Cultural Geography

argument works by attending to the two ‘ends’ of

the commodity chain that Marx, in his late politi-

cal economy, artificially closed off for discussion.

On the one side, along with many contemporary

cultural geographers, Pred insists that we attend

to the moment of commodity consumption as an

active partner in the reproduction of economic

life. On the other hand, he argues that commod-

ity fetishism – that structural misrecognition of

both the origins and social content of capitalist

goods – has a hitherto little-explored link to

nature. For, though value in capitalism is for

Marxists defined in terms of social labour, the

material wealth (use value) embodied in com-

modities ultimately derives from the extraction

and remaking of natural entities. By ‘denatu-

ralizing consumption’ Pred thus seeks to make

visible a whole world of hidden connections

between, say, the purchase and use of elaborately

marketed cashmere garments and the socio-

ecological exploitation attendant upon their

production. For Pred, we must, in sum, trace the

whole chain of connections from consumption

(culture) through economy (social labour) to

nature (use values) – and back again – in an act

of profane illumination.^18 Similar arguments

have been made by Elaine Hartwick (1998) in

her materialist deconstruction of the semiotics of

diamond consumption in the west.

Pred’s analysis links well with the second

body of Marxian work on culture–nature

couplings and conjunctions I want to consider. This

work focuses more upon the form of value domi-

nant in capitalist societies and the way it affects

human–environmental relations. Though pitched

at different levels of abstraction, the arguments

articulated in Chapter 7 of David Harvey’s

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference

(1996) and in John Foster’s edited book Valuing

Nature (1997) have an elective affinity. Harvey

anatomizes the ‘value form’ which, in capitalist

societies, environments, cultural artifacts and

social relations assume. Foster looks at the hege-

monic languages used to measure and act upon

the environment in a world where capitalist

money (the representation of labour value)

serves to commensurate diverse systems of

cultural evaluation. In both cases labour value is

treated not simply as an ‘economic’ measure but

as one of several possible value systems in

western and non-western cultures. Harvey’s and

Foster’s point is not just that labour value is an

increasingly dominant value sphere worldwide –

thereby displacing other ways of valuing nature –

but that it envelops nature both discursively (as,

for example, in the language of ‘free market

environmentalism’) and physically (as when nat-

ural entities become means to the end of value

expansion). Here, then, we see labour value as

the chrematistic thread that brings nature into the

ghostly universe of capitalist social relations.^19

The strengths of the motifs of coupling and

conjunction are threefold. First, culture, nature

and economy almost dissolve one into the other;

though ontologically different they are practi-

cally interfused. Second, in the studies reviewed

above, little or no attempt is made to install

causal hierarchies; the matter of culture and

nature is relatively coequal. Finally, the criticism

of fetishism and the critique of value both call

into question conventional or received ways of

knowing nature – thus relativizing the question

of how the matter of socio-environmental life is

to be understood ‘correctly’. Depending on

where one is situated historico-geographically –

Taussig’s peasants, Pred’s consumer, Harvey’s

and Foster’s unthinking appropriator of capitalist

value definitions – one’s knowledge of nature

varies dramatically. And yet, this said, in Taus-

sig, Pred, Harvey and Foster there’s arguably a

hint of residual naturalism. That is, one detects a

yearning to ‘uncover’ ‘hidden realities’ with the

implication that what is revealed is somehow of

‘deeper’ importance than other moments of, or

perspectives on, the socio-ecological world in

which we exist. With Taussig and Pred, the motif

of fetishism threatens to revert to a depth meta-

physics where some material ‘essence’ lies

behind duplicitous ‘appearances’ (Castree,

2001; Cook and Crang, 1996). Similarly, with

Harvey and Foster, there’s an epistemic double-

play, wherein the Marxist analyst lays claim to

corrective vision for the ideologically near

sighted. In other words, at some level all four

authors claim – implicitly and unreflexively – to

stand above or outside that which they critique: a

‘critical distance’ that precisely allows them to

make the cognitive claims they make.

EMBEDDING

This problem is not resolved in the fourth of the

Marxian motifs for conceptualizing culture–nature

relations that I want to review here: that of

embedding. This motif directs us to work that is

less theoretical and more empirically grounded

than much of that I’ve discussed so far. Though

they never formally described their work using

the term, the concern to disclose the ‘embedded-

ness’ of economic activities in specific ecologies

and cultures arguably animated the very different

writings of Fernand Braudel and Karl Kautsky.

Abjuring the seemingly arid abstractions of

Marxian modes of production theory, both men

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