Cultural Geography

work of the eco-Marxists mentioned above – can

also be viewed as an ecological critique of the

‘culture of capitalism’: a ‘culture’ that makes

nature but a means to the soulless end of accu-

mulation.^12 However, while fair enough in its

own right, this attempt to equate the economic

and the cultural inevitably misses far too much

about those various practices and representations

we have now come to associate with ‘culture’.

Additionally, it’s probably true to say that neither

Marx nor Schmidt et al. intended their writings

on nature to be read primarily as a critique of

capitalism’s peculiar ‘cultural economy’.

In any case, several of Marx’s twentieth-

century epigones explicitly dissented from Marx

by seeking to bind together the problematics of

culture and nature in a more formal way, in part

by redefining the meaning of the two terms. Key

here were those ‘western Marxists’ Adorno,

Horkheimer and Marcuse. Through a creative

fusion of Marx, Weber, Freud and other theorists,

their melancholic diagnosis of ‘instrumental

reason’ posited nature as capitalist modernity’s

utopian ‘other’: at once an unattainable source

of redemption and yet something, tragically,

which was increasingly dominated by western

societies (Vogel, 1996). Then, to offer a second,

very different, less theoreticist example, there

were the magisterial writings of French historian

Fernand Braudel. Never a Marxist in the ortho-

dox sense, Braudel dissolved the false partitions

dividing nature, economy and culture in a seam-

less story of human–environment translations

and transformations.

I will say more about the Frankfurt School, the

kind of ‘embedded’ Marxism that Braudel articu-

lated, and a host of other Marxian attempts to

link nature and culture later, but what’s notable

is that these and other critical reworkings of

Marx’s materialism were largely ignored during

human geography’s early engagements with

historical materialism. Overlooking virtually a

century of Marxist work after Marx, the pecu-

liarity of Marxism’s importation into the disci-

pline was just how orthodox it was, with David

Harvey as the principal advocate of a ‘classical’

version. This, I think, helps explain why Marxist

geographers – like Marx himself, only 100 years

later – for a long time tended to treat culture and

nature separately, if at all. Virtually ignored

through the 1970s and 1980s, when Marxist geo-

graphers were preoccupied with studying the

capitalist space economy, they received initial

attention only in isolation.

Thus, to take two representative examples,

there was Denis Cosgrove’s (1985) cultural

materialism on the one hand – a new, innovative

approach to cultural landscapes – and Neil

Smith’s (1984) insightful theorization of nature

on the other.^13 True, Cosgrove’s work did

impinge directly on the culture–nature question,

in part because it drew upon the synthetic mate-

rialism of Raymond Williams (of which more

anon) (Daniels, 1989). But by and large Cosgrove

and Smith were speaking different languages,

albeit within the broad parameters of the Marxist

tradition. And yet all along, of course, human

geography had had its own tradition of thought –

and a materialist one at that – which placed the

culture–nature nexus centre-stage: namely,

Sauer’s brand of cultural landscape study, which

was at once intellectually ambitious and empiri-

cally exacting.^14 Far too ‘bourgeois’ and conven-

tional for the early Marxist geographers, this

Sauerian attempt to synthesize cultural process

and environmental change was largely bypassed;

even as an object of critique it barely figured

in the first writings on nature by geographi-

cal Marxists like Neil Smith, Phil O’Keefe

(Smith and O’Keefe, 1980) and David Harvey

(1974). So it was that, until recently at least,

human geographers working within, or respond-

ing critically to, the Marxist tradition illicitly

kept nature and culture in separate intellectual

boxes.

Of course, this has all changed over the last

decade or so, in part because human geography’s

‘cultural turn’ has been achieved by extending

the compass of culture and breaking down those

analytical divisions that have for too long impris-

oned it in a discrete ontological space. But, as I

noted above with the examples of Adorno et al.

and Braudel, Marxists outside geography have

for decades sought to span the culture–nature

divide. These spanning operations, within geo-

graphy and without, have entailed a challenge to

the ‘common-sense’ Cartesian-Kantian mindset

that many Marxists since Marx have flirted with,

even as they have sought to accent the relational

worldview Marx critically adopted from Hegel

and his forebears. I now want to explore these

different attempts to think the culture–nature

relation from a materialist perspective. My

review is illustrative rather than exhaustive and

in no sense chronological. As we’ll see, the

closer Marxists and their interlocutors seem to

get to the matter of culture–nature, the more

elusive that materiality becomes.

DETERMINISM AND

DETERMINATION

One solution to the dichotomization of culture

and nature has been to think about the causal

GEOGRAPHIES OF NATURE IN THE MAKING 171

3029-ch08.qxd 03-10-02 10:47 AM Page 171