GEOGRAPHIES OF NATURE IN THE MAKING 169breach the culture–nature divide. But by crossing
one Maginot line, these authors still run up
against another: that which separates nature’s
materiality from thought about it. In short, rela-
tionalism (or certain versions of it) has its own
analytical limits.
In order to give the discussion some focus I
propose to review a history of Marxist work into
the culture–nature nexus. This may seem an odd
focus for two reasons. First, Marxism (histori-
cally at least) is often seen as a productivist,
economistic tradition of thought with relatively
little to say about culture and even less about
nature. Second, in geography Marxism has pre-
dominantly been deployed in urban and regional
economic research, not in work on culture–
nature. However, my decision to examine Marxian
thinking is not, in fact, as peculiar as it seems. To
begin, I use the term ‘Marxism’ in the broadest
sense to designate a variegated tradition of
thought with multiple branches (Berman, 2000;
McLellan, 1999). Marxism is anything but a uni-
fied thought-field; if it has any coherence then
it’s loose indeed, hinging on Marx’s political
economy as a common reference point (however
critically and vestigially). Thus, when I use the
word ‘Marxism’ in this chapter I refer to every-
thing from the ‘classical’ work of Marx through
to ‘neo-’ or ‘post-Marxist’ writing.^3
Equipped with this ecumenical definition, a
whole world of Marxian work into culture and
nature hoves into view.^4 In addition to this, much
of this work spans the disciplines. Geography
hardly has exclusive rights to the study of culture
and nature. Though much of my discussion will
refer to the research of geographers, it would be
parochial indeed to disbar any wider discussion
of how Marxists have grappled with the
nature–culture nexus. Indeed, one of my points
will be that the dilemmas faced by Marxist geo-
graphers are by no means exclusive to them.
Finally, my focus on Marxism is, arguably, par-
ticularly apposite for any discussion of the mate-
riality of nature and culture. For the Marxian
tradition, of course, has always boasted about its
hard-headed materialism since Marx and Engels
famously declared that existence precedes con-
sciousness. More than most approaches to
culture and nature, therefore, one might expect
Marxism to offer real insights into materialism
(Williams, 1978). The insights, I hope to show,
are real enough. But, despite themselves, they
only serve to demonstrate how difficult it is to
understand the materiality of nature (and culture)
at all.^5
The chapter is structured as follows. In the
next section I show briefly how several Marxists,
following Marx, have held the problematics ofculture and nature apart and why this is not a
defensible option. I then explore ten ways in
which other Marxists have tried to rethink the
culture–nature connection. These ways can be
captured in the motifs of determinism/determina-
tion, articulation/dialectic, coupling/conjunction,
embedding, process/construction and material-
ization. As I move from the first to the last of
these we see how Marxists have increasingly
challenged analytical approaches to culture and
nature. This challenge has entailed a stretching of
the concept of materiality to encompass more
and more things. As I proceed, I will explore the
strengths and weaknesses of these ten attempts to
show how culture enters into the constitution of
nature. However, apropos of my earlier comment
about how slippery the terms ‘culture’ and
‘nature’ are, we see the meaning of each shifting
somewhat as I explore the different options.
Though this definitional variance does make the
argument rather fluid, my main point will, I
hope, be clear enough: namely, that even the
most relational of Marxist imaginaries runs up
against the problem of how to grasp nature’s
materiality. This is, I submit, a problem for all
attempts to understand how culture/s make
nature/s. As such, the dilemmas of Marxism have
a wider relevance. What is required is nothing
less than a rethinking of how we think about the
matter of culture and nature.HOLDING CULTURE AND
NATURE APARTUntil relatively recently the Marxian tradition
tended to hold the problematics of culture and
nature apart, reflecting a more deep-seated divi-
sion of thought in the western habitus. Whether
or not Marx intended it to be so, his work has
been read^6 as treating issues of culture and nature
in relative isolation and for much of the twentieth
century his epigones mimicked this bifurcated
worldview.^7 It’s not hard to understand why. On
the one side, Marx famously said very little about
nature in his major writings. What he did say – as
Schmidt’s (1971) careful act of historical recovery
showed – tended to emphasize the relations
between nature (taken as a non-human domain)
and mode of production. On the other side,
though Marx said much more about culture –
from his writings on art to his more general
claims about the relationships between ‘base’
and ‘superstructure’ – the implication was that it
was at a considerable ontological and causative
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