Analysis of Presentation on Nature as Female

Analysis of Presentation on Nature as Female

I found the presentation on Nature as Female to be very interesting, because the topic asks as many questions as it answers. The question of why nature is gendered, I believe, is inextricably rooted in language. Language determines everything our experiences, our perceptions, our beliefs, and our desires. In a class I took last term we spoke about Lacan and his theory about language determining our desires, and it made sense to me, because you cannot desire what you cannot name. In the same way, language determines our beliefs about the world. In an anthropology course I took, there was a study about this Navajo tribe that demonstrated a profound understanding of quantum physics, without ever having been taught it. The linguists believed that this was because of their language. Their language determined their perception of the world, and thus allowed them to understand it in a vastly different way then people who speak English or French, for example. The example that was given to try to explain the difference was that instead of calling grass "grass", the Navajos would call it "growing green that reaches up to the sky". In their process of naming it as such, their concept of grass is different than our concept of grass.

Do you understand the difference that language can make, just in how things are named and described? Another example that was given was how Chinese children displayed far greater mathematical understanding compared to English speaking children, and the disparity was traced back to language.

The argument here is that language determines our conceptualization of numbers. In English, we say ten, twenty, thirty…etc. The word "twenty" gives no indication that it means "two tens". In Chinese, however, the words do give this indication (one-ten, two-ten, three-ten…etc).

Language is so innate in us that we forget its power. But realizing how language exerts itself over everything, it is easy to understand how our conceptualization of nature as female has come to be. Our concept is a result of our language, which determines our understanding of the world. In the English language there are gendered words, which necessarily influence our belief about what they signify. Thus we say "mother nature" and without a second thought we understand nature to be female. In just that one word "mother", nature becomes conceptualized for us as female. Thus, our understanding about nature is based on this belief.