Further beyond the society/nature divide: A comment on Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling

Abstract

In 'Beyond the Society/Nature Divide,' William Freudenburg, Scott Frickel, and Robert Gramling (1995) attack dualist thinking in sociology. They want to get beyond the style of thought that makes a clean split between nature and society and then allots explanatory priority to one side or the other. They even want to get beyond an eclecticism that adds up natural and social factors. Instead, they want to help us see that nature and society are products of in which each somehow gives rise to the other (361, 366-369, 372, 387). I strongly support this impulse, not just on technical grounds but disciplinary and political ones, too. should be a central task of sociology to get clear on the specific contours of contemporary society, and it cannot do so without conceptualizing the intertwining of the social with the technoscientific knowledge, resources, and artifacts that make up much of our engagement with nature in the late 20th century. That said, I wonder if Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling (FFG, from now on) have accomplished their purpose. Their parting remark is that It may be necessary . . . to recognize or to believe in the potential for mutual contingency, or the conjoint constitution of the physical and the social, before it is possible to see the ways in which the two are interrelated. Without progress in achieving such insights ... we run the risk of having our vision distorted by the very taken-for-grantedness of our socially agreed-upon definitions-the risk of being prisoners of our own perspectives (388). And I am not sure that FFG went as far as they could in helping us escape the prison. In what follows, I explain why I feel that