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Toward a Multicultural Ecology

University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh

The debate between realists and constructivists has polarized environmental scholarship in recent years. Situating this debate within the longstanding modernist tradition of categorically distinguishing "nature" from "culture," and the natural sciences from the social sciences and humanities, this article suggests that we need to find a non-dualistic space for rethinking cultural-ecological relations. Such a space has been articulated by actor-network theory (ANT), but this theory leaves significant gaps in its understanding of agency and of macro forces. To fill in these gaps, the author draws on perspectives that theorize perception and agency as embodied, animate, and ecologically embedded and that theorize macro forces as discursively shaped and causally multidirectional and multiscalar. The author proposes the concept of multicultural ecology as a way of articulating the indivisibility of nature and culture and the multiplicity of cultural-ecological practices, and suggests a normative dimension by which such practices can be compared and evaluated.

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