Culture and nature: interaction and confrontation

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:44

Nature is one of the main factors that determine the emergence of culture. It is for this reason that their interaction has been an important topic for many scientists for several decades, requiring further study. Those studies that have already been carried out have shown that culture is a natural principle, transformed by human activity. And at the same time, it stands outside of biology. Then the quite expected question arises as to whether culture and nature are opposite to each other, or whether they are in harmonious relations.

On the one hand, a person acts absolutely purposefully in order to remake the world around him, creating a different, artificial one. He calls it culture. In this case, nature is completely opposed to it, since only those elements of it that have been completely reworked by man enter the new world.

Sociobiologists are less categorical in this regard. Answering the question of how culture and nature are related, they argue that the social behavior of both animals and people is very similar. The only difference is how difficult the level is.their livelihoods. In this case, culture is a separate stage of biological evolution as a whole:

- plants change their species morphology to adapt to the new environment;

- animals, adapting, also acquire additional patterns of behavior;

- a person, in order to adapt to new conditions, complicates or changes only the forms of his own life, as a result of which the artificial habitat was actually formed.

Thus, it is clear that culture and nature are very vaguely demarcated. The main difference lies in how the mechanism of accumulation of experience and its transfer works. So, animals use instinct for these purposes, and people use those skills that are developed outside of biology.

Nature and culture are closely intertwined in the sense that the first gives birth to the second. That is, it appears after the interaction of man with nature. All cultural objects are made from a substance of natural origin. Thus, if we consider the problem from this position, then these systems simultaneously oppose each other and interact. Their unity is expressed in the fact that the basis of culture is the components of nature. And it, in turn, serves as a prerequisite for the emergence of an artificial world. More P. P. Florensky once noted that culture and nature cannot exist separately, but only with each other.

Since a person came out of a natural, natural habitat, it is stillaffects most aspects of his life. For example, work culture is an area that directly feels the impact of nature. This applies to the specifics of the occupation and activity in a particular area. A strict division of labor duties between the sexes, generated by the peculiarities of the climate, is observed, for example, in the North. So, women there, in addition to traditional domestic work, are engaged in dressing leather, making clothes from it.