Progress in Human Geography 30, 1 (2006) pp.

527

Material worlds? Resource geographies

and the matter of nature
Karen Bakker1* and Gavin Bridge2
1Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Room 217,
1984 West Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z2, Canada
2Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of

Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Abstract: Concepts of materiality are increasingly invoked in human geography. This paper
discusses several recent and influential workings of materiality, and examines their implications for
resource geographies. First, we identify a set of analytical questions at the heart of resource
geography and characterize the dominant approaches to these questions the production of
nature and the social construction of nature as yielding diminishing returns. Second, we survey
recent work on materiality relating to commodities, corporeality and hybridity and advance the
claim that this work provides a number of fresh perspectives with which to revive resource
geography. Third, we highlight three specific themes within this research: a radical redistribution
and decentering of agency; a revitalization of the concept of construction; and an acknowl-
edgement of the political-economic implications that flow from a world that is biophysically
heterogeneous. Finally, we draw on this analysis to explore how progress might be made in the
conceptualization and empirical study of resources.

Key words: agency, embodiment, environment, hybrid, materiality, nature, resource geography,
resources, textuality.

I Introduction material and the social intertwine and

Notions of materiality and the material are
abroad. Over the past few years human geog-
raphers have explored novel ways of account-
ing for the physicality and copresence of
the non-human both animate nature and
inanimate things within conventional
human worlds. Several critical interventions
have sought a rematerialization of human
geography after the cultural turn; calling, for
example, for recognition of the way that the
interact in all manner of promiscuous combi-
nations (Thrift, 1996: 24; Braun and Castree,
1998; Whatmore, 1999: 27). These recent
invocations of the non-human reflect a
growing unease with the way contemporary
human geography has tended to discount the
non-human worlds of nature and objects.
This rediscovery of the material spans
a range of human geographys subdisciplines.
In cultural geography, for example, rethinking

*Author for correspondence. Email: bakker@geog.ubc.ca

2006 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/0309132506ph588oa

6 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
the object is invoked as a means of reincor-
porating (and rediscovering) the materiality
of everyday life, or of accessing the relation-
ships between commodities, cultural identity
and the politics of value (see, for example,
Jackson and Holbrook, 1995; Crang, 1996;
Cook and Crang, 1996; Leslie and Reimer,
1999; Jackson, 1999; 2002; Philo, 2000;
Hughes, 2000; Hughes and Reimer, 2003;
Bridge and Smith, 2003; Anderson and
Tolia-Kelly, 2004). In urban geography, the
question of urban materialities is at the center
of a debate between conventional political-
economy and non-representational approaches
(Lees, 2002; Latham and McCormack, 2004).
The work of some feminist geographers and
disability researchers seeks to productively
reclaim the materiality of the body (so often
denied in social-constructionist accounts) as
an extension of the situated self , a way to
express how subjectivities are shaped by
the experience of acting in, on and through
the physical body (see, for example, Bell and
Valentine, 1995; Duncan, 1996; Imrie, 1996;
Longhurst, 1997; Dyck, 1998; 2003; Parr, 1998;
Teather, 1999; Valentine, 1999; Chouinard,
1999; 2002; Silvey, 2004).
As we explore in this paper, this re-
engagement with questions of materiality has
much relevance for geographies of resources
and the environment. Appeals to materiality
are, of course, not all of a piece; as we exam-
ine below, the plasticity of the term can elide
different and even incompatible ontological
commitments. Nonetheless, the proposition
with which we open this paper is that mate-
riality can provide a productive, if uncon-
ventional cut through which to interrogate
persistent questions raised by recent work
on the geography of resources. Our objective,
in short, is to champion resource geography
as an intellectually vibrant and politically
significant arena for critical inquiry and,
through this paper, to explore how insights
from work on materiality within several of
geographys other subdisciplines may help to
shape a research agenda for new work on
the geographies of resources.
Our argument proceeds in three stages.
First, we characterize contemporary Anglo-
American research on the geographies
of resources and note a significant split
between, on the one hand, a substantial
literature (and an allied teaching mission)
dedicated to the practices of resource and/
or environmental management and, on the
other, a critical literature that does not self-
identify as resource geography but which,
nonetheless, is centrally concerned with the
identification, appropriation and management
of biophysical processes for the provisioning of
capitalist societies. We identify how these
different components of the resources litera-
ture present particular challenges, and how
their limitations define the conceptual space
within which a revived resource geography
might emerge.
Second, we focus on work on resources
and the environment within the tradition of
critical political economy, and argue that it
deploys theoretical devices production of
nature and/or the social construction of
nature which have yielded diminishing
returns for some time. On this matter we
concur with the argument made by others
notably by Latour (1993) and Whatmore
(2002) to the effect that analyses premised
on further refining the nature of the relation-
ship between categories presumed to be
separate and pure are, at best, obfuscatory. It
is here, we claim, that engagements with
materiality elsewhere in human geography
(and cognate disciplines) can be particularly
helpful for working through a number of
analytical challenges associated with work
on geographies of resources. These include
the functioning of the econonatural net-
works through which nature is transformed
into resources, commodities and conditions
of production (Castree, 2003); the mutual
production, transformation and regulation of
biophysical and socio-economic processes
(Swyngedouw, 1999); and the productive and
generative capacities of the non-human (see,
for example, Smith, 1984; 1996; Castree,
1995; 1997; Drummond and Marsden, 1995;

