relations between the two domains, however the
latter are defined. This is not quite the transgres-
sion of categorial boundaries that it seems
because, as I’ll now illustrate, resort to the motifs
of ‘determinism’ and ‘determination’ has still
left Marxists saddled with the pitfalls of more
analytical approaches to culture and nature.
Moreover, these motifs fail to resolve the tricky
issue of where the materialism that Marxism
vouchsafes begins and ends.
Of the several examples I could offer, I want
to focus on just three cases of the ‘determinist’
solution to theorizing culture–nature relations.
The first concerns the maverick Marxism of Karl
Wittfogel who inverted Marx’s familiar theses
about the primacy of material production to
stress the ‘deeper’ materiality of nature. His
Oriental Despotism(1964) advocated a peculiar
form of Marxist environmental determinism
(what he called ‘geographical materalism’)
which argued that social formations – a mesh of
economic, culture, politics and more – are deci-
sively controlled by their natural resource base
(Peet, 1985), an argument later echoed indepen-
dently by Timpanaro (1975) and taken up explicitly
by environmental historian Donald Worster
(1985) in his exploration of ‘hydraulic capital-
ism’ in the western USA. The second and third
examples, by contrast, emphasize the effectivity
of ‘non-economic’ forces in concealing social
truths by resort to dubious conceptions of nature.
Here it is ideas deriving from, and functional to,
the economic ‘foundations’ of capitalist society
which make the notion of nature a cultural con-
struct. Thus Neil Smith (1984) spoke of general
and enduring ‘ideologies of nature’ in the west
which were designed to conceal the reality of
nature’s creative destruction at the hands of capital.
Similarly, David Harvey (1974) talked about
the ‘ideology of science’ operative in the neo-
Malthusian debates of the early 1970s on the
global ‘population bomb’. Whether Smith and
Harvey would label these ideologies as belonging
to the cultural domain is moot, but they certainly
seemed to arise, directly and functionally, from
economic relations. For both writers, then, the
‘culture of nature’ under capitalism is a duplici-
tous one that serves dominant class interests.
The limits of a deterministic marrying of
culture and nature are not hard to grasp. This is
why other Marxists have preferred the more flexi-
ble and open language of determination. Some of
the best examples come from Marxist analysts of
the practice of natural science. From the mid
1950s, inspired by Merton’s new sociology of
science, provoked by J.D. Bernal’s writing
and dismayed by the Frankfurt School’s bleak
reading of scientific-technical reason, severalMarxists sought to offer a more careful account
of western capitalist science in action. Early
critics – like the Radical Science Journal Collec-
tive (1974), Rose and Lewontin (1984) and
Robert Young (1979) – tended to focus on labo-
ratory science and scientific theories, while more
recent Marxists have turned their gaze to field
science. Good examples of the latter are Goodman
et al.’s From Farming to Biotechnology (1987),
LawrenceBusch et al.’s Plants, Profits and Power
(1991) and Jack Kloppenburg’s First the Seed
(1988), where plant biology is set in its specific
socio-economic context. In each case science
was/is seen as infused with class interests, in terms
of foci of research, the norms of the scientific
community, scientific funding and so forth.
The dominant class agendas and economic
imperatives of capitalist production were thus
seen not as controllingscientific practice but as
exerting definite pressures with definite out-
comes in terms of what ‘truths’ about nature
were discovered and legitimated. As in the case
of Wittfogel, Smith and Harvey, these are only
analyses of culture and nature if one stretches the
meaning of the former term to include scientific
communities, themselves embedded in a mesh of
economic relations, institutional sites and state
policies. But this is, of course, precisely what
contemporary post-Marxist analysts of science
like Donna Haraway and Hilary Rose have sub-
sequently done in an effort to argue that it is not
immune from the ‘subjective’ forces of culture.
The motifs of determinism and determination
have helped take Marxists beyond the unhelpful
separation of culture and nature. But they are
freighted with problems. Though the determinist
approach stages an encounter between culture
and nature, it does so only by way of spurious
ontological hierarchies and distinctions secured
by theoretical fiat. Thus in Wittfogel’s case
nature reigns causally supreme, while Smith and
Harvey stress economic prime causes while see-
ing ideology as a sort of cultural negative. The
causal hierarchy is much softer when the motif of
determination is invoked, but again some overly
tidy abstractions are posited such that – to revisit
the examples used above – the ‘culture’ of
science is related to, but discrete from, ‘eco-
nomic interests’. Rather than taking these dis-
tinctions as givens it is important to reflect on
their origins and epistemic status. Likewise, it’s
worth asking why some Marxists have routinely
considered that nature (for example, Wittfogel)
or economy (for example, Smith and Harvey) are
somehow ‘more material’ than culture. On top of
all this, and finally, the determinist/determina-
tion approach to culture and nature leaves one
crucial issue unresolved. However its materiality172 CULTURENATURES3029-ch08.qxd 03-10-02 10:47 AM Page 172