Nature is one of the main factors that determine the emergence of culture. For this reason, their interaction for several decades remains an important topic for many scientists, requiring further study. Those studies that have already been carried out have shown that culture is a natural principle, transformed by human activity. And at the same time, she stands outside of biology. Then the quite expected question arises as to whether culture and nature are opposite to each other or whether they are still in harmonious relations.
On the one hand, a person acts absolutely purposefully to remake the world around him, creating a different, artificial one. He calls it culture. In this case, nature is completely opposed to it, since only those elements of it that were completely processed by man enter the new world.
Sociobiologists are less categorical in this regard. Answering the question of how culture and nature relate, they argue that the social behavior of both animals and humans is very similar. The only difference is how difficult their level of life is. In this case, culture is a separate stage of biological evolution as a whole:
- plants, in order to adapt to the new environment, change their species morphology;
- animals, adapting, acquire additional behavioral patterns;
- a person, in order to adapt to new conditions, complicates or changes only the forms of his own life, as a result of which the artificial environment actually formed.
Thus, it is clear that culture and nature are very clearly distinguished. The main difference is how the mechanism of experience accumulation and its transmission works. So, animals use instinct for these purposes, and people use those skills that are developed outside of biology.
Nature and culture are closely intertwined in the sense that the first gives birth to the second. That is, it appears after the interaction of a person with nature. All cultural objects are made from a substance of natural origin. Thus, if we consider the problem from this position, then these systems simultaneously confront each other and interact. Their unity is expressed in the fact that the components of nature are the basis of culture. And she, in turn, serves as a prerequisite for the appearance of an artificial world. More P.P. Florensky once noted that culture and nature cannot exist separately, but only with each other.
Since a person came out of a natural, natural habitat, it still affects most aspects of his life. For example, a work culture is an area that directly feels the influence of nature on itself. This applies to the specifics of the occupation and activities in a particular area. A strict division of labor between the sexes, caused by the climate, is observed, for example, in the North. So, women there, in addition to traditional homework, are engaged in dressing leather, making clothes from it.