Gibbs, 1996; 2000; Gandy, 1997; Bakker,
2000; Bridge, 2000; Gibbs et al., 2002; Jonas
and Bridge, 2003). To support this claim we
examine three areas of geographical writing:
on commodities, corporeality and hybridity.
Third, we identify what we regard as
three significant implications for resource
geography of this work on materiality: a radical
redistribution and decentering of agency; a
revitalization of the concept of construction;
and an acknowledgement of the political-
economic implications that flow from a world
that is biophysically heterogeneous. In the
concluding section of the paper, therefore,
we explore how invocations of materiality
illuminate new ways of thinking about
resources, and draw on this discussion to
outline how progress might be made in the
conceptualization and empirical study of
resources. By exploring what work on mate-
riality might mean for research on the
geographies of resources, our hope is both to
engage those whose work addresses the core
concerns of provisioning within capitalist
societies (but who currently do not self-
identify as resource geographers), and to high-
light the opportunities for cross-fertilization
with those researchers and practitioners who
are daily engaged in the practices of resource
management.1
In the following section we explore recent
works within human geography and related
disciplines that challenge the common sense
naturalism of resources, and identify
impasses within these debates. In subsequent
sections we examine how a sustained engage-
ment with the materiality of resources may
offer a route beyond these impasses, and
provide a distinctive research agenda for a
revived resources geography.
II Materiality and resources
Something rather strange has happened to
resource geography. Issues of resource
supply, resource control and the effects of
rampant resource consumption on planetary
health are now resurgent in geopolitics; ques-
tions about value and identity are articulated
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 7
with stunning clarity in popular struggles over
resource appropriation; nature continues
to enjoy a prolonged moment in the sun
within academic inquiry; and yet the scope
and purpose even the existence of a
formal subdiscipline of resource geography
are surprisingly unclear. This journal, for
example, has not published work that identi-
fies itself as resource geography since the
early 1990s (Wescoat, 1991; 1992; 1993). The
disappearance of resource geography as a
formal field, however, is misleading. There
is, on the one hand, a substantial body of
work in the applied and teaching traditions
of resource management and environmental
conservation that embraces the term
resource unproblematically, and which seeks
to organize, administer and produce new
resource geographies that operationalize
public and/or private management objectives
like efficiency, the optimization of welfare, or
sustainability (Mitchell, 1989; Cutter et al.,
1991; Holechek et al., 2000; Shenk and
Franklin, 2001; Chiras et al., 2002). On the
other hand, resources (soil, groundwater,
timber, fish) form the empirical heart of some
of the most exciting theoretically informed
research by geographers in recent years: most
often, however, this work flies under the
flag of political ecology, eco-Marxism, agro-
food studies or environmental history, and
applies to resources rather than derives
from them theoretical approaches (like the
production of nature or the social construc-
tion of nature) developed elsewhere in geo-
graphy (Castree 2005). In short, if resource
geography is recognized at all it is most often
as a managerialist agenda and not as a theo-
retically vibrant area of inquiry or a field with
its own set of approaches. In this section we
examine how a sustained engagement with
the materiality of resources may provide a dis-
tinctive research agenda for a revived
resources geography.
To a degree, this resurgence of studies
of resource geographies was anticipated
by FitzSimmons (1989) call to place the
matter of nature squarely within the sights
8 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
of a politically engaged human geography.
