Is Emile in the Garden of Eden? Western ideologies of nature

Abstract

This paper will explore ideologies of nature including the ‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘wildernesses’. It locates these ideologies as morphing to accommodate the later trajectory of the Enlightenment Project and its endorsement of modern Western scientific and technological principles. Beginning with the premise that nature is unknowable, this paper offers a critique of dominant Western cultural ideologies that function to domesticate and order nature. This goes hand in hand with ideologies and practices of domination and control in the name of scientific, technological and capitalist neo-liberal economic ‘development’. The assumption that the boundary between nature and humans is crossable through scientific and technological knowledge is one that can be explored and challenged by examining how such knowledge is from the outset ideologically constructed. This paper will look at the concept of alienation from nature (as expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in ‘Emile’ and Karl Marx) to explore how modern schooling and the capitalist economy shape human-nature relations.