Theoretical approaches to the relationship nature-culture: some contributions between the years 1980 - 2004

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show some of the most important critics in the debate between nature and culture today. It wants to claim new paradigms of science in the problematic of the depletion of natural resources of the home we live in, the earth, and the role local communities play against the looter discourse of global capitalism from their distinct cultural and social existence. This article contains three parts that propose by analogy, a resemblance between the times of change occurring from one moment to another, in the same way that we could pass from "classic" paradigm about the topics to recent theoretical processes including local knowledge. The first one, called "night", exposes shortly most common approach that capitalism and the positive currents of science maintain about nature. The second, "Sunrise", is one of the most important pieces of this work, since it criticizes the darkness of the night, the approaches of the global capitalism from Marxism, the post-structuralism and the gender. The third, "new day", concludes that with these new perspectives of analysis we can understand in a better way the relationship between humans and Earth. These new political, cultural, environmental and global knowledge from the Centre and the periphery are crossed by power relationships, which propose a new inclusive perspective between apparently contradictory concepts, and represent its overcoming, starting from the consciousness that they themselves generate, trying to guide the political issue to these new knowledge within a global agenda.