Cultural Geography

5 Note that in this chapter I am interested less in

‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as ideas having a material exis-

tence – though this existence is undoubtedly real and

important – and more in the ‘materiality’ of those

myraid things we choose to call natural and cultural.

6 And ‘reading’ – in the active, interpretive sense of the

word – really is the point here. There is, in my view,

little point in trying to grasp what Marx ‘really’ said

about any subject. His diverse corpus has now been

used in so many ways and contexts that the ‘real

Marx’ scarcely exists any more. Accordingly, in this

section I work with a strategic fiction: that it’s possi-

ble to say what Marx ‘did’ and ‘did not’ say in his

writings about nature and culture.

7 See, for instance, Gamble (2000) where the chapters

on nature and culture barely overlap.

8 And David Goodman (2001) has shown how the con-

cept of the labour process has functioned within

Marxism – notably in agro-food studies – as a means

of privileging economic over natural matters.

9 Neil Smith (1984) has taken this argument forward

with his thesis about the ‘production of nature’.

10 It’s interesting that the recent efforts to rethink the

culture–economy distinction in geography have not

been repeated for nature–economy. To my mind, much

of the new political economy of environment works

withinthis distinction rather than challenging it.

11 Though the point, of course, is that not everyone

would define nature, economy and culture in these

ways.

12 And it was Weber, of course, who claimed that capi-

talism was, quite literally, a culturally specific eco-

nomic system in his work on the Protestant ethic.

13 Indeed, what is striking is how two Marxist geo-

graphical books – both landmark texts – could be

published at the same time and yet say so little to the

concerns of each other. Smith’s Uneven Development

effectively bracketed out questions of culture, while

Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Land-

scapegives the concept of nature none of the careful

scrutiny and reformulation offered by Smith.

14 In addition to this, many geographers working on

human–environment relations drew upon ‘cultural

ecology’ and looked to anthropology for ways of

approaching ‘material culture’.

15 See also George Henderson’s (1999) marvellously

subtle analysis of the material transformation of rural,

late-nineteenth-century California and its representa-

tion in popular literature.

16 For another Marxist study that is similarly attuned to

the overdetermination of nature/culture/economy see

Alicja’s Muszynski’s Cheap Wage Labour: Race and

Gender in the Fisheries of British Columbia(1996).

17 The thinking of Peter Dickens (1996) on the alien-

ation from nature intrinsic to capitalist societies

echoes some of Taussig’s ideas in this regard.

18 In the work of Fine et al. (1996) this commodity

chain approach has been given an even greater eco-

logical emphasis through a concentration on food, a

‘cultural commodity’ par excellencebut one whose

organic character affects both the production and

consumption ends of the chain; see also Goodman

and Redclift (1991).

19 Though not exclusively or even largely Marxian in

tone, the journal Environmental Valuesis doing much

to critique the hegemonic valuation of nature in

capitalist societies.

20 Though it’s in his novels that Williams’ under-

standing of culture and nature is arguably best

expressed.

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