The historical discipline’s continued preference for defining “nature” within the context of the environment has proven too narrow, and as a consequence has led historians too far astray in their search for nature’s broader meaning. In the realm of Imperial German agriculture, nature came increasingly to be defined as a set of practices, often stressing traditional processes and resistances to industrialization, rather than a specific environmental or geographic place. Artisanal German vintners were the first in Europe to define their wines as natural, buffering themselves from the socially disruptive technological advances of nineteenth-century winemaking. In doing so, “nature” was appropriated as a defensive tool to ward off the democratizing effects of rational enology. Subsequently, the land—in the form of the vineyard—was made to appear to have unique, God-given characteristics, a forerunner to today’s notion of terroir. This talk will critique nature within “unnatural environments” by addressing its rootedness in agricultural practices and social dislocations.
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