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Nature and the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography

Article  in  Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift · April 2008

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Year: 1998

Title: Nature and the "cultural turn" in human geography

Journal: Norsk geogr. Tidsskr., Vol 00, 00-00. Oslo. ISSN 0029-1951

Abstract: In international human geography one of the most interesting developments the last

years has come from the so-called cultural turn and "new" cultural geography. This article deals

with the conceptualisation of culture within "old" and "new" cultural geography. It will show that

the recent reinterpretation of culture also concerns conceptualisations of nature. What is striking

here is that in the process from "old" to "new" cultural geography, the culture-nature relationship

has been lost in favour of a society-space relationship. This is the outset for a critique of

conceptualisations of culture from a feminist perspective. The article concludes that an

integration of the cultural turn with feminist perspectives (French feminism and environmental

feminism) will create a more fruitful approach to the conceptualisation of both culture and nature,

which is at the core of human geography.

Name: Inger J. Birkeland

Address: Department of Sociology and Human Geography,

University of Oslo,

PO Box 1096 Blindern,

N-0317 Oslo,

Norway
2
NATURE AND THE "CULTURAL TURN" IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Inger J. Birkeland

THE CULTURAL TURN

During the past twenty years we have witnessed a new interest in culture within international

human geography associated with the so-called "cultural turn". The turn to culture is connected

both to fundamental changes in modern societies and to the way we think about these changes.

Enormous social changes have come about as a result of the globalizing processes. The

globalization of the economy and the enormous development of information and communication

technologies have had consequences for all levels of society. The growing environmental

problem is only one example of the consequences of the development. One problem that arises

from this development relates to the sphere of language, theoretical discourse, knowledge and

truth. The fact is those old models of the world no longer work in today's society. There is a need

for new models, and new maps, which can bring new knowledge and new solutions to the

problems. The turn to culture has therefore also been labelled a "linguistic turn", which stresses

the significance of language for constructions of knowledge. In this article I use the cultural turn

as a term that covers both.

I generally see the cultural turn as a very open field, not restricted to one single position,

and not limited only to human geography. For each of the human sciences (humanities and social

sciences) the cultural turn has led to a discovery of new approaches and other ways of thinking.

3
Much inspiration has for example come from the development of philosophy within this century

and the way this has been introduced to the individual disciplines. I am in particular thinking

about phenomenology, hermeneutics and a differentiated group of philosophical ideas called

poststructuralism. These have been influential in terms of providing researchers in the various

disciplines with interpretative and deconstructionist approaches (Alvesson 1996). Within human

geography some of the most interesting works, in terms of most cited works in a Nordic context,

has come from Anglo-American geography (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, Gregory and Ley 1988,

Cosgrove 1996, Jackson 1989, Philo 1991, Barnes and Duncan 1992, Ley and Duncan 1993,

Gregory 1994, Price and Lewis 1993). However, it must be mentioned that the renewed interest

in culture not only refers to Anglo-American geography. The cultural turn is as evident in

continental geography (represented by Swiss, Italian and French geographers) as it is in Anglo-

American geographyi. In this article I will however deal only with Anglo-American geography.

In the Nordic context the cultural turn has been met with a remarkable silence. There are a

few who explicitly have shown an interest in the cultural turn (Gren 1994) or commented on the

relevance of the cultural turn (Simonsen 1996). The debate among Norwegian geographers has,

as far as I can see, been kept among those who already have an interest in cultural processes. This

discussion has taken place outside formal arenas like this journal. It seems that the cultural turn is

associated with confusing and changing content, and that the differences in perspectives and

approaches that lies behind the development are unknown to many. If we are interested in

understanding the relevance of human geography for society today I will argue that it is

extremely important to understand both the possibilities and the limitations of the recent cultural

turn.

4
 My concern in this article is therefore to explore the relevance of the cultural turn for

human geography. First, the relationship between nature and culture will be presented as central

for the legitimation of human geography. Next, general conceptualisations of culture will be

presented in order to locate an analytical concept of culture relevant for human geography. I will

then discuss the concept of culture as it has been used within Anglo-American cultural

geography. The focus will be on the Berkeley school of cultural geography and the “new”

cultural geography as it appears in Britain. This discussion shows that in the process from "old"

to "new" cultural geography, an interest in the culture-nature relationship that characterised the

Berkeley school was lost in favour of a society-space relationship in "new" cultural geography.

