Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 95by some to be ‘human nature’ also. For those on the cultural left, the ‘human’in human geography was to be understood in thoroughly non-biological,non-essentialist, non-universal ways.This had two dimensions. First, therewas an attempt to de-naturalise our understanding of people’s identities(sense of self) and their ways of looking at the world. With texts likePeter Jackson’s (1987) edited Race and Racism leading the way, Mapping theSubject (Thrift and Pile 1995) was just one of several 1990s publications inhuman geography that showed how people’s subjectivity is not explicablein terms of some enduring neurological essence common to all people.Rather, it was shown to be the complex product of the social relations anddiscourses in which individuals are ‘interpellated’ (or socialised overthe life-course). In this view people unwittingly fit themselves into (andare fitted into) socially created ‘subject-positions’ over time that areinternalised mentally so that they seem to be an organic part of the individualsconcerned. Though such arguments may seem to be more thedomain of sociologists, social psychologists and cultural theorists, humangeographers’ concern was with how subjectivities are partly the cause(and effect) of the various physical and symbolic locations in whichlives are played out (bars, nightclubs, homes, shops etc.). In particular,‘abject’ (or stigmatised) identities were often the focus, like those of gaypeople or the disabled. The relevance of nature to all this was that discriminationagainst (as well negative self-understandings among) peoplewith certain identities were shown to often rely upon ideas about what is‘natural’ and therefore supposedly ‘normal’ and what is ‘unnatural’ andtherefore ostensibly ‘abnormal’. For instance, until recently, homosexualindividuals in the West were led to suppress their sexual preferences (orconfine them to certain ‘hidden locations’) because of socio-culturalconventions that deemed these preferences to be ‘perversions’ of a universalnorm supposedly set by ‘human nature’ (i.e. that men should be attractedonly to women and vice versa).Second, coincident with these attempts to de-naturalise identity andsubjective outlook were attempts by other geographers on the cultural leftto de-naturalise the human body. In everyday life, of course, most peopletend to think of bodies as biologically fixed and given. Meanwhile, thesciences of the human body – like medicine – have exhaustively analysedthe inner workings of the body and the ‘outer’ faculties of sight, smell,hearing, taste and touch. Such analyses can in turn influence everydayunderstandings of the body, notably in the form of ‘popular’ books and