Cultural Geography

of culture and nature, mediated as they are by

political economic relations, cannot be under-

stood discretely. With culture taken to be every

bit as material as the ‘hard’ economic and eco-

logical realities it seeks to make sense of, the

motifs of articulation and dialectic suggest an

approach which relativizesthe limits and powers

of culture/nature/economy in any given context.

In short, these domains mutually and materially

determine one another, echoing Marx’s plea that

any proper (sic) analysis of concrete situations

should attend to ‘diverse determinations’.

Of course, knowing which determinations are

at work requires that the analyst comes equipped

with appropriate abstractions. And here again,

even with the ‘matter’ of nature and culture on a

more even footing, we find Marxists like Moore

and Watts resorting to an inherited language of

difference which specifies, albeit in broad terms,

that the two domains are ontologically distinct

though related. What are needed, I would argue,

are Marxian metaphors that are rather more rela-

tional than those of articulation and dialectic –

ones which can push Cartesian-Kantian binaries

even further to the margins. Moreover, the epis-

temic problem of how Marxists can know the

materiality of culture–nature–economy remains

relatively unproblematized in Moore’s and

Watts’ work. Indeed, one can detect an almost

traditional attachment to epistemic realism in the

writings of both men, since one is left to assume

that the cognitive claims made are more-or-less

accurate ‘reflections’ of the material world being

discussed. As Bartram and Shobrook put it,

echoing Marcus Doel (2000), ‘within the

“enclosed” epistemology of nature–society

dialectics there is an assumption that nature is

still out there to be reclaimed, protected or

remade’ (2000: 373).

COUPLING AND CONJOINING

This brings me to the notions of nature–culture

couplings and conjunctions. Here culture is seen

as being ‘in’ the natural, either directly or at a dis-

tance. In other words, nature and culture are seen

here as necessarily entangled (see Thomas, 1991).

Some of the most productive Marxian work in this

area has been based on a creative rereading of

Marx’s account of commodity fetishism; other

work has attended more to the specific form of

‘value’ dominant in capitalist societies. In both

cases the materiality of culture and nature is not

only redefined; the epistemic status of knowledge

of that materiality also begins to be problematized.

Let me take each in turn.

In rather different but equally illuminating

ways, anthropologist Michael Taussig (1980)

and geographer Allan Pred (1998) have sought to

stress the physical imbrications of culture and

nature. They achieve this by way of unconven-

tional readings of what counts as the ‘economic’

and, more particularly, by way of a respecifica-

tion of commodity fetishism. In The Devil and

Commodity Fetishism in South America(1980),

Taussig’s well-known study of how indigenous

peasant communities involved in mining and

plantation agriculture in South America responded

to the sudden intrusion of market relations, he

effectively writes an anthropology of capitalism

in order to thoroughly denaturalize it. He does

this not by treating capitalism as a culturally

specific economic system that has spread out

historically from Europe – the appealing but rather

urbane attempt to collapse the economy–culture

division that I mentioned earlier – but in a more

interesting way. Echoing Lukacs’ (1971) brilliant

account of reification, Taussig seeks to ‘examine

the connections between the deepest categories

of thought and the social practices (and social

contradictions) within which that thought arises’

(Vogel, 1996: 20–1).

In other words, social ideas and thoughts –

what Marx once called ‘material forces’ in their

own right – are not mere superstructural

ephemera but the very ‘cultural’ categories that

enable daily economic (and other) practices to

occur. In capitalism, for Taussig as for Lukacs,

the commodity is emblematic of a peculiarly

estranged worldview, where ‘things’ are taken as

ontological givens that can be separated from

social relations, personal identities and ecological

contexts. As Taussig put it, ‘things stand in

some way ... for social relations. But unless we

realize that ... social relations ... are themselves

signs ... definedby categories of thought that are

also the product of society ... we remain victims

of ... the semiotic we are seeking to understand’.

(1980: 9, emphasisadded). What his book does,

in thrilling anthropological detail, is to show how

peasant communities confronted with commod-

ity culture seek to make sense of, and contest, the

mining/farming of natural landscapes. The result

is to show the fetishism and cognitive category

mistakes intrinsic in the capitalist ‘worldview’, a

worldview which fails to see the inextricable

relations between social labour, worker exploita-

tion and natural resource extraction.^17

Approaching commodities from a rather

different direction, Allan Pred has recently tried

to expand Marx’s sense of them as social relations

to think of them as natural-social-cultural rela-

tions. In this his thinking resonates with that of

anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986). His

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