The essays contained in Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture represent an attempt by
scholars from Canada Germany and Mexico to come to grips with the innovative work of the
American philosopher and anthropologist Lawrence Krader who has proposed nothing less than a
new theory of nature according to which there are at least three different orders¿the
material-biotic the quantum and the human¿which differ from one another according to their
different configurations of space-time and which cannot be reduced the one to the others. Each
author takes up Krader¿s theory in relation to its impact on their own discipline: sociology
anthropology the study of myth the theory of labor and value economics linguistics and
aesthetics. The question of how nature and culture can be integrated within a theoretical
framework which links them in difference and nexus and allows each their non-reductive space
leads each of the contributors to move in their thinking beyond the old dualisms of materialism
and idealism fact and value nature and culture.
