Mother Nature / Human Nature: An Environmental Anthropology Drawing on Christian Thought, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism
Author(s)
Roach, Catherine M.
Abstract
Ecological degradation is a crucial contemporary problem. One response is the rapidly growing, humanities-based field of environmental thought. My task here is a sympathetic critique of this field and a contribution toward new directions in it. My central argument is that human relations shape how we represent and value nature. We need to focus more closely on what it means to be human and to be human-in-nature (on questions of “environmental anthropology”) in order to understand and heal relations to nature. I argue that central patterns of response to nature are shaped unconsciously and are ambivalent and gendered. I illustrate this tripartite environmental anthropology with analysis of Mother Nature imagery from contemporary popular culture. The dissertation draws on complementary insights in traditions of Christian thought, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory–both on their own and in their “eco-” partnerships with environmental thought. Environmental thought fails to fully appreciate how the gendering of nature is central to Western cultural views of nature and women. Part one lays out this argument and Part two develops this anthropology by examining three patterns in nature imagery: the nurturing Good Mother, the persecutory Bad Mother, and the Hurt Mother we now seek to heal.
