From Culture to Biocultures

Extract

In advocating a biocultural approach to literature, one is claiming an ineluctable relation between science and culture. Biology, for example, is as intrinsic to the embodied state of readers and writers as history and culture are intrinsic to the professional bodies of knowledge known as science and biology. To think of science without including a historical and cultural analysis would be like thinking of the literary text without the surrounding weave of active or dormant discursive knowledges. It is similarly limited to think of literature—or to debate its properties or existence—without considering the network of meanings we might learn from a scientific perspective. Combined, these propositions link with a more synthetic argument: that the biological without the cultural, or the cultural without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst.