We need different ideas because we

need different relationships. (Raymond

Williams, 1980: 85)

My task is an unenviable one: to think the history

of thinking about the relations between ‘culture’

and ‘nature’, all the while keeping sight of the

latter’s elusive materiality. The difficulties of

undertaking such a task are legion. To begin,

there’s the legendary problem of fixing the

meaning of my two ‘keywords’, which is why

they hang so precariously between scare quotes.

As Raymond Williams famously noted, the

terms ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ are formidably poly-

semic or, if you prefer, semantically promiscuous.

This immediately makes any discussion of the

relation between the two unstable. Unable to pin

down their cognitive content, one is forced to use

signifiers whose meaning is constantly shifting.^1

The result, potentially at least, is a form of argu-

mentative sea-sickness.

Added to this, things get no easier when we try

to think about the materiality of culture and nature.

It’s become habitual in post-Enlightenment

thought to oppose the material and the ideal, that

is, ‘hard’ facticity and ‘soft’ discursivity. In

geography, anthropology, history and beyond,

there’s a whole tradition of research into the

material making and remaking of nature/s by and

through culture/s. In recent years, the ‘matter of

nature’ – to borrow Fitzsimmons’ (1989) felici-

tous phrase – has taken on a heightened impor-

tance across the disciplines and in the wider

world. Greenhouse warming, species extinction,

acid deposition, ozone thinning, resource

exhaustion, genetic modification: these and other

purportedly epochal transformations of the natural

have alarmed and preoccupied academics, policy

makers and publics worldwide. And what is

at stake here is nature’s materiality: that is, its

ontological existence, capacities, powers and

consequences. From the plaintive cry that nature

has ended to the brave new world promises of

transgenic technologies, the focus of attention is

the physicality of those things we conventionally

call natural. But, as I hope to show in this

chapter, the materiality of nature is far from self-

evident. This is not just because the common

equation of the material and the natural is itself

problematic – after all, isn’t culture every bit as

material as nature? (Graves-Brown, 2000) – but

also because the closer we get to knowing

nature’s materiality, the more that materiality is

deferred. Herein, I will argue, lies a persistent

dilemma for research into the culture–nature

nexus. The conclusion I will ultimately drive

towards is that attempts to think about the matter

of nature take us to the very limits of thinking

itself.^2

The root of the problem, I want to argue, is the

analytical cast of so much post-Enlightenment

thinking about culture and nature. With

Descartes and Kant as its philosophical flag-

bearers, the analytical mindset works with self-

sufficientabstractions and seeks out binarisms.

Thus the exclusive categories of culture and nature

line up with a host of other suspect dualisms:

human/non-human, mind/world, representation/

reality, epistemology/ontology, ideality/materi-

ality. The critique of the analytical imaginary is

long standing and familiar and I make no claims

to originality in repeating it here. However, I also

want to argue that even its apparent opposite – a

relational imagination – can suffer the same

cognitive maladies. With Hegel, Leibniz and

Spinoza as its philosophical flag-bearers, the

relational worldview tries to stitch back together

that which is rent asunder by the analytical lexicon.

As we’ll see, by expanding the meaning of

materiality successive authors have sought to

8

Geographies of Nature in the Making

Noel Castree

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