De-naturalization” is my favorite new term of art; I’ve heard it from several historians lately. If it’s not obvious, it means taking things that seem natural, inevitable, or just like part of the firmament and revealing them for the wacky, lucky historical accidents that they are. Because everything is.
Robin Sloan - Records made of whale blubber « Snarkmarket
Commenter Firmuhment points out:
This is a great quote, although actually Robin is wrong, the term is “defamiliarization” and has been around for years and years; it was coined in 1917 by the Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky.
I thought this was interesting, so I sent Firmuhment’s response to Robin for his consideration and he responded:
That’s interesting — I don’t know if there’s a difference, but I do know that my two historian friends specifically used “de-naturalization” — so now you’ve got me wondering if there’s a specific nuanced meaning for that term… or if they were just choosing a random word from a general set (e.g. sometimes you say “big,” sometimes you say “huge”) … hmm. Thanks for mentioning it!
As I’m thinking about it, I think there might be a difference. This is totally an uneducated guess, but: de-familiarization seems like the more general term. De-naturalization seems to specifically hinge on, well, history — and causality. De-naturalization has to do with whether something was INEVITABLE or not. So when you de-familiarize something, you make it seem strange again (and that works for stuff here & now, and for stuff from the past, etc.) When you de-naturalize it you make it seem UNLIKELY — or at least highly contingent. The result of a specific cocktail of historical factors. But, again: just a guess.