While the concept of culture in "old" cultural geography was flawed, the concept of culture in

"new" cultural geography has lost touch of its basic relationship to the concept of nature. Inspired

by the recent feminist critique of a particular form of reasoning in Western philosophy connected

to dualist thinking, I will question the problematic and lacking understanding of the culture-

nature relationship in both these traditions. The critique shows that the concept of culture is

constructed in contradistinction to the concept of nature, either explicitly or implicitly. This pair

of concepts is structured according to gender difference in a particular way. Over time we have

seen an equation between 'nature' and 'women' in contradistinction from 'culture' and 'men'. The

meaning of nature is constructed through its connectedness to women and femininity, while the

meaning of culture is constructed through its separation from both women and nature. My point

is that this critique points to the legitimation of human geography as a discipline. The article will

take this critique one step further and show that it is possible to integrate the reinterpretation of

culture with a more fertile understanding of the nature-culture relationship. This integration

5
opens up not only for a reinterpretation of nature, but for a reinterpretation of the nature of human

geography.

CULTURE AND NATURE IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH TRADITIONS

It is quite paradoxical to look back at the history of geography, not only for ten or twenty years,

but for several centuries. Geographers have over the centuries contributed in shaping a political

and economic world which we today are struggling to repair both environmentally, economically

and culturally. The environmental crisis that is experienced throughout the world is really one of

the most pressing questions today. As I see it this question is particularly important to bear in

mind when reconsidering the concept of culture in human geography. As I will show later in this

article, the struggle to repair the environmental crisis is connected to conceptualisations of culture

in a fundamental way. This will be evident when we focus on the changing understandings of

geography's object of study within the different geographical research traditions.

Both human and physical geography share a mutual history that has developed over

several centuries, and to me the relationship between culture and nature, the human world and the

natural world, society and nature, represents the core of geography, both for human and physical

geography. Since the fifteenth century and onwards geographers have contributed to the

development of Europe and its nations through mapping the surface of the earth (Livingstone

1993). Geography became very early related to the young and rapidly modernising nations of the

developed world since these nations were in need of knowledge for colonist and imperialist

purposes. Knowledge of the world represented thus knowledge of the natural world in terms of

6
distribution of wealth, raw materials, vegetation, soil, plants and animals, population. Such

knowledge was of course closely related to growing trade, where geographers joined in

commercial expeditions. Such knowledge was also a necessary premise for warfare and for the

building of empires. This disciplinary history is mirrored in the establishment of the "Royal

Geographical Society" in England in 1830. In Norway "Det Norske Geografiske Selskab" was

established in 1889 when Fridtjov Nansen returned from his expedition to Greenland.

Any legitimation of geographical knowledge at any period of time relates to the particular

ways geographers construct their object of study. From the fifteenth century and onwards the

object of study for geographers represented the natural world as it was used, named, tamed,

exploited and made habitable by human beings. Even from the beginning we cannot think of

geography without thinking of culture. The legitimation of human geography in modern societies

is put in other words, and in often different and conflicting ways. Geographical knowledge in

modern societies has been closely connected to the development of modern state institutions, to

the notion of modernity itself, and to the role of knowledge in modern societies. It seems

reasonable to say that as geographers we share the mutual history of a discipline that has been

particularly interested in the relationship between human societies and their use of nature and

space. I am in other words concerned about how human geographers conceptualise both culture

and nature. The central question is not that culture is conceptualised, but what kind of

conceptualisation is presented.

CONCEPTS OF CULTURE

7
What conceptions of culture will work for human geography today? What conceptualisations of

culture will help us to deal with the environmental crisis? There is no simple answer to this

question. The meaning of the concept of culture at any point of time within the history of

geography has changed due to the changing legitimation of the discipline. The problem at hand

for the geographer structures in many ways how the concept of culture is understood. Culture is a

very difficult, contested and open concept. There are many possible definitions of culture and not

one single will avoid criticism. Marianne Gullestad has suggested three ways to conceptualise

culture, and below I have used her three categories in order to provide human geography with a

viable concept of culture (Gullestad 1989). These are not definitions, but ways of referring to

culture. We may distinguish between culture as 1) a sector in society, 2) a condition for action,

meaning and communication, and 3) a holistic way of life (lifemode). The human sciences have

many different concepts of culture, but generally it is preferred to speak of culture in terms of a

holistic way of life, and as condition for meaning and communication. In the next section I will

show how and why the holistic concept of culture is most useful for human geography.

1) Culture as sector in society

Culture is often understood as one of the many sectors of society. If we think of society as a cake,

culture is thought to be one of the pieces of society. Culture here means art as activity and art

products; that is theatre performances, music, literary works, visual arts. This way to talk of

culture is of little relevance for the human sciences, even if the activities and products of the

culture sector are objects for research in the human sciences.

