Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
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想象灭绝：濒危物种的文化意义
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Jan Baetens.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jan Baetens.
干预是科学庸俗化以及认识和提高认识的干预。从这个角度来看，文化媒介当然可以发挥重要作用，但它们的影响仅限于社会和文化行动，而不适用于科学本身，科学仍然没有文化投机。海瑟是文学和科学研究中文化研究的代表（将她的作品标记为生态批评的例子并不符合她研究的广泛范围），相反，她呼吁文化因素对于更好地理解科学本身至关重要。这种说法当然不是全新的（文化的生产作用，更确切地说是语言的生产作用，自1980年代以来一直是一个长期和极其令人兴奋的问题），但文化的突出，即文化价值观，与我们作为一个社区所重视的东西和我们不重视的东西之间的基本区别有关，无论是选择、冷漠还是无知，是生物多样性辩论中的一个重要创新（这是灭绝辩论的更大范围）。《想象灭绝》开篇对使我们能够衡量生物多样性的标准进行了引人入胜的评估。因为即使“容易”观察到这个或那个物种已经消失，物种灭绝和生物多样性下降之间也没有直接联系。这不仅是因为一个物种的消失不能用绝对的术语来解释（这可能会因历史标准而有所不同，例如，当我们将目前的生物多样性状况与以前遭受比今天可能发生的物种灭绝更严重的物种灭绝的时期进行比较时），但也因为对物种的“科学”定义总是有偏见，或者更积极地说，受其他物种的影响和决定，也就是说，文化标准：某些物种被认为比其他物种更重要，前者的存在或缺失（渡渡鸟，鲸鱼，大猩猩等）。将有一个完全不同的影响，比缺乏或存在后者（例如一个突变病毒）。这种差异不仅仅是理论上的，它直接和实质性地反映在实际的研究中，由于科学、文化和经济方面的原因，许多物种被忽视了（众所周知，B o k s更容易获得资金）。
intervention being that of science vulgarization as well as of awareness and consciousness-raising. Cultural agents, in this perspective, have certainly a major role to play, but their impact is limited to social and cultural action and does not apply to science itself, which remains free from cultural speculation. A representative of cultural studies in literature and science studies (to label her work as an example of ecocriticism would not do justice to the broad scope of her research), Heise instead makes a plea for the crucial importance of cultural elements for a better understanding of science itself. Such a claim is of course not totally new (the productive role of culture, more precisely of language, has been a permanent and extremely stimulating concern since the 1980s), but the foregrounding of culture, that is of cultural values having to do with the basic difference between what we value as a community and what we do not, be it by choice, indifference or ignorance, is an important innovation in the debate on biodiversity (which is the larger horizon of the extinction debate). Imagining Extinction opens with a fascinating evaluation of the criteria that enable us to measure biodiversity. For even if it is “easy” to observe that this or that species has disappeared, there is no direct link between species extinction and declining biodiversity. This is not only because the disappearance of a species cannot be interpreted in absolute terms (it can be nuanced by historical criteria, for instance when we compare the current state of biodiversity with previous periods that suffered even greater species extinction than what may be happening today), but also because the “scientific” definition of a species is always biased or, more positively put, influenced and determined by other, that is, cultural, criteria: Certain species are considered more important than others, and the presence or absence of the former (the dodo, the whale, the gorilla, etc.) will have a completely different impact than the absence or presence of the latter (for instance a mutating virus). This difference is not just theoretical; it is directly and materially reflected in the actual research, which overlooks many species for reasons that are inextricably scientific, cultural and economic (as is well known, it is easier to get funding to b o o k s