FitzSimmons decried the peculiar silence
on the . . . geographical and historical dialectic
between societies and their material envi-
ronments within human geography, while
acknowledging that calling forth the material
is not unproblematic. Indeed, as recent dis-
cussion of urban (im)materialities makes clear,
concepts of materiality can be enlisted to
shore up, as well as radically challenge, con-
ventional modes of explanation (Lees, 2002;
Latham and McCormack, 2004).
This ambivalence characterizes much
recent research on materiality across human
geography. Should materiality be conceptual-
ized in predominantly physical terms as a raw
substrate, a bedrock reality counterposed to
the social, cultural and textual? Or should
materiality be conceptualized in ways that do
not simply collapse one pole of the dualism
into the other, or outside of a dualist frame-
work altogether? In other words, what is
required to think about materiality in ways
that are simultaneously physical and cultural,
that admit the significance of the physical
but which also recognize that materiality is
uncontainable in physicalist terms alone
(Grosz, 1994; xi)? If one adopts the ontologi-
cal position that non-human entities have
active capacities in making history and geo-
graphy (Castree, 1995: 13), then one needs a
way to express the physicality and causality of
the non-human without straying into object
fetishism, or without attributing intrinsic
qualities to entities/categories whose bound-
aries are extrinsic (ie, that are defined, at least
in part, socioculturally). To the skeptic, then,
the resurgence of the material after a decade
of social constructionism should be reason
for pause, since it raises spectres of worn-
out dualisms, resurgent physicalism, object
fetishism and environmental determinism.2
These concerns are particularly apposite in
resource and environmental geographies,
which have tended to cleave to an epistemol-
ogy of natural realism. In a subdiscipline
devoted to the gritty and fleshy realities of
water, soil, timber, minerals and animals,
materiality is readily conflated with the
actual, tangible and visceral (cf. Latham and
McCormack, 2004). This tendency is fre-
quently compounded by the rhetorical
presentation of resource/environmental geo-
graphy as the bridge or glue between human
and physical, the middle drawer in the dis-
ciplinary dresser (lying above earth-surface
processes but beneath economy and society,
a solid foundation to which the latter may be
tethered). Thus, with some significant excep-
tions (see below), resource and environmen-
tal geography have conceptualized nature in
predominantly physical terms: as an assem-
blage of things independent of (although
related to) society, whose properties (respon-
siveness to technology, geographical location)
and social utility are revealed by science.
Research in these fields has traditionally
focused on improving the flow of resources
from nature and to society (or minimizing
the effects of flows from society to nature),
through the design of institutional and territo-
rial frameworks for procuring environmental
goods and services and managing biophysical
systems. This stands in contrast, of course, to
much work in the field of political ecology, in
which the mutual production of society-
nature relations has been central to research
and analysis for the better part of three
decades (see, for example, Peluso, 1992;
Rocheleau et al., 1996; Blaikie, 1999; Escobar,
1999; Watts, 2000; Forsyth, 2002; Peet and
Watts, 2004; Robbins, 2004).
The material, in short, has deep roots in
the study of resources within geography,
where it has often been treated unproblemat-
ically as a category external to society. Given
this disciplinary history, any contemporary
appeal to materiality might be undertstood to
imply an antediluvian indulgence in natural
realism. Yet the actual practices of resource
acquisition suggest this resolutely physical
understanding of materiality is something of
a fiction. To take one example, consider the
work of exploration geologists in determining
the location and value of a mineral resource:
frequently described as a discovery (nature

