Cheap Nature

It only took a day from her crime to her execution. Yet court documents don't even record her name. She lived in Tlaxcala, New Spain, and on Sunday, July 18, 1599, she smashed crosses in a church, incited Chichimec Indians to rebel against the Spanish, and killed a Tarascan Indian using sorcery. The next day she was arrested. Six witnesses testified against her. As the sun set, she was permitted to speak in her defense. She recounted her deeds and then — according to the court record — recounted a dream

of deer and they said to her not to turn away and that they were looking for her and that they did not want to appear to anyone else but her, because she was ill and they wanted to see her, and she said that she was very old the time she saw the figures and now she is young and healthy and they have taken away some cataracts that she had, and then these two figures went into a cave with her and they gave her a horse, which she has in said pueblo of Tlaxcala, and that one of the two figures was a deer that rode atop of a horse and the other deer had the horse bridled, and on that occasion she was crippled and after seeing the two figures she is well.

Of the crimes she committed, her dream was the worst. She might have fueled insurrection, desecrated a church, and interfered with the flow of silver from Chichimec land, but most dangerous, she offered a vision of order and nature contrary to the colonizers'. The horse was ridden not by Spanish men but by a deer — the symbol of the Chichimec: not white men astride nature, but local life upon the colonizers' life. The dreamer of this dream was guilty of calling not just for a political insurrection but for a cosmic one. She dreamed the order of the world seditiously. She was hanged as a witch later that afternoon.

It's hard to speak of this woman without knowing her name. Her killers called her a witch. That is a name she may have used for herself, albeit without its colonial venom. Even though her name was set at so little that it didn't merit an entry in the conquistadors' paperwork, it is an act of memory against forgetting that her story is told. The dreamer of this radically different ecology had to be killed, swiftly. To allow her to live would sanction an alternative to capitalism's world-ecology.

Our Chichimec woman was killed by a civilized society because her natural savagery broke its rules. This transgression, this crime, was a relatively new idea. As recently as 1330, savage meant "intrepid, indomitable, valiant." That positive use faded by the end of the fifteenth century, replaced with its modern one of "in a state of nature, wild." This isn't an accident. At the time of the execution of the Chichimec witch, the terms nature and society were being produced.

At the very moment when Las Casas and Sepulveda were debating the fate of Indigenous Peoples — were they "natural" slaves? — the meaning of our everyday word society experienced a momentous change. Beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, society came to mean not just the company we keep but also a bigger whole of which individuals are a part. The notion that individuals are part of collective units greater than themselves isn't new — humans have long given names to and established boundaries around social groups: being part of the polis, the city, the Middle Kingdom, Christendom, the chosen people, and so on. But modern society has a historically unique antonym: nature. On the other side of "society" are not other humans but the wild. Before nation came society. Before society could be defended, it had to be invented. And it was invented through the policing of a strict boundary with nature.

In the English language, the words nature and society assumed their familiar meanings only after 1550, over the arc of the "long" sixteenth century (c. 1450–1640). This was, as we shall see, a decisive period in England's capitalist and colonial history. It marked the rise of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and their construction of massive New World production systems, worked by coerced Indigenous and African labor. These transformations were key elements of a planetary shift in the global center of power and production from Asia to the North Atlantic. That shift did not come fast. Europe was technologically and economically impoverished compared to civilizations on the other side of Asia, and only after 1800 did that change. China, recall, already had the printing press, a potent navy, gunpowder, and vibrant cities, and it was marked by both wealth and environmental crisis. Where European capitalism thrived was in its capacity to turn nature into something productive and to transform that productivity into wealth. This capacity depended on a peculiar blend of force, commerce, and technology, but also something else — an intellectual revolution underwritten by a new idea: Nature as the opposite of Society. This idea gripped far more than philosophical minds. It became the common sense of conquest and plunder as a way of life. Nature's bloody contradictions found their greatest expression on capitalism's frontiers, forged in violence and rebellion — as the witch killing demonstrates.

We take for granted that some parts of the world are social and others are natural. Racialized violence, mass unemployment and incarceration, consumer cultures — these are the stuff of social problems and social injustice. Climate, biodiversity, resource depletion — these are the stuff of natural problems, of ecological crisis. But it's not just that we think about the world in this way. It's also that we make it so, acting as if the Social and the Natural were autonomous domains, as if relations of human power were somehow untouched by the web of life.

In this book, we use these words — Nature and Society — in a way that's different from their everyday use. We're capitalizing them as a sign that they are concepts that don't merely describe the world but help us organize it and ourselves. Scholars call concepts like these "real abstractions." These abstractions make statements about ontology — What is? — and about epistemology — How do we know what is? Real abstractions both describe the world and make it. That's why real abstractions are often invisible, and why we use ideas like world-ecology to challenge our readers into seeing Nature and Society as hidden forms of violence. These are undetonated words. Real abstractions aren't innocent: they reflect the interests of the powerful and license them to organize the world.

That's why we begin our discussion of cheap things with Nature. Nature is not a thing but a way of organizing — and cheapening — life. It is only through real abstractions — cultural, political, and economic all at once — that nature's activity...