Rendering Nature

Only five of the twelve chapters in this impressive collection focus on the U.S. West, but there are riches here for all, regardless of region. Editors Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young introduce the book with reference to William Cronon’s 1995 edited volume, Uncommon Ground, which includes Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” The pairing is apt. This new work shares the earlier book’s complex thinking, elegant writing, and accessible analysis of the “Nature-Culture Paradox,” the ways in which humans use culture to construct nature and vice versa (p. 1). Rendering Nature takes up this mantle with its own vision: to stretch the disciplinary boundaries of American studies (study nature to understand culture) and environmental history (give agency to a nature beyond human culture). “The process of rendering,” Shaffer and Young explain, “offers a useful conceptual tool to interrogate the entanglement of nature and culture without presuming either to solve or to sidestep the paradox.” They continue, “The authors in this volume operate from a core assumption that nature and culture exist not as distinct realms but as a reciprocal give-and-take that blurs the boundaries of each and rejects the prioritization of either” (p. 12). From there, the contributors roam broadly—their work is grouped by the four themes of their subtitle. A western or cultural historian might well assign John Herron’s “Stuffed: Nature and Science on Display,” on taxidermy at the 1893 World’s Fair; Frieda Knobloch’s “Rocks of Ages: The Decadent Desert and Sepulchral Time,” on desert time; or Andrew Kirk’s “Prototyping Natures: Technology, Labor, and Art on Atomic Frontiers,” on art and representation at atomic test sites.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Discipline · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Wilderness · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy