Neuwrite/Edu

Justin D’Souza                                                                               About 170 words

SUNY Geneseo

INTD 105 Science Writing

False Dichotomies of “Modern” Society

By Justin D’Souza

When one browses a newspaper, one encounters many neat sections: “science, politics, economy, law, religion, [etc.].” But the complexity of modern issues goes beyond labels. For example, a story about the ozone layer blends science and politics. Latour argues that we too frequently create false dichotomies between human events and natural/scientific events due to our inability to properly classify such hybrid “networks.” However, every culture has these interconnected networks – an anthropologist analyzing an ancient culture will synthesize them, like a “narrative” Therefore, old cultures did not have the false dualisms modern culture has that separates us from nature and science. We uphold this dualism so we can think of ourselves as more modern than others, the West versus the old. But since this dualism does not really exist, we are like ancient cultures, aka not modern.

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Geneseo’s Arboretum certainly seems like an example of a “nature-culture,” But, I predict that if a discovery were found in the trees, it would be confided to the science section of a newspaper regardless of if it relates to other fields.