As every undergraduate knows, geography
stakes its disciplinary identity on being
uniquely concerned with the interface
between human culture and natural environ-
ment. Nowhere is this better epitomized than
in the early work of Carl Sauer (1925) and the
legacy of the Berkeley School with its empha-
sis on ‘cultural landscape’ in which ‘culture is
the agent [and] the natural area the medium’.
However, even here, it is evident that this
definitive geographical concern assumes that
everything we encounter in the world already
belongs either to ‘culture’ or to ‘nature’, a divi-
sion entrenched in the very fabric of the
discipline and reinforced by the faltering
conversation between ‘human’ and ‘physical’
geography. In consequence, as human geogra-
phers set about trafficking between culture
and nature, a fundamental asymmetry in the
treatment of the things assigned to these
categories has been smuggled into the enter-
prise. Geographies, like histories, become
stories of exclusively human activity and
invention played out over, and through, an
inert bedrock of matter and objects made up
of everything else. It is a story that is writ
large in disciplinary texts like Man’s Role in
Changing the Face of Earth (Thomas et al.,
1956) and that percolates through diverse
currents of cultural geography, whether in the
guise of Marxist concerns with the ‘produc-
tion of nature’ (for example, Mitchell, 1996;Smith, 1984) or representational concerns
with the cultural politics of landscape (e.g.
Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Cosgrove and
Daniels, 1988). But it is those geographies
associated with the so-called ‘cultural turn’
that have most intensified these divisions
between the natural and the cultural, champi-
oning the ‘agent’ over the ‘medium’ to such an
extent that the world is rendered an exclu-
sively human achievement in which ‘nature’ is
swallowed up in the hubris of social construc-
tionism (Demeritt, 1998). This section of the
Handbook deals with culture’s ‘outside’ and
the fate of this pervasive exteriorization for
the things ascribed to ‘nature’ (Wolfe, 1998).
The three chapters in this section endeav-
our to retrace some of the ways in which
‘nature’ has been evacuated in cultural geo-
graphy and, more importantly, some of the
more imaginative responses to the culture–
nature antinomy that this evacuation has
occasioned in geography and elsewhere (see
Latour, 1993). The guiding ethos of these
chapters is their dissatisfaction with the
binary terms in which the question of nature
has been posed and their engagement with
currents in critical thinking that unsettle the
humanistassumptions underlying their perpet-
uation in cultural geographies of various kinds
(see Hayles, 1999). I would highlight four sets
of conversations as the most influential amidst
these efforts to fashion more-than-humanSection 3
CULTURENATURES Edited by Sarah Whatmore
Introduction: More than Human Geographies
Sarah Whatmore
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