Nature - autonomous learning

26 strange naturesbecome. By contrast, a cohort of human geographers argue that ideas abouthuman nature are just that: ideas which need to be ‘de-constructed’ ratherthan taken at face value.As we’ll see later in the book, this has been especiallyevident in relation to ‘race’, gender and sexuality.To de-construct ideas ofrace, gender and sexuality is, in this context, to show that they rest ondubious concepts of biological determinism. Additionally, some humangeographers argue that the specific social relationships and ‘structures’ inwhich individuals are enmeshed materially influence their physical andpsychological being over the life-course.This means that a person’s bodilyand mental ‘nature’ cannot be understood in purely biological terms (e.g.as a product of their genes). Rather, it must also be understood as an effectof a person’s positioning within wider social networks since these networksshape people both physically and psychologically.This kind of human geography research is a very long way indeed fromthe investigations undertaken by environmental and physical geographers.Whether studying nature in the sense of the non-human world or asessence, human geographers have made a concerted effort to de-naturalise thosethings conventionally seen as wholly or partly natural.These geographers evaluate, aswell as make, moral and aesthetic claims about nature (not just cognitiveones). And they often do so in a normative mode, passing judgement onthat which they analyse. Some student readers will doubtless be surprisedto read that several geographers study human nature – albeit in critical andnon-naturalistic ways – as well as non-human nature. But this is not quitethe departure from ‘the geographical tradition’ (Livingstone 1992) thatit appears to be. As I will show in the next chapter, the ‘experiment’inaugurated by the early geographers even extended to explaining humannature. This is often forgotten when potted histories of geography arewritten for students. Originally, geographers wanted to link the naturalenvironment, human society and human nature together within one or otherexplanatory framework.Well over a century later we have come full circle,but with a twist.Today, as we’ll discover later in this book, physical andenvironmental geographers refrain from talking about human naturealtogether (preferring, instead, the focus on the physical environment).Meanwhile, a cohort of critical (or left-wing) human geographers wantto talk about ‘human nature’ just as much as their forebears did.The crucialdifference is that they want to do so in a de-naturalising way such thatwhat we often call human nature is not as ‘natural’ as it appears to be (seeBox 1.5).