Critique of Pure Nature

This book challenges the Western contemporary “praise for Nature”. From food to body practices, from ecological discourses to the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary imaginaries abound with representations of an ideal “pure Nature”, essentially defined according to a logic of denial of any artificial, modified, manipulated — in short, cultural — aspect.

How should we contextualise and understand such an opposition, especially in light of the rich semantic scope of the term “nature” and its variability over time? And how can we — if we actually can — envisage alternative models and approaches capable of better accounting for such richness and variability?

The author addresses these fundamental issues, combining an initial theoretical problematisation of the concept of nature and its evolution — from classical philosophy to the crucial changes occurred through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism and the modern era, finally considering recent insights in philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology and semiotics — with the analysis of its discursivisation — from the iconography of Mother Nature between the past and the present to the representation of catastrophic events in fictional and non-fictional texts, from clean eating and other popular food trends to the ambivalence of the naked body between its supposed natural ascription and its multiple cultural characterisations. Thus she introduces a critique of pure Nature, providing a systematic study of the way nature is attributed meaning and value in some of today’s most relevant discourses and practices, and finally tracing a possible path towards an “internatural turn”. 

Simona Stano is Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Turin (UniTo, Italy) and vice-Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication (CIRCe). In 2018, she was awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship for a research project (COMFECTION, 2019-2021) on the semiotic analysis of food and digital communication. She has collaborated with several universities and research centres in Italy and abroad, including New York University (USA, 2019-2021), the International Semiotics Institute (2015-2018), the University of Toronto (Canada, 2013), Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania, 2015-2019), the University of Barcelona (Spain, 2015-2016) and Observatorio de la Alimentación (Spain, 2015-2016). Prof. Stano deals mainly with food semiotics, body semiotics and communication studies, and has published several papers, edited volumes (including special issues of top semiotic journals such as Semiotica, Lexia and Signata), essays and monographs (I sensi del cibo, 2018; Eating the Other. Translations of the Culinary Code, 2015) on these topics.