World Cultures eJournal

Three questions that should be answered in order to understand the reason for writing and the potential importance of this and other studies in this special issue of World Cultures are: What is a cultural model? Why is it important to understand farmer’s cultural models of nature? Are there cultural models of nature particular to farmers? This paper attempts answers with  emphasis  to view cultural model of nature in terms of a functional relationship between nature and farmer. I regard this perspective as an important one because cultural models must be used in real life and studied as such if they are supposed to be anything but butterfly collections for academic discussion. I hope to show that in using their cultural models, farmers draw upon other cultural models that exist at different levels of abstraction and as part of social identities and particular contexts.