After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology
Author(s)
Escobar, Arturo
Abstract
This paper presents the outline of an anthropological political ecology that fully acknowledges the constructedness of nature while suggesting steps to weave together the cultural and the biological on constructivist grounds. From tropical rain forests to advanced biotechnology laboratories, the resources for inventing natures and cultures are unevenly distributed. The paper proposes an antiessentialist framework for investigating the manifold forms that the natural takes in today’s world. This proposal builds on current trends in ecological anthropology, political ecology, and social and cultural studies of science and technology. The resulting framework identifies and conceptualizes three distinct but interrelated nature regimes–organic, capitalist, and techno–and sketches their characteristics, their articulations, and their contradictions. The political implications of the analysis are discussed in terms of the strategies of hybrid natures that most social groups seem to be faced with as they encounter, and try to stem, particular manifestations of the environmental crisis.
