Abstract
What should sociologists make of nature? Pragmatism provides one possible answer to this question by centering the practical relations between humans and nonhuman nature. Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements offers perhaps the most ambitious effort to develop a pragmatist sociology of nature. The book’s polemical aim is to depose a family of theories that, Bargheer argues, dominate our way of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. This essay constructs an alternative, more accommodating critical encounter between competing theories. It begins by simultaneously granting Bargheer’s positive theoretical contributions while entertaining several virtues of opposing theories of nature and culture that the book largely overlooks. The results include three challenges for a pragmatist sociology of nature: the problem of depth; the problem of breadth, and the problem of differentiation. I argue that this accommodating critical encounter may result in a smaller distance between pragmatism and other sociological theories of nature and culture, and opens to more opportunities for synthetic conversations, rather than pointing to unbridgeable chasms.
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Notes
This dichotomy has of course long been a critical target for environmental sociologists (see, for example: Catton & Dunlap 1980; Dunlap and Catton 1994; Freudenburg et al., 1995; Stuart, 2016). However environmental sociology has largely operated as a self-referential sub-discipline (Elliott, 2018), due at least in part due to the broader discipline’s stubborn indifference to the question of nonhuman nature. Without diminishing the importance of contributions that circulate within environmental sociology proper, my focus in this essay is on approaches to the question of nature that have significantly spilled over into the broader discipline of sociology despite this pattern of indifference.
It is worth noting that this is the terrain of one of the most prominent debates in cultural sociology, which centers on how to conceptualize culture’s role in motivating versus justifying action (see, for example, Swidler 1986; Vaisey, 2009). Bargheer does briefly engage with this debate in the book (Bargheer 2018a, p. 44), but by situating his broader argument against structural functionalism rather than in conversation with contemporary theorists, he avoids developing how his proposal relates to more recent contributions in fine-grained detail. More sustained and direct engagement with these contemporary theorists may help to propel Deweyan moral sociology more squarely into the mainstream going forward.
While Bargheer takes primary aim at Lévi-Strauss in Moral Entanglements, Durkheim and Mauss’s ([1903] 2009) argument that people order the nature world in ways that reflect the organization of society would also be an apt stand-in for this view. Although he doesn’t do so in the book, Bargheer does critically engage with Durkheim directly elsewhere (see Bargheer 2018b).
Geertz was quite explicit about this. “The concept of culture I espouse,” he writes, “is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz, 1973, p. 5). Others, such as Sewell (2005), have used this semiotic conception of culture in causal analysis, but this was not Geertz’s ambition.
On the relationship between wilderness and American environmental advocacy, see McPhee (1977), Farrell (2015), Amironesei & Scoville (2018), and McCumber & King (2020). On the specificity of the conception of nature immanent in the United States Endangered Species Act, see Doremus (2010), Alagona (2013), Heise (2016), Berseth & Matthews (2021), and Scoville (2022).
Sewell (2005, p. 164) argues for a conception of culture as “the semiotic dimension of human social practice in general,” and develops the role that historical “events” play in the processes of signification. There remains the question of how to reliably interpret the meaning of practice. Contrasts can be a helpful way of organizing cultural interpretation. Fourcade (2011), for instance, demonstrates the durability and coherence of “natural sensibilities” in her study of French and American responses to oil spills by placing them in relation to the broader historical trajectories of the two nations.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Stefan Bargheer for the opportunity to engage with his work. Marion Fourcade, Mary Shi, and Joe LaBriola read earlier iterations of this essay and providing helpful comments that are reflected in the final version. All errors are my own.
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Note: This essay was prepared for a symposium on Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements that has been accepted for publication in Theory and Society.
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Scoville, C. The means and ends of nature. Theor Soc 51, 951–965 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09496-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09496-y