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actors that fall into the categories of human and more-than-human. For example, Callon

advocates for ‘the abandonment of all prior distinction between the natural and the social’

(1986, p. 1). He draws attention to networks of actors and significant moments, rather than

pre-existing categories, to figure the contours of power.

However, there are some issues with the complete abandonment of a nature/culture

binary. Drawing on the work of Vicki Kirby, Astrida Neimanis points to the limitations of the

notion of nature and culture entanglements (2015, p. 147). Even though many scholars (such

as ANT scholars to which I have just referred) use the notion of entanglement to overcome a

nature/culture binary, this notion nonetheless relies on the distinction between a nature and a

culture that then come together (Neimanis 2015, p. 147). Tânia Stolze Lima (2000)

challenges both a separation of nature and culture, as well as attempts to bring these two

categories together. Lima considers the case of the Amazon as it has appeared in

ethnographic accounts and her own research with the Juruna of the Amazon. In response to

Descola’s question about the ‘the applicability of the nature/culture distinction to so-called

pre-modern systems’ (2000, p. 45), Lima suggests that neither a neat theory that distinguishes

nature and culture or a collapsing of this binary is sufficient. In the case of the Juruna, she

argues that relations and difference amongst the human, the animal and the superhuman exist

within each of these separate categories (2000). She suggests that the notions of wild and

civilised, and of perspectivism are more relevant to the Juruna than the category of

nature/culture – both as an oppositional binary and in attempts to meld such binaries (Lima

2000). By arguing this point, Lima contends that binaries also exist in indigenous

cosmologies and that these appear when considering the perspective of a human, an animal or

a superhuman. Writing about Japanese ecological ontologies, Eisenstadt states that even if

nature and culture do not necessarily exist in an oppositional relationship, these categories are

nonetheless encompassed in other specific dualistic categories like pollution and purity, and

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