This understanding does not work if we want a concept of culture to work as an analytical

tool. This is because culture understood as the cultural sector originates in an understanding of

8
culture connected to the cultural elite of society, which represents the favoured and privileged

group of human beings in society. This conceptualisation is problematic since it can be argued

that all human beings both have culture and are cultural human beings. We need a broader

conceptualization of culture that includes all members of society, and we need to be able to

distinguish between differences in culture and between cultures in a fruitful way. An analytical

concept of culture needs some sort of relativisation in order to account for cultural differences,

complexities and hierarchies (Hastrup 1988). Relativisation of the concept of culture can be done

in different ways, but the classical way is to look for contrasts. One way of giving meaning to

culture is e.g is to study contrasts between different cultures. An other way is to contrast culture

with the meaning of nature. A third way again is to search for a concept of culture which retains

its relationship to nature, and which is able to account for differences between cultures, however

in other ways than through contrasts. This is a solution that I will come back to later in this

article.

2) Culture as premise for action, communication and meaning

It is impossible to present one conceptualisation of culture that all may agree upon. Even so, a

general conception of culture in the human sciences is that it is a premise for action,

communication and meaning. This means that culture represents a sort of resource, knowledge,

or premise, which human beings learn through socialisation, and which they employ and

transform through practical use. Culture as resource or knowledge means that culture is that

which actualises action, communication and meaning. Culture therefore represents implicit or

explicit skills which most often are given names such as: values, norms, ideologies, ideas,

thought patterns, symbols, languages. One familiar example is to equate the concept of culture

9
with ideology. A common understanding of ideology is that it represents a form of knowledge

that is used among groups of human beings to communicate or highlight certain forms of

meaning, and to hide or repress other forms of meaning. This concept of culture is relevant in

order to understand how power works within society.

This is a classical concept of culture within the human sciences. Human geographers

interested in this concept of culture are focused on the spatial variations in culture: how symbols,

ideologies and thought patterns vary across space and time. Culture is not represented as a mental

"thing" that materialises in space and time, it is simultaneously constructed as a part of the social

world. However, there is a weakness in this conceptualisation of culture as I see it for the future

of human geography. This conceptualisation of culture does not contain any conceptualisation of

nature, which I see as essential for a concept of culture that will work for human geography.

3) Culture as a way of life

A classic understanding of culture has been to equate it with a way of life. Culture as a way of

life characterises a group of human beings' holistic way of thinking and living. Culture as a way

of life is similar to a usual way of talking about culture in everyday language; as farming

cultures, coast cultures, nomadic cultures, working class culture, youth culture, women's culture,

Indian culture. This is a holistic concept of culture. When culture is taken to mean way of life it

may result in culturalism, which means that culture is studied without seeing it in relation to

social processes. It represents an idealist understanding of culture. Raymond Williams (in

Jackson 1989:157) has once said that culture is the most complicated word in the English

language, and criticised culturalist interpretations of culture. In Peter Jackson's presentation of

Williams' ideas (ibid), it is clear that culture understood as way of life can be traced back to

10
romanticism and German philosophy in the nineteenth century. Culture became then one of those

"key words" which stems from the same historical period and which has had great impact on later

thought. The concept of culture thus became synonymous to civilisation within English language,

and over time is used to describe ways of life or holistic lifemodes within western industrial

societies. It is very important to note that Williams here describes the development of the

meaning of the concept of culture in relation to the meaning of the concept of nature. Culture as a

way of life is therefore a concept that includes an understanding both of culture and nature, both

of human beings and their relationship to nature, their environment, their material or physical

surroundings.

I would like to present two examples, among many, which shows that a holistic concept

of culture has been important within human geography. The concept of culture in classic human

geography was more or less understood as a way of life. French regional geography at the turn of

the century, exemplified with Vidal de la Blache, argued for example that geographers should

study the different genres de vie (modes of life, ways of life) of human beings in relation to their

geographical environment (Dickinson 1962:208ff). Vidal studied the relationship between the

physical world (nature, the geographical environment) and human beings. According to Vidal,

geography was to be concerned with both nature and culture, and to study the interrelationships

between nature and human beings. This relationship between nature and culture was debated

strongly at the turn of the century in terms of whether culture or nature played the determining

part in this relationship. Vidal saw nature as that which provided human beings with a range of

possibilities in order to make the world habitable ("possibilism" was the label given to this

tradition). He opposed strongly environmental determinism, a part of the heritage of Charles

11
Darwin where nature, the geographical environment, was seen as the determining factor in the

relationship between nature and culture.

A more recent example is the new interest in analysis of lifemodes that was sparked by

the Danish ethnologist Thomas Højrup, who in 1977 published "Det glemte folk" (Højrup 1983).

Højrup sought to study differences in lifemodes by grounding empirical analysis with social

theory. His theoretical combination of an althusserian Marxism and the so-called Copenhagen

School in structural linguistics were adopted by human geographers in the Nordic countries in the

1980s. Højrup's theory of lifemodes was in different ways combined with different social theories

(see for example Sørensen og Vogelius 1988, Bærenholdt et al. 1990, Simonsen 1993, Birkeland

1994, Friberg 1990).

