? Will the blurring of the nature-
culture opposition in certain sectors of contemporary science imply a redefinition
of traditional western cosmological and ontological categories? And, finally,
would the theoretical rejection of the nature-culture dualism merely signify a
return to the “ecological” concepts of the early medieval European world or would
it, perhaps, set the stage for a new kind of ecological anthropology?

For Descola the process of addressing these questions starts with recognition of current

ecological models. He argues that throughout the world there are four modes of

identification: animist, totemist, analogical and naturalism. These modes ‘define the

boundaries between self and otherness as expressed in the treatment of humans and non-

humans’ and give form to specific cosmologies (Descola 1996, p. 87). For Descola, Western

cosmology exemplifies naturalism as a mode of identification and commonsense making (p.

88). It structures:

95