INTRODUCTION: SITUATING LAW

A central notion in this work so far is that “nature” is, among other things, a conceptual tool that is used for making sense, for making things meaningful. I am deliberately employing terms like “task,” “tool,” “used,” and “making” to emphasize the practical character of its deployment. People do things with “nature.” Things, places, events are made meaningful. Often “nature,” its surrogates and oppositions, are used strategically, pragmatically, and instrumentally. This needs to be emphasized right off because often in discussions of concepts or ideas the practical character of making sense can too easily be forgotten and the discussion can appear to be about concepts or ideas as such, untethered to social life and experience. For example, when in this chapter I discuss cultural artifacts such as “the state of nature idea,” or “the idea of natural law,” or even “the law idea,” I wish to be understood as focusing on how these malleable artifacts are used by particular and situated social actors for particular – often political – purposes. Like other tools they are both made and employed for making.

Like science, law is, among other things, a significant site of cultural production. It is one of the primary cultural sites in which the categories, images, and narratives of “nature,” “humanness,” their differences and relations are constructed and from which they are put into broader cultural circulation, projected, or inscribed onto segments of the material world.