Natural Born Humans
Putting Culture, Science, and Religion Back Into Nature
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.32470Keywords:
neo-materialism, nature, science, religion, two culturesAbstract
In recent years, scientists and humanists have begun converging towards a new concept of humanity, one in which human culture, creativity, and power are seen as the product of nature, not its antithesis. Drawing on these insights, I suggest some ways in which scholars might embrace the concept of the ‘natural born human' to better recognize the powerful role of the natural material world in creating the human past and future. If a vital materiality informs every aspect of who we are as humans, then the scientific insights into this material world are not distinct from or contrary to humanism. To the contrary, science might be better understood as a manner of humanism and perhaps even akin to a materially grounded religion. Thus the old divide between science and the humanities might now be closing as we better recognize the inescapable material nature of the human animal in all of its dimensions.
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Davis, Mike. 2002. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso).
Descola, Philippe. 2014. Beyond Nature and Culture (trans. Janet Lloyd; Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
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Emsley, John. 2011. Nature’s Building Blocks (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship Between Humans and Things (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118241912.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
LeCain, Timothy J. 2015. ‘Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective’, History, Culture and Modernity 3.1: 1-28. Online: https://www.history-culture-modernity.org/articles/10.18352/hcm.474/.
LeCain, Timothy J. 2017. The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316460252.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Coal (London: Verso).
Mitman, Gregg. 2005. ‘In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History’, Environmental History 10: 184-210. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/10.2.184.
Nash, Linda. 2006. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Noble, David. 1999, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin Books).
Ore, Janet. 2011. ‘Mobile Home Syndrome: Engineered Woods and the Making of a New Domestic Ecology in the Post-World War II Era’, Technology and Culture 52: 260-86. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2011.0077.
Pearce, Fred. 2011. ‘Phosphate: A Critical Resource Misused and Now Running Low’, Environment360: July 7.
Simmons, Alan H. 2011. The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
Smith, Peter Andrey. 2015. ‘Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?’ New York Times, 23 June.
Snow, C.P. 1959. The Two Cultures (London: Cambridge University Press).
Steffen, Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill. 2011. ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369: 842-67. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0327.
Thomas, Julia Adeney. 2014. ‘History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value’, American Historical Review 119: 1587-607. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1587.
Wagner, Andreas. 2015. Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates (New York: Current).
Walker, Brett L. 2015. ‘Environments of Terror: 9/11, World Trade Center Dust, and the Global Nature of New York’s Toxic Bodies’, Environmental History 20: 779-95.
White, Richard. 1995. The Organic Machine (New York: Hill & Wang).
Published
2018-02-26
Issue
Section
CLOSED - Special Issue: Religion, Science, and the Future
How to Cite
LeCain, T. J. (2018). Natural Born Humans: Putting Culture, Science, and Religion Back Into Nature. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 11(4), 420-434. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.32470
