Representing Ecology: Nature and Risk in Contemporary Social Communication

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the basic theoretical perspective and some interpretative aspects resulting from a study on social representations of nature, environment and ecology in three European countries, Italy, France and Germany.1 The theoretical core of this study is founded upon the approach of social representations which we can tie above all to the name of Serge Moscovici (1961; 1984). He transformed the Durkheimian concept of collective representations into a ‚social phenomenon‘ in order to single out the process and the dynamics of its mobile and circulating character. Moscovici recovered the ‘structural meaning’ which Émile Durkheim had attributed to collective representations, but reinterpreted it in a more dynamic capacity: he didn’t accept the static feature of collective representations as appropriate to contemporary society. ‚contrasts science with common sense and notes changes, over time, in the relationship between the two. In Durkeim’s days, science was often a consequence of the progressive refinement of common sense. Knowledge, in the process of becoming refined, becomes, of course, less and less common and, hence, more and more esoteric. In the modem world, Moscovici believes in the direction of causality is often reversed, i.e. science is, quite commonly, the basis, rather than the outcome, of common sense‘ (Farr 1993, 16f).