A way of life is therefore useful to characterise the holistic way of thinking and living of a

group of human beings that have similar relationships with their material or physical

surroundings. It seems that a holistic concept of culture that integrates both nature and culture is a

more workable concept of culture for human geography. It is relevant becauset it makes it

possible to distinguish between different forms of life -- differences in culture -- throughout the

world according to nature-culture relationships. In this way the concept of culture does not only

refer to differences between cultures and groups of human beings in society. It refers to an

additional element, the connection between groups of human beings and their physical

environment (nature). The distinctions between concepts of culture that I have made here will

hopefully make it easier to follow my argument in the remaining parts of the article.

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE WITHIN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

12
The concept of culture has been central for many human geographers during this century. One

example is the so-called Berkeley-school of cultural geography, where Carl Sauer was the

leading figure (Sauer 1925, Cosgrove and Jackson 1987, Jackson 1989, Price 1993, Olwig 1996).

The cultural geography of Carl Sauer has had much influence on the recent cultural turn, and it is

therefore interesting to discuss his ideas further.

Carl Sauer dominated North American cultural geography for many decades of this

century. Sauer was interested in human being's relationship to nature, or the relationship between

culture and nature. Culture meant the ways human beings act in relation to their surroundings.

The concept of landscape was used to describe a geographical way of thinking about the

relationship between culture and nature (Jackson 1989). The object of study was the cultural

landscape as a direct manifestation of culture's material aspects over time, the so-called

“morphology of landscape” (Sauer 1925). Sauer, in contrast to many of his American

colleagues, was strongly influenced by European geography and humanism. Early geographers

like Ritter, Humboldt, Ratzel and Hahn provided the basis for Sauer's views on culture and

landscape. He also borrowed ideas from anthropologists like Kroeber and Loewie in the United

States. From these he inherited the rejection of a determinist view of nature in relation to culture.

Instead he was interested in the way human beings, culture and society were influencing nature.

The concern for nature was in other words central for Carl Sauer, and an almost organic unity

between culture and nature was represented in his idea of landscape (Olwig 1996:644).

Carl Sauer is only one example from geographical research where concepts of culture

have been important. His ideas have had enormous impact on American cultural geography on

people such as Yi-Fu Tuan, whose recent book on aesthetics, nature and culture is a reflection of

13
that (Tuan 1995) and Clarence Glacken, whose major work was a book on nature and culture in

Western thought from ancient time to early modernity (Glacken 1967). For or against The

Berkeley School was a big controversy within American geography (Jackson 1993, Price and

Lewis 1993, Mitchell 1995, Jackson 1996, Cosgrove 1996, Duncan and Duncan 1996, Mitchell

1996). The political implications of the Berkeley School were for example questioned. However,

Sauer's main interest was the interrelationship between human beings and the land. This was

presented with a clear position against Eurocentric and modernist models of the world, and for a

radical environmentalism that often took the position of third world societies (Price and Lewis

1993:12). In addition, Carl Sauer met much criticism for his view of culture. His so-called super-

organic view of culture became the target for much critique because of a poor understanding of

human agency and social context. The super-organic view "adopts the view that culture is an

entity at a higher level than the individual, that it is governed by a logic of its own, and that it

actively constrains human behaviour" (Jackson, 1989:18). This further meant that culture was

not related to individual human beings, and consequently that cultural geography should not be

concerned with individual human beings. He was in particular accused of reifying culture.

Culture was treated as a thing of independent existence and causative powers, which represents a

form of culturalism where culture is explained only in its own terms (ibid). Culture is said to be

touched by historical and social forces rather than created by them. This critique came from

younger geographers of the post-positivist generation like James Duncan, Denis Cosgrove, David

Ley and Stephen Daniels who were arguing for a "new" cultural geography (Price and Lewis

1993). This shows that the concept of culture of the Berkeley School represents a holistic concept

of culture (culture as mode of life). It reflects an interest in the interrelationships between culture

and nature but has nevertheless fundamental weaknesses.

14
 The debate never rose to a similar level within Britain. The reason was that cultural

geography never had been as important in Britain as it had been in the United States. The first

geographer of the post-positivist generation in Britain who took the concept of culture seriously

was Peter Jackson, who in 1989 published the book “Maps of Meaning”. Jackson's book was the

first attempt to formulate some suggestions about the possibilities of renewing the concept of

culture in geographical research.

