historical ascent outof nature. Indeed the earliest andmost persistent notion of ‘civilization’
in the classical anthropology handed down by humanism is the story of the temporal process
through which humanity strives to raise itself out of an animal state. Civilization in this sense
is the realization of humanity as ‘truly human’, conceived as a movement away from mere
living things that live (Glendinning, 2000). Still today, world historians see agriculture as the
developmental threshold that propelled this movement, leading to the emergence of the great
regional traditions of human civilization (for example, Smith, 1995). Nature’s cultivation is
construed as the turning point that launched humanity out of a raw existence and set it on its
diverse ‘civilizing’ paths.
For Carl Sauer, writing from the 1920s in the American context, ‘culture’ was the name
given to this evolutionary force behind the imprints that people left on the earth. The richness
of Sauer’s work lay in his attention to the variable expressions of its influence in regional con-
texts across the Americas and beyond. More generally, he wrote: ‘Man alone ate of the fruit
of the tree of Knowledge ... and thereby began to acquire and transmit learning, or Culture’
(1956: 2). His overriding point – taken up by numerous followers in the Berkeley School
of cultural geography and beyond – was the instrumental role of culture as a ‘universal
capacity’ of ‘even the most primitive people, including the obtuse Tasmanians’ (1952: 11) to
turn nature into culture. Even they, it was granted by Sauer, were uniquely human.
Buried within Sauer’s brand of cultural relativism lies some residual primitivism that con-
tinues to fuel that pervasive hierarchy of the premodern and the modern. Indeed the example
of these ‘obtuse’ Australians, who neither domesticated plants and animals nor settled in nodes
around them, affords an opportunity to augment the critical race theory of anti-
colonial studies with a critique of an equally powerful civilizational discourse. For the linking
of culture, cultivation and human potentiality turns a spotlight on a peculiar humanist
politics– one that bears more scrutiny from cultural geographers. This applies in at least two
senses, the excavation of which brings cultural geography’s long-standing interest in the
culture/nature interface into contact with themes of race and empire.
First, the coupling of nature’s cultivation and ‘civilization’ reveals a representational conceit
within many of the world’s cultural traditions: that the hand of a universalized human entails
a supersession of (animal) nature. By now, such a view sits uncomfortably with the critiques
of the dualism of humanity/animality on which that and other premises of philosophical
humanism depend (Glendinning, 1996; Pearson, 1997). Within cultural geography, one finds
that evolutionary as well as more recent symbolicconceptions locate culture in a sealed,
species-specific sphere of humanity. Both conceptions rely on a model of humanity as an
essentialized condition and status opposed to animality. Crucially this includes human
animality, which has long since been conceived as the substrate of ‘biology’ on which ‘culture’
is thought to sit (see Ingold, 1995). The capacities of consciousness, sociability and intention-
ality which make up that superstructure of ‘culture’, and which are thought to uniquely equip
humans with the ability to transcend nature, are taken to be defining measures of the human.
Not only does this deep-seated view overlook the evidence for such capacities in beings
additional to the human – as witness the emerging field of ‘animal geography’(see Section 3 in
this book) – it also privileges a restrictive figuration of ‘the human’ and human history.
Second, the image in western tradition of the earth as garden assumes a teleological
course of agrarian land use and livelihood that carries not only a heavy humanist baggage,
but an ethnocentric one as well. In this tale, the movement of history is the march of human-
ity which has its ultimate manifestation in the secure enclosure of the bounded city. There20 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 20