Nonini—A Companion to Urban Anthropology

The most inclusive definition of nature is that realm of experience that humans believe is ordinarily beyond their ability to control and shape. The lay of the land, the cycle of night and day, winter and summer, dry season and wet, dis-asters, the wind and the weather, grasses, shrubs and trees, mammals, fish and insects, health and disease, and ultimately, birth and death. While anthropolo-gists have generally been concerned with the many ways that people have tried to comprehend nature and the various means they have employed to bind, buffer, or redirect these forces, those of us who work among city dwellers have a particular interest in nature: the extensive building and transformation of space combined with the large numbers of people who live there seems to push these forces of nature away from people’s everyday lives. They imagine their lives to unfold in a city, not in nature. Those who make a living through farming or gathering wild foods cannot imagine their lives apart from nature. It is this imagining of a life lived outside of nature that sets city dwellers apart from those in non-urban communities. Of course, even though the intent of the urban is to live in a world fashioned entirely by humans, nature continues to intrude on the lives of the urbanites, sometimes quite rudely. This becomes the basis of anthropological research on nature in the city