In this book Jackson writes that cultural geography in Britain was non-existent for many

years until the end of the 1980s. He shows that the new interest in culture grew at that time on the

background of new processes of change in society and new ways of thinking within the other

human sciences. The new perspective Jackson presents may be seen as a product of both new

developments within human geography and the general cultural turn within the human sciences.

His way of looking at cultural geography represents an integration between anti-positivism and

the cultural geography of Carl Sauer and others. He was in addition inspired by Clifford Geertz

and Raymond Williams, and by interpretative and poststructuralist approaches within the human

sciences.

The integration that Jackson made was rather logical and elegant. Jackson's concept of

culture implied a social and political conceptualisation of culture. Culture is implicated in the

way society develops at all levels, and knowledge of culture must reflect this fact, Jackson

argued. Culture was no longer understood apart from the social forces that create society, and it

was no longer represented as an entity above individual human beings. Culture was placed on the

level of social reality and lived life. Human geography is represented as concerned with the

relationship between society and space, and the interest in culture is located within the so-called

'society and space' debate within human geography during the 1980s (Jackson 1989:184). For

15
example, he recognises that culture is both spatially constituted and spatially expressed. Cultures

are "maps of meaning through which the world is made intelligible" (ibid:2). It means that

culture is a part of the web of social and cultural life "made through concrete patterns of social

organisation" (ibid). The renewed focus on cultural difference that Jackson suggests, was

expressed in new ways of understanding social differentiation as simultaneously socio-spatial

differentiation. Questions of ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality, nationalism, regionalism,

power and equality, are central in this new focus on spatial difference.

The main interest of human geography as it is represented by Jackson lies in society.

Jackson's understanding of culture represents, as far as I can see, the second concept of culture

that was discussed above (culture as premise for action, communication and meaning). This has

consequences for the treatment of nature. In his book Jackson did not mention nature, or what

Margaret Fitzsimmons (1989) has named social nature. The focus is turned to an understanding

of human geography's object of study as social space, not culture-nature relationships. Seeing

space as socially produced could in principle also include a conceptualisation of nature as

socially produced, but it didn’t. In the development from "old" to "new" cultural geography we

here see a shift from culture-nature relationships to society-space relationships, where the

previous concern for nature was lost in favour of society, an object of study without connections

to nature. I will argue that a conceptualisation of nature-culture relationships and social nature

will be necessary if the cultural turn is relevant for human geography. In the next section I will

discuss further the problems and possibilities of this shift in focus.

NATURE, SPACE AND CULTURE

16
In an article from 1989 Margaret Fitzsimmons points out that very few geographers during the

1980s had shown an interest in "social nature" (Fitzsimmons 1989:106). In this article she

compares conceptions of space with conceptions of nature within geographical thought, and

describes human geographers' representations of nature and space as very imbalanced. This

imbalance has two aspects, she says. First, it was from the beginning caused by the relations

between geography and the other disciplines. Secondly, it was due to the institutional changes

within geography which over time have created three schisms. These internal institutional

changes within human geography are very important. The first schism is connected to the

relationship between human and physical geography. The second schism is related to the

development within human geography where an ontological separation between nature and space

took place. For those who embraced space as the object of study, mainly radical geographers, any

understanding of nature was left out explicitly, Fitzsimmons says (ibid:112). This ontological

differentiation was then turned into an epistemological difference, which represented the third

schism within human geography. These barriers made it thus difficult to create an understanding

of space as nature within human geography. Margaret Fitzsimmons did however identify a new

awareness of nature among human geographers ten years ago, when her article was published.

During the 1990s this interest in nature has been growing among geographers with a primary

interest in "new" cultural geography in Britain (Matless 1996).

Fitzsimmons shows that the ontological separation between nature and space made it

difficult for human geographers to construct its object of study in other than purely social terms.

It is important to note that this schism is a product of the positivist debate within human

geography. After the break with positivist geography the concern for nature was in other words

17
non-existing or discussed in terms of social space. The conceptualisation of the relation between

space and nature, that space represents a conceptualisation of nature, concerns the relationship

between the physical and the human sciences. It is a question of the basic legitimation of human

geography. It represents a philosophical problem that has created much anxiety, debate and

conflict among human geographers, not the least because it concerns major scientific problems

that are not only specific for human geography. Quite big philosophical questions can be raised

out of the history of geographical research traditions: What is nature? What is culture? What is

space? What is materiality? How can we have knowledge of this? What is the relationship

between space, nature, world, earth? What is the status of the subject, the person, the human

being, culture and society in these relationships? Recognising that there is little agreement

between human geographers today on what defines human geography as an academic discipline,

my answer to these questions is that human geography cannot do anything else than continue to

take a particular interest in the culture-nature relationship. Instead of trying to find fixed and

absolute answers to these questions, we might look upon these questions as an ongoing project.

