Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History
Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History
复制标题
自然总是重要吗？
DOI：
10.1046/j.1468-2303.2003.00258.x
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发表时间：
2003
影响因子：
1.1
通讯作者：
E. Stroud
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
E. Stroud
尽管几十年来在环境史令人印象深刻的奖学金，该领域仍然在很大程度上边缘的学科作为一个整体。环境故事仍然更有可能出现在政治，社会和经济历史的介绍，侧栏和脚注中，而不是以变革的方式融入这些叙述，尽管我们作为环境历史学家知道潜力是存在的。当我们努力确定我们希望其他历史学家在我们的工作中做什么时，我们遇到了定义和使命的问题：什么是环境史？我们做什么是独一无二的？我们希望其他历史学家从我们的工作中学到什么？我们这个领域的一些学者建议，我们可以通过将“环境”作为与种族、阶级和性别平行的分析类别来回答这些问题，他们认为，对环境的仔细关注与对其他类别的关注一样，为揭示社会中的权力关系提供了丰富的途径。虽然权力确实可以在环境中被解读，并且经常通过环境来表达，但我认为，“环境”作为概念和事实，与阶级、种族和性别有着根本的不同，以至于这种类比不起作用，并且分散了我们对另一个更富有成效的策略的注意力，以阐明我们的学术更广泛的相关性：展示了物质自然对环境领域之外的历史的重要性。如果其他历史学家能和我们一起关注泥土、水、空气、树木和动物（包括人类）的物理、生物和生态性质，他们会发现自己对过去提出了新的问题和新的答案。
Despite several decades of impressive scholarship in environmental history, the field remains largely marginal to the discipline as a whole. Environmental stories are still more likely to turn up in introductions, sidebars, and footnotes to political, social, and economic histories than they are to be incorporated into those narratives in a transformative way, though we as environmental historians know that potential is there. As we struggle to identify what precisely it is that we want other historians to do with our work, we run up against questions of definition and mission: What is environmental history? What do we do that is unique? What do we want other historians to learn from what we do? Some scholars in our field have suggested that we can answer these questions by framing "environment" as a category of analysis parallel to race, class, and gender, arguing that careful attention to the environment offers as rich a way of uncovering power relationships in societies as attention to these other categories does. While it is true that power can be read in the environment, and is frequently expressed through it, I argue that "environment" as both concept and fact is so fundamentally different from class, race, and gender that the analogy does not work, and distracts us from another, more fruitful strategy for articulating the broader relevance of our scholarship: demonstrating the significance of material nature for histories beyond the environmental realm. If other historians would join us in our attention to the physical, biological, and ecological nature of dirt, water, air, trees, and animals (including humans), they would find themselves led to new questions and new answers about the past.