"Creature of nature", eh?

See, one thing about exploring such a question anthropologically (you don't want to say "sociologically" unless you're talking the science. If you do, then we want to be quoting studies or specific and precise "models" at each other) is that the whole idea of "nature" in general is its own construction.

Like the lines between races... and like the lines between gender itself (which Jin talks about), the line betwen "cultural" and "natural" is also pretty arbitrary. Cultures emerge in specific locations and are as shaped by the topography, climate, and local resources as any given species of animal... perhaps more so in some ways and are very much a natural object. On the other hand, nature itself is constantly being constructed and produced by the creatures that live in it: The soil is where it is because fungi produced it, trees crunch rocks over time, the bird pulls random elements from afar to create a nest in a precise location, animals drink water out of one stream and piss it into another...

Somehow we've decides as a whole that cities are unnatura and forests are natural... even though the forest has been utterly reshaped by every creature in there. The idea of a "forest" itself is a location utterly bounded by the life that lives in there; where the trees stop, the forest stops.
____________

But, yeah. Avoiding the issue of whether we should be using the word "nature" as some sort of distinction. I do want to try and play with your question some and some of the answers:

By Ragtime
All in all, I think men are less in touch with their true nature than women because a man's nature is more influened by the change in society and technology than a woman. No matter how much society and technology advances, women will always have that maternal part of them because women will always (at least I hope so) go through the 9 months of pregnancy, give birth to them and breast feed them (although this is becoming less and less popular).
This is OLD SKOOL.

Basically from the Classical (Greek/Roman model) until... umm... something like last week... people have been playing this game of Childbirth -> NATURAL.

Childbirth is no more a biological process than eating, breathing, or pooping, but we tend to make an extra special deal about it.... perhaps a bigger deal than our instincts do. Watch the way your body and mind reshapes itself around missing a day or two of water. Affects me wayyy more than months without sex. Affects women wayyy more than a LIFETIME with out childbirth.

Things were Classically construed like so:
There are two kinds of production available to humans:
1) The production of other lives (have sex, wait a few months, have child)
2) The production of cultural products (tools, cities, art, knowledge, etc.)

The division was then gendered. Producing children is a feminine act. A male that runs around making his life having sex with many women would be regarded as "sensuous" (which is a gender-loaded idea). He's doing the most biologically male thing, of course, but he's simply fulfilling his role in a feminine process.

Producing stuff became a masculine act. And when you have ideas like that, you can easily imagine men continually doing their masculine thing of invention and creating as somehow getting "further" from nature as each future production is made within the context of previous productions.

What emerged from this constructed distinction is a centuries long subjugation of women and in the end not taking them really seriously until the 20th century. Even big deal feminist tracts like Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the rights of Women had to nest pleas for women's education in the performance of mothering roles.


But like I said, nothing about childbirth is inherently more "natural" than fulfilling basic survival needs. In the ways that we are all bound by hunger, thirst, aversion from pain, and the desire to assure those things before we move onto other concerns, we are all still "creatures of instinct" across gender and do so more than others.

Also, in the way that we use cultural tools to fulfill needs, there is nothing less natural about the cultural resources we use to facilitate nutrition (farmer, farm, FDA, factory, truck, supermarket, thoroughly-modern-kitchen) than the resources we use to facilitate childbirth (OBGYN, pain meds, hospital, bed, chair, baby courses, maternity leave, maternal yoga, maternity wear, artificially induced contractions, C-section)

Moving on.


By palette
We aren't role playing our natural instinctive behaviors because the world around us has responded to those and made life a lot more easier. We've become creative, intelligent individuals and have adapted.
Can I say, before I respond, that "palette" is a really cool screen name?
Anyways:

Instinct and the natural world are always in dialogue. Being physically capable of a huge range of behaviors, primate bodies don't have much shifting to do in order to be able to fulfill the requirements of natural selection. Instead, natural selection has been mainly reshaping the behaviors of primates. If a given creature does not have the appropriate behavioral equipment to maintain proximity to parents (in psychology, we call these instinctual behaviors: "Attachment behaviors"), then it won't learn adult skills or maybe even won't survive to the age where it could.

Also, there's the issue that our culture is formed by us as instinctual creatures. So many cultural notions will form around instinctual processes. I'm the most familiar with attachment research, so let me use that as an example again:

As soon as the baby can reliably identify faces, it starts to prefer "familiar" faces and starts to feel distressed by "unfamiliar" faces. A mom can pass a newborn around to any visitor to coo at it. But only a year later, the baby suddenly becomes terrified of strangers.

Humans observing, "Hey! It seems the baby gets on better with the mother," will produce cultural notions that support it. An idea of "motherhood," Hallmark cards, poetry, skills, training, dolls for babies, etc.

It won't easily produce an idea of "passing that baby around-hood" (though, if the environmental concerns that might make such a behavior work are pressing enough, then maybe it will)


So because of those two ideas, you can consider that humans are never far from their instincts. The culture we exist in grows out of our instincts, so even in "complex" cultures, our instincts persist. And to the extent that a culture might "stray" from a given instinct, our instincts will then adapt.
_______________


My wrists are tired, and I'm hungry. But I suppose that's enough for now.