The culture-nature relationship is not an end in itself, but a tool to work with in order to arrive

with new knowledge and new solutions to social and cultural problems.

There has been much theoretical tension within human geography and this relates, as I see

it, very much to a tendency to avoid conceptualisation of culture and nature. I will argue that it is

necessary to develop a new theoretical interest in nature -- in terms of a new "social ontology of

nature" (Fitzsimmons 1989:189) -- if human geography is to be a viable discipline in the future.

The relationship between culture and nature must therefore be dealt with at an ontological level,

and not at an epistemological level. The ontological separation between nature and space does not

have to imply a problem as long as we recognise that the solution to the problem is located in the

18
area of culture. As a cultural problem it is related to the way human beings experience, use and

sense the world (space, nature, the environment), and how language is used to construct

knowledge of this world. In this context it is the focus on language that makes the cultural turn

relevant for human geography because it offers solutions for a new theoretical interest in nature. I

will only mention the possibilities of phenomenology, hermeneutics and poststructuralism in this

contextii. In the remaining part of this article I would like to suggest a way forward for theorising

a social ontology of nature. When doing this it is rather important to be attentive when

reconsidering the concept of nature as any conceptualisation of nature will not do.

CULTURE, NATURE AND WOMEN

I am going to connect the theoretical interest in nature and culture with the recent development in

feminist philosophy, in particular insights from environmental feminism (or ecofeminism) and

the particular tradition of French feminism connected with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

This connection will make it possible to integrate space as nature, a social understanding of

nature where the social world is not privileged over the natural world. To begin with, I agree with

Margaret Fitzsimmons who says that our ways of experiencing, using and sensing nature has

arisen from real history and geography (Fitzsimmons 1989:183). The point is that this real history

and geography do have particular characteristics regarding the use of nature. This is evident

because nature has not only been used, but abused in Western societies, and to me this is a result

of a gendered history and geography. How is it possible to say this?

19
 The theoretical inspiration for this view of real history and geography comes from a book

on women, ecology and the scientific revolution written by Carolyn Merchant (1980). She shows

that"theories about nature and theories about society have a history of interconnections"

(ibid:69). Nature has for many centuries represented a projection where perceptions of self and

society are given a place in cosmos, she says. The root metaphor binding the understanding of

self, society and cosmos together in the sixteenth century was the organism. The view of society

and nature was arranged as an organic analogy between the human body, representing

microcosm, and the larger world, the macrocosm, she argues (ibid:5). This organic imagery of

nature contained a dual understanding of nature as feminine. On the one hand it was nature

(earth) as a nurturing and kind mother. One the other hand it was nature as wild, uncontrollable

and utterly chaotic. Both of these images were feminine images of the earth, but only the second

was kept when the Scientific Revolution took its outset. Merchant says that the organic view of

nature was lost with the development of modern society. The view of nature as alive was by the

seventeenth century replaced with an image of nature as dead and passive. The organic and

animistic imagery of nature was substituted by an other and lethal imagery. In the period between

1500 and 1700 the organic imagery of nature gave way to a mechanistic imagery. This

development was made possible by changes in the use of nature. The mapping of the surface of

the earth for resources and raw materials became both politically and economically important in

imperial and economical enterprises. Mechanism according to Merchant was based on a view of

nature where force was external to nature rather than internal to nature: "Because it viewed nature

as dead and matter as passive, mechanism could function as a subtle sanction for the exploitation

and manipulation of nature and its resources" (ibid:102-103). The view of nature was in other

words transformed from living to dead matter.

20
 The changes that made the mechanistic view of nature possible were connected partly to a

growing understanding of nature as chaotic and disorderly. Nature, Mother Earth, was to be

controlled, and so were women. The connection between nature and women is clear. The

previous dual image of women and nature was transformed to a singular image of women as

sheer disorder. Women were seen as overturners of order, and were associated with a lower form

of human life, with animality. This separation between women and men, nature and culture, is

according to Carolyn Merchant "a key factor in Western civilisation's advance at the expense of

nature" (ibid:143). The idea of wilderness and the need to control wilderness grew out of this

image.

I will now relate this mechanistic view of nature that Merchant has discussed to the

particular form of reasoning that has characterised Western philosophy. I will show that the view

of nature and women according to mechanism is related to this particular logic of reasoning.

