funeral:The very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures — diffe
funeral:The very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures — different or universal — do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison. As soon as we take practices of mediation as well as practices of purification into account, we discover that the moderns do not separate humans from nonhumans any more than the totally superimpose signs and things.[…] Absolute relativism presupposes cultures that are separate and incommensurable and cannot be ordered in any hierarchy; there is no use talking about it, since it brackets off Nature. As for cultural relativism, which is more subtle, Nature comes into play, but in order to exist it does not presuppose any scientific work, any society, any construction, any mobilization, any network.—Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern -- source link