[JSRNC 2.2 (2008) 258-268] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1363-7320 doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v2i2.258 JSRNC (online) ISSN 1743-1689 © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW. _______________________________________ REVIEW ESSAY Social Nature: Collapsing Dichotomies without Unraveling the Fabric of Things _______________________________________ Adrian Ivakhiv Environmental Program, University of Vermont, 153 S. Prospect Street, Burlington VT 05401, USA Adrian.Ivakhiv@uvm.edu Noel Castree, Nature (Key Ideas in Geography; London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 312 pp., $38.95, ISBN: 9780415339056. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network- Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 320 pp., $43.95, ISBN 13: 9780199256044. John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 200, $54.95, ISBN: 978-0-415-34175-2. The world might be imagined as a web held together through oppositions, force fields of tension overlaid against each other in a delicate network that holds everything we know in the elastic space stretched between the opposable thumbs of multiple, invisible hands. By the world, I do not necessarily mean atoms, photons and light rays, proteins and cells, bodies, structures, systems, and planets. I mean the world as an experienced, interpreted, storied, affective domain of relations, identifications, and involvements. In that world, or worlds (since they are differently experi- enced and conceived by every world-bearing being), meanings and values are conferred through distinction and differentiation: this is better than that, we do this and they do that, once upon a time things were this way but now they are much worse (or better), and so on. We organize the patterns and regularities we see, over time, into categories such as darkness and light, earth and sky, cold and warm, raw and cooked, male and female, and then stitch these categories into bundles: dark-earth-female vs. light-sky- male, or variations along these lines. These categories become the ways we