Various feminist researchers have put forward an essential critique of reason as it is found in

mechanism because it structures meaning -- and therefore knowledge of nature -- through

dualism and a logic of hierarchy (Cixous 1981, Plumwood 1993, Fürst 1995, Irigaray 1993, Rose

1993). Dualist thinking means that knowledge of the world is constructed by means of concepts

whose meanings are logically structured as a binary opposition. Dualist thinking is not only

structured by opposition, but by a logic of hierarchy where one term is given a positive value,

because of an opposite term which is given negative value. A dualism, Val Plumwood argues

(1993:42),"results from a certain kind of denied dependency on a subordinated other". That the

understanding of nature is dependent of an understanding of culture is therefore a reflection of

dualist thinking, where culture is given priority over nature. The tendency to structure meaning

through dualism and hierarchy is a highly gendered practice. The French feminist Hélène Cixous

21
has showed how many fundamental pairs of concepts in Western philosophy and science are

structured in the same way, and how the meaning of these concepts originates in the pair of

concepts Man-Woman: Activity-Passivity, Sun-Moon, Culture-Nature, Day-Night, Father-

Mother, Head-Heart, Intelligible-Sensitive, Logos-Pathos, Form-Matter (Cixous 1981:90).

We have thus seen historically an equation between nature and women in

contradistinction from culture and men where meanings of nature is constructed in terms of its

connectedness to women, while the meanings of culture is constructed in terms of a separation

from nature and women. Women have been associated with a sphere of physicality and nature,

which is given a negative value, while men have been associated with the sphere of culture and

superiority of reason, given a positive value (Plumwood 1993:33). This form of rationality in

western culture, Plumwood argues, is based on a refusal to acknowledge dependency of nature. I

will add that nature here is not only thought of in terms of the natural environment, but as

woman, as womb and primary dwelling place. The connectedness between nature and women is

threatening, therefore both women and nature has been understood as wild and inferior, as

something beyond control.

So, is it possible to find some common ground for a social ontology of nature that

transcends both dualism and the logic of hierarchy? Yes, I really do think there is, and I will

argue that a new "turn to nature" may recover human geography and provide it with material for

an explicit and urgent legitimation as an academic discipline. A new legitimation of human

geography is necessary because of the historical connectedness between geographical knowledge

and exploitation of nature for economical and (geo)political projects. To understand the essence

of the environmental crisis we have to take feminism's contribution on the conceptualisation of

culture and nature seriously. This legitimation will have to deal with the concerns that feminist

22
geographers have stressed in their critique of geographical research practices. As I see it, the

starting point for a new social ontology of nature is to deconstruct the connectedness between

women and nature in its historical and geographical manifestations, including geographical

knowledge.

One example of a deconstruction of this connectedness is found in Gillian Rose's book

"Feminism and Geography" from 1993 which criticises geographical research practices for being

inherently masculinist. Masculinism refers to" work which, while claiming to be exhaustive,

forgets about women's existence and concerns itself only with the position of men" (ibid:4). As

Rose shows, to identify low representation of women within human geography does not

necessarily mean that women is not represented within geographical knowledge. She argues

rather that women are very much present within geographical knowledge, and that there are

different representations of woman in geographical knowledge in different research traditions.

Gillian Rose shows for example that geographers over the years have depended on particular

constructions of their object of study, nature, through employing particular images of women. To

be a geographer was to be a male geographer, she says: "to think geography - to think within the

parameters of the discipline in order to create geographical knowledge acceptable to the

discipline - is to occupy a masculine subject position" (ibid:4). This made geographers

understand their object of study in terms of a masculinist language, Rose argues.

This masculinist language led to a representation of geographical knowledge (whether it

be nature, space or environment) through certain images of Woman. In Rose’s psychoanalytically

oriented analysis ‘Woman’ (with a capital W) refers to fantasised images of women. The early

geographers ‘discovered’ ‘conquered’ and ‘mapped’ unknown territory, and represented it in

terms of Woman, as if it was a woman that was conquered and mapped. Geography’s

23
contribution in the mapping and colonisation of the world can therefore be described as a very

masculinist project. The environmental crisis that we experience today may therefore be viewed

partly as a result of a masculinist project of colonisation and mapping of the world. Through

geographical research a particular relation between culture-geographer-man and nature-object-

woman was represented. This logic is still important in the representation of geographical

knowledge, Rose says. For example, the problem with cultural geography (both" old" and "new")

is that the object of study still is put in masculinist language. ‘Place’, a central concept in cultural

geography has been described in ways that constructed associations between ‘place’ as ‘home’

and ‘home’ as ‘Mother’ (ibid:56ff). From Gillian Rose's critique we can see that concepts of

culture in geographical knowledge imply de facto concepts of nature represented through

connotations to Woman.

