Sociology And Nature

This book engages with, and contests, the ‘new sociology of nature’. It moves beyond existing debates by presenting new social theory and working across current fields of interest, addressing the debate on new genetics and genomics, taking human biology seriously, and the issues of interdisciplinarity that are likely to arise in longer term attempts to work across the social and natural world. Nature and Sociology will be of great interest to students of a variety of disciplines including sociology and social science, human geography, social and biological anthropology, and the natural sciences.

Sociology as if nature did not matter has been the sociological expression of modern societies negligent of the processes of nature. In response to this ?ecological blindness,? Raymond Murphy examines the limitations of sociology that have resulted from this neglect.Humanity's success in manipulating nature destabilizes the natural support system of society on a planetary scale and, in turn, destabilizes all of society's institutions. Because the manipulation of nature has become so central to modern society, society, Murphy argues, can now be understood only in terms of the interaction between social action and the processes of nature. The growing awareness that social constructions unleash dynamic processes of nature?processes beyond human control that bear on social action?has the potential of radically transforming sociology. Sociology and Nature proposes the reconstruction of sociology in which nature does matters, developing a novel sociological approach that situates social action in its natural context.

Translation of two weeks: Sociologie, originally published in 1901 in La grande encyclopedie; and, Divisions et proportions des divisions de la sociologie, first published in 1927.

In this book, Jonathan H. Turner combines sociology, evolutionary biology, cladistic analysis from biology, and comparative neuroanatomy to examine human nature as inherited from common ancestors shared by humans and present-day great apes. Selection pressures altered this inherited legacy for the ancestors of humans—termed hominins for being bipedal—and forced greater organization than extant great apes when the hominins moved into open-country terrestrial habitats. The effects of these selection pressures increased hominin ancestors’ emotional capacities through greater social and group orientation. This shift, in turn, enabled further selection for a larger brain, articulated speech, and culture along the human line. Turner elaborates human nature as a series of overlapping complexes that are the outcome of the inherited legacy of great apes being fed through the transforming effects of a larger brain, speech, and culture. These complexes, he shows, can be understood as the cognitive complex, the psychological complex, the emotions complex, the interaction complex, and the community complex.

This book engages with, and contests, the ‘new sociology of nature’. It moves beyond existing debates by presenting new social theory and working across current fields of interest, addressing the debate on new genetics and genomics, taking human biology seriously, and the issues of interdisciplinarity that are likely to arise in longer term attempts to work across the social and natural world. Nature and Sociology will be of great interest to students of a variety of disciplines including sociology and social science, human geography, social and biological anthropology, and the natural sciences.