The False Divide between Nature and Culture

The False Divide between Nature and Culture: How Estrogens, Yeasts and Snakes Reveal the Entanglement of Everyday Life

Hosted by the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre

Featuring:

Mary Lou Rassmussen (ANU) and Celia Roberts (ANU)

Ben Matthews (University of Newcastle)

Gavin Smith (ANU)

“Culture” is often equated with all things human, and “nature” with the external environment; distinguished from each other as if they were two separate realms of reality. This idea stemmed from modernist ideals of progress, where nature and ‘the environment’ were framed as separate distinct from humans as something to exploit or dominate, external to human endeavours, or seen as an escape from the ‘real world’ of culture – a place to relax outside of the pressures of work. This separation has led to some of the existential challenges we face today including climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, mass extinction events, and waste and pollution. This seminar presents work that shatters the false distinction between nature and culture and troubles lay perceptions of human practices as separate from the apparent wilds of nature. These presentations challenge us to think differently about the natureculture entanglements that arise in everyday life, and to consider how narratives of humanity’s dominance over the ‘natural world’ can be overturned to address the environmental and social challenges that they have generated.

Estrogens as naturecultures: Mary Lou Rassmussen (ANU) and Celia Roberts (ANU)

We have recently begun a three year study of estrogen experiments in laboratories, medical clinics and in the community. The third subproject will track ‘lay’ estrogen knowledges and practices through qualitative interviews and textual analysis of websites, apps, social media postings and educational materials and consider how they engage and challenge formal scientific and biomedical accounts of hormonal action, sex/gender, health and wellbeing. Reporting on an exploratory pilot for this subproject, this paper discusses where and how estrogens appeared as an actor across eight social media platforms (Aug-Sept 2024). We analyse 67 posts spanning a wide range of practices related to gender transition, menopause, mental and physical health, tracing in each case what estrogen is said to do, and how forms of expertise circulate. Posts were classified into four content categories: gender affirmation, DIY estrogen, medical advice and alternative medicine. Across these categories, estrogens appear as exemplary naturecultures, troubling their conventional figuration as messengers of (biological) sex.

Mary Lou Rasmussen is Professor, Research School of Social Sciences at ANU. Their research focuses on building transdisciplinary understandings of reproduction, sexuality, and gender across diverse lifeworlds. Rasmussen is co-editor, with Louisa Allen, of the Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education (2016) and the Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education (2024) (Palgrave) and has co/authored Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis: Making Bushfire Babies (Bristol, 2023); Queer Generations: sexual citizenship and LGBTQ youth in Australia (forthcoming Bloomsbury). Currently she’s collaborating on two ARC Discovery projects, Experimenting with Estrogen and Locating LGBTIQ+ Youth in the Archives.

Celia Roberts is Professor in the School of Sociology at ANU, working on hormones, embodiment and reproduction. Her most recent books are Hormonal Theory: A rebellious glossary (2024, Bloomsbury Press), a co-edited collection of social analyses of a wide range of hormones, and (with Mary Lou Rasmussen, Louisa Allen and Rebecca Williamson), Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis: Making bushfire babies (2023, Bristol UP), a qualitative study of reproduction during the 2019-20 Australian bushfires. She is currently working on the translation of epigenetics into antenatal care in Australia.

Fear of Synthesis and the Unseen: the Wild Yeast Zoo citizen science slash start-up: Ben Matthews (University of Newcastle)

Wild Yeast Zoo is a citizen-science-driven biotech startup exploring the untapped potential of Australian microbial biodiversity. This presentation uses Wild Yeast Zoo as a situated case through which to examine the false dichotomy between nature and culture, and the ways this division complicates public engagement with microbial ecologies. Microbes inhabit us, ferment our foods, shape atmospheres, structure soils and participate in ecologies that are at once biological, social, technical and symbolic. Despite their foundational role in ecosystems and human health, microbes are often overlooked or misunderstood, in part because they challenge familiar narratives that separate the human from the natural. Synthetic biology and microbial engineering intensify this problem by blurring the boundary between natural and designed organisms.

I argue that what is often described as a public fear of synthesis in relation to biotechnology may be more carefully understood as a fear of entanglement. It is an unease that emerges when familiar boundaries between organism and artefact, design and evolution, body and environment, public good and private value appear to move. Wild Yeast Zoo addresses this complexity by positioning citizen science as a bridge, engaging publics directly in the discovery, characterisation and possible application of wild microbes.

Drawing on my work as a scholar-practitioner and co-founder, I examine how participatory science can reframe microbes from abstract scientific objects to tangible, culturally and ecologically significant agents. This requires scientific rigour and ethical guard rails that allow microbial discovery to shift from extractive bioprospecting toward relational “biorespecting”. It also requires attention to the affective politics of microbial life, where disgust, fascination, anxiety and wonder often sit together. By curating encounters across these thresholds, the presentation asks how sustainability might be understood as the continuous conduct required to keep an unseen commons alive.

Dr. Benjamin Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Newcastle, and a lab-coat owning synthetic biology researcher and co-founder of Wild Yeast Zoo, a biotech startup combining citizen science and microbial bioprospecting to drive sustainable innovation. He is an AI with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and leads strategy and communications at Wild Yeast Zoo. His research builds transdisciplinary bridges between science, communication, public engagement and commercialisation, with a focus on synthetic biology, microbial biodiversity, and the cultural framing of the emerging bioeconomy.

Wilding Sociology: how sociology can contribute to conservation: Gavin Smith (ANU)

Sociology has traditionally and disproportionately focused on analysing the practices of humans, in the social and material sense. Less attention has been given to the agency and sociality of non-human actors such as animals, ecosystems and environmental forces, and their complex and dynamic interrelationships. This seminar takes a sociological perspective to reflect on nine years of intricate work with and for venomous snakes in The Bush Capital of Australia. This has entailed both removing and relocating hundreds of venomous snakes from human dwellings where they are seen as risk flows, as well as providing care for sick and injured snakes and doing hundreds of community snake education events. It also incorporates extensive empirical research over four years on the habits of these animals including how they make use of habitat and respond to being translocated to a new and unfamiliar environment, as well as collecting biometric and genetic data from individual specimens to analyse population structures. In doing these different works over time, we consider what can be learned from the representation and treatment of snakes in Australian society? In what ways is urban milieu both amenable and hostile to certain natures? And how might harmful outcomes be reduced?

We address these questions by exploring the precarious position of snakes on Australia’s urban edges and, from this analysis, begin envisaging a conservation approach better suited for the Anthropocene. We contemplate the power of ‘listening’ to wildlife and the contribution of co-existence education programs and practices that take a holistic and relational ontology in challenging narratives and sentiments that render snakes, and other organisms like them, alien; and thereby killable (Colombino and Giaccaria 2016). These approaches envisage more inclusive, multispecies futures and function to decolonise and normalise snakes as valued inhabitants of urban ecosystems.

Gavin Smith is an Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at the Australian National University. He is also a Director of the Surveillance Studies Network. His research has mainly examined the social impacts of surveillance technologies, looking at the intersubjective meanings ascribed to everyday practices of watching and being watched. In recent times, his research has focused on the ambiguous figure of the snake in Australian society. This is a double-edged project examining social and cultural perceptions of snakes, both historically and in the contemporary period, but also how humans and other species engage with these animals in everyday life. Building on the sociality of snakes, the second component of the research involves conducting snake ecology research and tracking a sample of Eastern brown snakes (Pseudonaja textilis) in Canberra to better determine habitat use and movement profiles post-release. Contact: gavin.smith@anu.edu.au