Rose also shows that very few women geographers have showed an interest in cultural

geography and the relationship between nature and culture. She says that the reason for the lack

of interest in nature rested in an other interest in the power relations between men and women

which was more critical for women in geography at that time. I have much sympathy for this

response. This is because feminist geography first of all has represented one of the most radical

new developments within human geography the past 15 years. Twenty years ago it was quite easy

to show the discrimination of women and gender relations within human geography and that

gender had implications in practical research. There had been few women geographers working

during this century. Women and men met different conditions for work as students and members

of faculty, and they still do. Knowledge of women was excluded for many years. New methods

were not respectable, the work was subjective and therefore not scientific, or: it was political and

therefore also not scientific. These are familiar (male) responses to feminist research within all

24
the human sciences. Much has happened to feminist geography since the first book was published

in 1984 by the "Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG" in Britain (IBG 1984). Since

then there has been a growing interest in feminism among women geographers internationally

(Bondi 1990, Massey 1991, Bondi & Domosh 1992, McDowell 1993, Massey 1994, Rose 1993,

Duncan 1996, McDowell 1997). In 1994 the journal "Gender, Place, Culture" was established.

Also women geographers in the Nordic countries has brought forth much work on feminist

geography. In 1995 a Nordic seminar on feminist geography was held at Trondheim, with

participation from all academic levels (Forsberg 1995, Simonsen 1995, Birkeland 1995, Åquist

1995, Førland 1995).

Even if the representation of women in geography, of gender and feminist perspectives

within research has improved, this does not necessarily imply a change that makes a difference.

With the exception of Gillian Rose and a few others (among these Nesmith and Radcliffe 1993),

the feminist response to cultural geography did in fact not represent anything new in terms of

rethinking the relationship between nature and culture. It seems that the schism between nature

and space that was discussed earlier in this article also applies for large parts of feminist

geography. The focus has been on a social interpretation of culture, while questions of nature

hardly were mentioned. I will suggest that in order to arrive with a social ontology of nature we

have to make a few analytical distinctions. We have first to distinguish between feminist works

which do and do not theorise nature. We must further distinguish between the different feminist

works which theorise nature. In the following and concluding section I will show a few

alternatives for feminist geographers who are interested in theorising the social ontology of

nature.

25
CONCLUDING REMARKS: TOWARDS AN "OTHER" NATURE?

This article has dealt with reinterpretations of culture within human geography, which

took a new path with the cultural turn. I have argued that the meaning of the concepts of nature

and culture is interrelated, and that a viable concept of culture for human geography must include

a corresponding concept of nature. However, as I have described above, any relationship between

culture and nature will not do. We need a concept of culture which retains its relationship to

nature, and which simultaneously is able to account for differences between cultures, in other

ways than through dualism and the logic of hierarchy. This movement is inspired by feminists

who in particular have been rethinking the conceptualisation of nature and culture within Western

culture and science. I will conclude this article by mentioning a few examples of these feminist

works. These works can mainly be categorised in two groups according to either an affirmation

of the connectedness with women and nature, or to a new interpretation of the culture-nature

relationships which stresses both women and men's connectedness with nature and culture.

The first group comprises works of so-called spiritual environmental feminists, poets,

writers, environmentalists, artists and healers. One example is Susan Griffin who inverts the

dualism between nature and culture and instead valorises nature and its feminine connotations

(Griffin 1984). Other examples are found in Diamond and Orenstein (1990), which gathers

material from members of the interdisciplinary ecofeminist movement. There is however a

problem with many of these responses in that they still operate within dualist reasoning. Most

often women, through their connectedness with nature, are represented as the only solution for a

viable future, while men and men's knowledge are represented as the source of evil. Such

26
responses only revert the problem of dualist thinking, and represents therefore no real

transcendence.

In the second group we find the French feminist Luce Irigaray who has explicitly worked

with the culture-nature dualism in a way that transcends dualist thinking altogether (Irigaray

1993, Casey 1997, Whitford 1991). Irigaray seeks a better future and a solution to the

environmental crisis for both men and women, culture and nature. She clearly identifies nature

with women, and criticises philosophers who has failed who see this connection directly. She

criticises the present violence in society which is about to destroy the living earth. The living

earth becomes for Irigaray a symbol for woman in a positive way. However, instead of

constructing nature in contrast to culture, she wants to reconnect nature with culture, the living

earth with its dwellers. Irigaray wants to re-establish relationships between men and women,

human beings and nature through a new ethics where nature must be subject to the same ethics as

culture (Irigaray 1993). This vision of an other conceptualisation of both nature and culture is

interesting for an integration of feminism with the cultural turn. It means that the cultural turn

might give us a new opportunity to also reinterpret nature-culture relationships in non-dualist and

non-hierarchical ways.

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i
I am grateful to Professor Leif Ahnström for the point on the extent of the cultural turn outside Anglo-american
human geography.
ii
The possibilities of phenomenology, hermeneutics and poststructuralism is further developed in my ongoing
doctoral work, which studies the relationship between travel, gender and modernity in the context of holiday travel to
North Cape in the 1990s.

34

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