Page 105 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

environmental determinist position (structuralist, symbolic, cultural relativism and

constructivism). For instance, in a cultural relativist stance, anthropologist and advocate of

cultural relativism Franz Boas suggested that the colour of seawater involves a cultural act of

construal (in Helmreich 2011, p. 133). Indeed the Boasnian concept of culture functioned to

distance anthropology from the disciplines of biology and psychology (Bennett 2015, p. 552).

By extending the nature/culture critique to more watery zones, marine anthropologist Stefan

Helmreich (2011) suggests that within the social sciences, not only is there a tradition of

separating nature and culture, but also of land and sea. The latter featuring in early

anthropological accounts by well-known forebears of anthropology including Bronislaw

Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Margaret Mead, who cast a romantic

and European aesthetic on the sea and set it aside from land based theorising, in turn

strengthening the binary of culture and nature, culture and seawater (Helmreich 2011, pp.

134-135).

The point of looking briefly at these theoretical positions is to highlight that however

diverse these positions seem, each shares an assumption of the existence of a nature/culture

binary (Pálsson & Descola 1996, p.3; Whatmore 2000, p. 266). Sarah Whatmore extends

such a critique by stating that both side:

...premise their arguments on the acceptance, however unrecognized, of an a priori
purification of the things of the world according to the magnetic poles of the
“natural” and the “cultural”; the “real” and the “represented”. (2000, p. 266)

Bennett argues that culture as a universal concept coevolved with the universal concepts like

nature, society and economy (2013, p. 12). In response he asks the important question – what

are we to make of culture without its corresponding universal concepts like nature? (Bennett

2013, p. 12)

93