Geography - William’s Ideas of Nature

Ideas of Nature – Williams

• Gendering in terms of how different personifications assume different genders; those different genders get associated with positive/negative, violent/non-violent characteristics  

William’s Ideas of Nature:

• Idea of nature, and nature itself – is there a difference?
• In a sense, this is a question of what historical sociologists have synthesized as two separate ontologies or experiences of reality, although they are perhaps not that separate

• Realism on one hand, construcitism on another hand
• Realism – physically defined and testable world; gender or sexuality as biology
• Constructissm – multiple or infinite worlds that you define practically; includes discursive worlds or effects – gender/sexuality or race as experientially produced

• Williams argument is different

• Suggests that ideas, especially ideas of nature, are both real and constructed

Point 1: Ideas are historically determined. Just as there were conservative ideas of nature, there were also

These ideas were partial and unstable, and revealed circumstances and interests of those who made them.

Burke – imagines a natural law of imagining society as hierarchy

Roseau – nature is a state of complete freedom and equality

radical diggers – common property is more natural than other property

Point 2: These ideas also made the world in substantially different ways.

• Williams is not saying ideas are changing over same
• Ideas were never just simply true as nature itself
• Williams is suggesting something different, which goes beyond simple positions defined by realism or constructism

• Ideas are part of the world
• Ideas, such as ideas of nature, have history and that history (unlike evolution or burkes theory of society) is not tended towards perfection – history is complex and open to different possibilities
• Ideas of nature reflect production of different worlds

• some OF Which are historically and geographically simultaneous

• Not important which ideas of nature are true, but rather how they are true and what are the effects of that

Point 3: Ideas of nature is wild and separate from human beings and actions corresponds to capitalism and imperialism

• Wild nature produced real historical effects but also produced the natural observer, Man
• Man is outside of nature and capable of rational observation
• Wild nature produced a hierarchy of geographies and human beings

Williams is grappling with the historical question of what is nature. How has nature been produced/made? This is what Williams means when he says idea of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history. Does this apply only to idea of nature or nature itself?

Like Williams, let us consider these questions historically. What is the practice of geography? What is it that geographers do?

• The images portrayed us are certain ideas of nature (images of women)
• This vocabulary pertains to a 19th century practice of geography implies the singular and geographically defined people – people having an intrinsic relationship to their geography
• Colonial and imperial origins in sense of pertinence of empire and project of colonializations of these geographical documents

Do these documents tell us something about the way these practices came to being as they are? Practices of which Williams natural observer started to describe the natural world? Do these documents describe the world as is or are they themselves involved in the production of certain type of worlds? In thinking about these origins, in thinking about this particular history, we might pay particular attention to the soldiers in the image he showed us or to these images in the particular constructions of gender/race and returning to Williams, we might say, in proposing  away of thinking ideas of nature, also proposing a way to think about nature itself.

“Idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.”

• If the idea changes, as Williams suggests it does, does the thing itself change?

• We will think about how reading/writing work – what work do we do while reading/writing? That is, what is knowledge? What sorts of natures does knowledge produce?

“Nature has a nominal continuity, over many centuries, but can be seen, in analysis, to be both complicated and changing, as other ideas and experiences change”

CRUX OF WILLIAMS ARGUMENT

“What matters in them is not the proper meaning but the history and complexity of meanings: the conscious changes, or consciously different uses: and just as often those changes and differences which, masked by a nominal continuity, come to express radically different nd often at first unnoticed in experience and history”

“I want to try to indicate some of the main points, the general outlines, of such analysis, and to see what effects these may have on some of our contemporary arguments and concerns”

• What matters is not so much the proper meaning, but the complexity and construction of the meanings
• Suspect that the rest of the essay is to demonstrate this claim
• Be aware of the intent – why is this claim important to Williams? What are these contemporary arguments and concerns that we want to indicate about ideas of nature and complexity of meanings invested in the word nature mean for contemporary arguments and concerns? What are these contemporary arguments and concerns that Williams refer to?

• They refer to contemporary concern of “physical crisis of our world” (pg70)
• The way this situation/crisis is framed might be impeding our understanding of the situation – what does it mean to read this essay today? What does it mean to think about a physical crisis of our world that is very different from when Williams wrote this?
• Let us call attention to how we are reading more generally – what are these words/ideas and how do they make different worlds?
• This is just a reading of nature, but not THE reading of nature.

Political effectiveness of words/images/texts – Syed implies that Williams ideas of nature (orient) have effects in the world and that these effects are not separate, but entangled with other forms of human activity such as empire and colonization. This is one example of what Donna Haraway of worlds making worlds – counterpoint of realist’s insistence of singular world, while having a double sense of scientifically observed truth and geo-political order (justice)