Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings

4 : Nature and Culture

129 4 : Nature and Culture O ne of the most intriguing divisions that fantasy literature enables us to rethink is that between the domains of nature and culture. Many scholars maintain that the principal cause of today’s many environmental problems, from ozone depletion to the proliferation of genetically manipulated organisms, is the way in which Western society perceives there to be a difference between nature and culture.1 While nature and culture are terms that are both well-known and slippery to define, our cultural relationship with nature is dominated by problems of delimitation as well as of conflicting traditions: Where exactly do we draw the line between nature and culture ? Is there even a line to be drawn? Are we not of natural origin and therefore part of nature ourselves? In that case, how can things we do be anything but natural? In the actual world, these questions have become relevant parts of the debate about how to deal with environmental issues; and through the fantasy genre, they may be approached from any number of new directions. Cities may seem a typically cultural phenomenon, but they are actually among the most interesting, and certainly the most distinct, interfaces between nature and culture. They provide a limit or boundary that is or is not transgressed or permeated, a locus where both sides of the relation can be studied. This is just as true of cities in fantasy fiction. There may well be, as Brian Attebery claims, some “archetypal green world that underlies all fairyland”;2 but generally speaking, the city in fantasy is neither connected to fairyland nor to any archetypal green world. Its magic is of a different kind, less predictable and straightforward. By investigating the relationship between nature and culture, it is possible to understand what function that relationship has in the imaginary cities, but also to see what fantasy cities can tell us about alternative ways of exploring this important and familiar yet complex duality. 130 hErE BE dragoNS two SlIPPEry tErMS Defining “nature” is an undertaking fraught with complications. In Thinking about Nature, Andrew Brennan reflects that given the variety of ways in which the term nature is used, a case could even be made for dropping it from descriptions.3 Kate Soper, in What Is Nature?, remarks that the term is “at once both very familiar and extremely elusive.”4 A quick glance in the Oxford English Dictionary shows us a term that has accumulated a considerable number of only vaguely related meanings. Nature can, for instance, mean “[a] malleable state of iron” and “[a] class or size of guns or shot” (both meanings now obsolete). It is a word that can denote anything from bodily functions in need of a handy euphemism (related to, for example, excrement, urine, semen, and menstrual discharge) to the characteristic disposition of a person. It can even mean the entire cosmos.5 For the purpose of discussing the relation between nature and culture , the most suitable definition in the OED is that of nature as “[t]he phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.”6 The last clause brings to mind Soper’s point of departure , namely that “[i]n its commonest and most fundamental sense, the term ‘nature’ refers to everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity.”7 It is further helpful to consider Brennan’s outline of the distinction between broad and narrow (or absolute and relative) notions of “the natural.” The basis for his broader notion is that human behavior is natural insofar as we find the same behavior naturally in other animals (particularly higher mammals), and that human management, production, and interference make events and products unnatural.8 Brennan and Soper are in general agreement with philosopher Keekok Lee, who starts off her list of seven senses of “nature” with what she terms naturenh (non-human). She defines naturenh as opposed to culture, which “involves human agency and its products.”9 “Culture” can have almost as many meanings as the word nature. Depending on which discipline we turn to, definitions will vary. It has, for instance, been suggested that “culture” is “a class of phenomena conceptualized by anthropologists in order to deal with questions they are trying to answer.”10 In their 1952 investigation of literature in (mainly) the social sciences, anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn include nearly three...