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The institutional spaces that powerfully hold in place nature/culture binaries

also hold in place sea/land binaries. Helmreich (2011) explores both of these binaries.

Even though he directs his critique towards the social sciences, in particular a wider

critique of the recent theoretical manoeuvre referred to as the materialist turn, he

makes several points relevant to the topic of the current chapter. He retools historian

and philosopher of science Peter Galison’s concept of theory machine – an object in

the world that sparks a theoretical formulation (Helmreich 2011, p. 132). In doing so

he considers how seawater figures as a theory machine principally in social science

but also in natural sciences, and also helps to articulate globalisation, politics, and

economics with descriptions such as ‘flow’ and ‘current’ (Helmreich 2011).

Essentially this is a conversation about how language and discursive framings are

implicated in environmental and social ordering. The sea is seen within a

European/western framework – fluid, fast, wild, unbound, changeable – suggests

Helmreich (2011). In addition to nature/culture binaries, culture is often imagined in

land-based idioms grounded in European ideas of agriculture and cultivation rather

than associated with the sea (Helmreich 2011, p. 132). Not all cultures, he argues,

have a tendency to separate the land and sea (Helmreich 2011, p. 135). Yet the

disciplinary divides of marine biology, agriculture, botany and so on would have us

think that such divisions are natural.

Changing Discourses of Nature in an Icelandic Fishery

If the connection between language and a changing environmental order is not clear

by now, then the following interlude should solidify this connection. Set in the period

from medieval times through to the late 1900s, Gísli Pálsson's Icelandic case study

offers an example of the environmental ordering (and reordering) I have just outlined.

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