Ryan Schram's Anthrocyclopaedia

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# Nature as the recursion of culture

## Nature as the recursion of culture

### Tutorial notes

Ryan Schram  
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology  
May 6, 2025

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/10/tut

## Salmon farming, Or Google AI has no sense of humor

Me: Hey, what would a salmon farm with salmon farmers look like? Wouldn't that be funny? 

Google AI: Here's a picture of [[https://g.co/gemini/share/dc4c1b7b3b87|a generic Norwegian salmon farm in what I think Norway looks like]]. Would you like me to create more conventional images based on my narrow imagination of the universe? 

## Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

A passage from the opening two pages of Latour's book, //We Have Never Been Modern// ([1991] 1993).

### I.I The Proliferation of Hybrids

"On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don't agree with the chemists; they're talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don't know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Should we wait? Is it already too late? Toward the bottom of the page, Third World countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development.


"The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections or the next board meeting. The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors - none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story.


"On page six, I learn that the Paris AIDS virus contaminated the culture medium in Professor Gallo's laboratory; that Mr Chirac and Mr Reagan had, however, solemnly sworn not to go back over the history of that discovery; that the chemical industry is not moving fast enough to market medications which militant patient organizations are vocally demanding; that the epidemic is spreading in sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, heads of state, chemists, biologists, desperate patients and industrialists find themselves caught up in a single uncertain story mixing biology and society.


"On page eight, there is a story about computers and chips controlled by the Japanese; on page nine, about the right to keep frozen embryos; on page ten, about a forest burning, its columns of smoke carrying off rare species that some naturalists would like to protect; on page eleven, there are whales wearing collars fitted with radio tracking devices; also on page eleven, there is a slag heap in northern France, a symbol of the exploitation of workers, that has just been classified as an ecological preserve because of the rare flora it has been fostering! On page twelve, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and Texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive. On page fourteen, the number of lines on high-definition television bring together Mr Delors, Thomson, the EEC, commissions on standardization, the Japanese again, and television film producers. Change the screen standard by a few lines, and billions of francs, millions of television sets, thousands of hours of film, hundreds of engineers and dozens of CEOs go down the drain.



"Fortunately, the paper includes a few restful pages that deal purely with politics (a meeting of the Radical Party), and there is also the literary supplement in which novelists delight in the adventures of a few narcissistic egos ('I love you . . . you don't'). We would be dizzy without these soothing features. For the others are multiplying, those **hybrid** articles that sketch out **imbroglios of science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology, fiction**. If reading the daily paper is modern man's form of prayer((Sic. Also, fun fact: Latour, a devout Roman Catholic, [[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-critical-zone-of-science-and-politics-an-interview-with-bruno-latour/|read the Bible every day]].)), then it is a very strange man indeed who is doing the praying today while reading about these mixed-up affairs. All of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day.


"**Yet no one seems to find this troubling. Headings like Economy, Politics, Science, Books, Culture, Religion and Local Events remain in place as if there were nothing odd going on.**" (Latour [1991] 1993, 1–2). 

## Pair-and-share discussion 

To the list above, we can also add **[[https://canvas.sydney.edu.au/courses/64258/pages/week-10-nature-as-the-recursion-of-culture#the_last_bit_of_lecture|salmon farming in Norway]]**. Every fact of daily life is touched by what Lien and Law (2011) call **the performativity of knowledge**. A world made by the peformativity of knowledge is a house of cards: It **cannot stand** without constant adjustment, tweaking, fiddling... and **it still falls down**. 

The more a society, and the global institutional order at large, attempts to assert its "modernity," its control over its own material conditions, and thus its own complete separation of Nature and Culture, the more new **hybrids** of nature and culture appear at the boundary between the two supposedly distinct realms. 

1\. Buddy up; work in pairs.

* Read the extract from Latour's book quoted above (Latour 1991, 1-2).
* Read the [[https://canvas.sydney.edu.au/courses/64258/pages/week-10-nature-as-the-recursion-of-culture#the_last_bit_of_lecture|last bit of my lecture on salmon farming]].

2\. Find new hybrids in today's newspaper.


* Where do you [[https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Lb59NTsaw/|normally get your news]]?
* What source did you choose?
* By the way, //[[https://www.sydney.edu.au/study/student-life/student-news/subscriptions.html|SMH]]// is unpaywalled for users of the USYD campus network (although that's not a rec).



3\. What categories does the newspaper put the hybrids in?



4\. What ontological boundaries are transgressed by the appearance of the hybrids?



**//And remember//, even if you're working in pairs, every small group needs a spokesperson and a scribe...**

## References

Latour, Bruno. (1991) 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. https://archive.org/details/wehaveneverbeenm0000lato/page/n11/mode/2up?q=%22The+proliferation+of+hybrids%22.



Lien, Marianne Elisabeth, and John Law. 2011. “‘Emergent Aliens’: On Salmon, Nature, and Their Enactment.” Ethnos 76 (1): 65–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.549946.