sought to trace the intimate, organic ties binding
specific social formations to specific environ-
ments. True, Braudel was concerned with the
longue duréeof regional change, while Kautsky
(1988) was concerned with the ‘problem’ of agri-
culture in modern capitalism. For Braudel (1972;
1973), the issue was how diverse places, ecolo-
gies and cultures in southern Europe, from the
Middle Ages onwards, became connected
together in extended mercantile trading networks
and, later, a nascent capitalist economy. For
Kautsky, in The Agrarian Question, the issue
was more specific: how and why were ‘pre-
capitalist’ class relations surviving in an economic
sector (agriculture) at once directly dependent on
nature and vital to sustaining the wider expan-
sion of a capitalist way of life in the nineteenth
century? But these differences notwithstanding,
in both cases an attempt was made to respect the
routinized flows of materials and practices
wherein the labels ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’
became fuzzy to the point of being slightly irrel-
evant. Culture, nature and economy were each
depicted as medium and outcome of, or condition
and cause for, the others.
In more recent times we owe our understand-
ing of the term ‘embeddedness’ to Karl Polanyi
(1944) and Mark Granovetter (1985). In spirit at
least, something of what Polanyi and Granovetter
were trying to communicate about ‘the economy’
has been achieved vis-à-vis nature–culture by a
new generation of Third World political ecolo-
gists and by a cohort of agrarian political econo-
mists. I can only consider one of many possible
examples here: Miriam Wells’ wonderful Straw-
berry Fields (1996), a detailed study of class and
work in rural California. Going against the grain
of Marx’s thinking, Wells seeks to explain the
‘reversion’ from wage labour to share-cropping
in strawberry production. What emerges is a
nuanced story of how ecology, class, ‘moral dis-
course’, cultural norms and the law are mutually
shaped in a particular time and place with very
specific effects. Refusing Marx’s apparently
presumptive materialism, Wells’ analysis is, in
other words, responsive to local detail not theore-
tical diktat – a move that has clearly bothered
some (Walker, 1997). Consequently, Strawberry
Fields identifies no ‘essential’ processes and
directs our attention instead to what Williams
(1978: 7) aptly called the ‘constituted material-
ity’ that is distributed throughout the nature–
economy–culture nexus.
It was Williams himself, of course, who in the
1970s and 1980s gave theoretical voice to the sen-
sitivity that authors like Wells have since sought
to express.^20 In Problems in Materialism and
Culture (1980) he challenged the balkanization ofknowledge in Marxism that confined materialism
to a privileged ontological zone. As such, his
‘cultural materialism’ was a creative attempt to
rethink nothing less than the materiality of histori-
cal materialism. More than other cultural Marx-
ists of his generation – such as E.P. Thompson –
Williams was deeply interested not only in how
culture and nature were connected but in how
these categories themselves emerged and func-
tioned in capitalist societies. Though these
interests were crisply articulated in his more
theoretical essays, it was in Williams’ novels –
such as Border Country– that the sedimentation
of culture, environment and production were
most sensitively explored (Harvey, 1995). In a
sense what Williams shows is that we live in an
a world of interconnected ‘local capitalisms’
whose common capitalist character is deeply
modified by lived cultures and animate ecolo-
gies. This said, Williams’ thinking about culture
and nature cannot easily be pigeonholed under
the category ‘embedding’. But since I don’t want
this essay to become an exploration of Williams’
polymorphous oeuvre, I will simply state that
some of the other work reviewed in this essay
owes a real debt to his thinking in this area.
Like the work considered in the previous
section there is much to recommend these attempts
to embed culture and nature in each other. But a
persistent problem that I have highlighted through-
out this chapter remains. Even if culture and nature
are placed on an equal onto-explanatoryfooting,
with economic relations hovering somewhere
nearby, this does not answer a key question
raised earlier: how can one come to know the
matter of the nature that is being remade by, and
yet helping to constitute, specific social forma-
tions? For if, as all of the authors I’ve discussed so
far indicate in different ways, nature as such
scarcely exists outside cultural, economic and
other relations, then presumably we still need a
way to authorize any claims about it. This is
particularly so if we are to respect the fact that
while those things we call natural do not exist
tout court, they nonetheless have material capa-
cities that are not the sameas those of culture or
economy (however we define the latter two
terms). As I want to illustrate in the next two
sections, several contemporary Marxists (ortho-
dox, neo- and post-) have only really addressed
this question by displacing it.PROCESS AND CONSTRUCTIONOne solution to the question posed above is to
reject it. After all, the question rests on the hope176 CULTURENATURES3029-ch08.qxd 03-10-02 10:47 AM Page 176