This book brings together chapters written by scholars providing a wide interdisciplinary background (anthropology, archaeology, comparative religion, art history, philosophy, and biology). It offers both descriptive data on the way non-Western people conceive what Westerners call Nature, and philosophical investigations into meaning of this concept in Western thought. The book intends not only to demonstrate how very differently humans think about the elusive concept of Nature, it also tries to show where primitive thought and Western philosophy meet.