Nature - autonomous learning

20 strange naturesthey reflect, in some measure, the agendas of those who promulgatethese ideas. For instance, it serves white racists very wellto insist that people of colour are ‘naturally less intelligent’ thanCaucasians. Such beliefs gain extra credence when some authoritycan be invoked to justify them. For instance, in the mid-1990sa controversial American book entitled The Bell Curve sought tooffer scientific proof that IQ varied according to one’s class and, byimplication, ‘racial group’ (Hernstein and Murray 1996).Of course, the idea that white people are more intelligent thannon-whites is not a hegemonic idea in Western countries today,though it arguably was in the past. The reason it is only takenseriously nowadays by a minority of people is because it has beensuccessfully challenged by what were once counter-hegemonic ideas.These counter-hegemonic ideas (like the suggestion that non-whitesdo less well on IQ tests than whites because they often suffer a worseeducation) become hegemonic once enough people can be persuadedthat they are valid. But it would be a mistake to think thatcounter-hegemonic ideas are always more objective and less ‘biased’than the hegemonic ideas they oppose. Arguably, all hegemonic ideasreflect the agendas, aims and objectives of those expounding them.Sources: Gramsci (1995); Johnston et al. (2000); Williams (1977)NATURE AND GEOGRAPHYIn the previous section I said a lot about knowledges of nature.This followedan introductory section in which we established that nature meansmore than just ‘the physical environment’. We’re now in a position todiscuss the particular knowledges of nature produced by professionalgeographers. One starting place is to apply the discussion of different typesof knowledge to geography.This done, we can then focus on geographers’knowledges of nature specifically rather than the nature of their knowledgein general.