# Nature–culture relationship process—toward constellar relationality

**Authors:** Maya Aguiluz-Ibargüen

PMC · DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1441600 · 2025-06-10

## TL;DR

This paper explores how the relationship between nature and culture has evolved, shifting from a strict duality to a more interconnected continuum.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a new conceptual framework called 'constellar relationality' to understand the dynamic between nature and culture.

## Key findings

- The nature–culture binomial can shift between a continuum and a dualistic separation.
- Modern cosmology, influenced by figures like Lovelock and Latour, supports a renewed nature–culture continuum.
- Sociological evidence challenges the traditional separation of nature and culture.

## Abstract

In this article, I analyze the semantic genesis of the mutations experienced by the nature–culture binomial, which, in some cases, tends to be a continuum and in others, tends to the dualization of both domains. I begin with a brief analysis of the transcendence of the classical reflection on Nature from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to stop my attention on the marked nature–culture duality in the no less classical formulations from specific works of Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss, even when this dualism is enriched by the conceptual variation in the work of each one. In the second part, I analyze the condition of possibility on which the above argumentation rests on the basis of a preparatory narrative that proceeds to objectify “nature” in the new modern cosmology that emerges in the seventeenth century with the stamp of Galileo and Descartes. In the third part, I analyze a whole set of sociological evidence that questions the plausibility of this separating duality between nature and culture. In the fourth part, I analyze the return of the nature–culture continuum that emerges at the hands of a new cosmology in late modernity that receives the stamp of James Lovelock and Bruno Latour.

## Full-text entities

- **Diseases:** violence against (MESH:D009203), illness (MESH:D002908)
- **Chemicals:** carbon (MESH:D002244)
- **Species:** Rubroshorea almon (species) [taxon 292004], Ovis aries (domestic sheep, species) [taxon 9940], Homo sapiens (human, species) [taxon 9606], Alouatta seniculus (howler monkey, species) [taxon 9503], Lagothrix (woolly monkeys, genus) [taxon 9518]

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12185460