as external, revealed through science),
mineral exploration negotiates an extremely
heterogeneous biophysical world and cre-
atively produces the target resource (as
opposed to finding something whose bound-
aries are pre-existing). Attention to the
practices of resource and environmental
management thus reveals the inadequacy of
a purely physical understanding of materiality:
as Latour (1993) points out, it is through these
practices of translation that nature and
society get churned up every day.
Of course, resource geography from its
beginnings has contained a strand that, by
recognizing the constitutive role of knowledge
in any determination of resources, insists on
their irreducibly cultural nature. The work of
Zimmerman (1933) or the Chicago-school
of natural hazards research (White, 1945),
for example, claims resources as cultural
appraisals of nature and positions them on the
boundary, part-way between the pure realms
of nature and society. The value of this weak
form of social constructivism is that it turns
resources into a dynamic category rather
than resources being, they become: what
counts as a resource depends on the inter-
action between biophysical heterogeneity
(the variation in physical conditions that
produces differential land rents, or the vari-
able grade/quality of mineral resources, for
example) and social institutions. To be clear,
this work does not represent a recognition of
translation suggested by Latour (1993: 78) it
is in fact the very mixture of two pure forms
that he rejects (and in this sense it is resolutely
part of Latours modern Constitution) but
it demonstrates nonetheless the existence of
a heterodox tradition within resource geo-
graphy that has sought to grapple with the
problem of materiality outside of a narrowly
physical frame. This long-standing recognition
of resources as explicitly socionatural phe-
nomena suggests that geographical research
on resources may be particularly receptive to
the insights of recent work on materiality.
Resource geography more recently has
been permeated by still stronger challenges to
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 9
the commonsense naturalism with which
research on natural resources is often asso-
ciated. These challenges come from work
on the social construction of nature and the
production of nature, both of which wrestle
with the relationship between the natural
and the social, and with related questions
of agency. The production of nature thesis
(Smith, 1984; Roberts and Emel, 1992;
Gregory, 2001), for example, repositions
nature as an outcome of social relations
rather than an asocial input to the economy
(Harvey, 1974): it is through the socio-
economic production of nature that the
geographically uneven character of capi-
talist development takes shape. The lasting
achievement of research on the production
of nature has been to demonstrate how
socio-economic forms (eg, the city) and
socio-economic processes (eg, industrializa-
tion, urbanization) rest on a more funda-
mental process through which exchangeable
values are produced by transforming or
metabolizing nature (see, for example,
Worster, 1985; Kloppenburg, 1988; Cronon,
1991; Swyngedouw, 1999; Brechin, 1999;
Zimmerer, 2000; Gandy, 2002).
Valuable as the production of nature has
been as a guiding framework in this task, it
remains limited for at least two reasons. First,
the historical materialism upon which this lit-
erature draws has struggled with how to rep-
resent the active capacities of biophysical
processes dialectically without invoking an
external nature. The production of nature
thesis tries to solve this historically by inter-
nalizing nature as a social product but, by
envisioning first nature transformed via
labor, ends up squeezing out any productive
or generative role for ecological or biophysical
processes (for an exception, see Benton, 1992).
The engagement by resource geographers
with the production of nature thesis has at
times, therefore, taken the form of a sympa-
thetic critique. While affirming the importance
of a perspective that understands resources
and environments as political-economic
projects (eg, Roberts and Emel, 1992),
10 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
research has nonetheless highlighted the ways
in which biophysical materials and processes
are not infinitely malleable: nature is indeed
produced, yet the processes and capacities
that constitute nature frequently resist or
confound its production in ways that enable
accumulation. Work in rural sociology and
agricultural geography, for example, has
sought to explain the failure of capitalist
social relations fully to penetrate agricultural
production (exemplified by the persistence of
the family farm) by reference to the disunity
of production time and working time in agri-
culture (the fact that there are long periods
of time when photosynthesis is occurring but
human labor is not) (Mann and Dickinson,
1978; Goodman et al., 1987; Fine, 1994). In
these accounts, therefore, the biological
processes of agriculture represent obstacles
to capital which significantly shape the form
that social relations take in the agricultural
sector. Other accounts maintain a consti-
tutive role for the materiality of biophysical
processes, yet reject the language of obsta-
cles as unnecessarily confining: Kloppenburg
(1988), for example, characterizes seed corn
as a vehicle for accumulation because of the
increasing capacity for biologically based sec-
tors of the economy to integrate accelerated
biological returns into the circuits of capital;
while Henderson (1998) deftly illustrates how
obstacles to production are in fact opportuni-
ties from the perspective of capital circulation,
and how temporal and spatial disunities of
agricultural production in early twentieth cen-
tury California (rooted in the physical nature
of agriculture and the states diverse ecotones)
created conditions for the growth of credit.
Second, references to the materiality of
nature in this work float uneasily between
materiality understood as the (socio-ecological)
conditions of production which provide the
motor for history; and materiality as the
empirical stuff of nature coursing through
the econonatural networks (to use Castrees,
2002a, phrase) of commodity chains and
provisioning systems (Fine et al., 1996).
These are quite different meanings: the
latters conflation of the material with the
empirical reposes on the realist ontologies
underlying much natural science and con-
ventional economics and is at odds with the
historical materialist perspective underlying
the former interpretation. It is, for example,
one thing to chart the flows of materials/
commodities that undergird contemporary
capitalism, and another to argue that it is the
politicization of the social relations around
these flows that drives social change.3
Materiality is handled with similar ambiva-
lence within work on the social construction
of nature. Contributors to this expansive
literature share a common concern with the
circulation and reinterpretation of particular
discursive constructs, yet the ontological
underpinnings of this work often diverge
sharply. As a way of sorting through these
differences, Demeritt (2002, following
Hacking, 1999) proposes a helpful distinc-
tion between construction-as-refutation and
construction-as-philosophical-critique. The
former, he argues, seeks to refute taken-for-
granted beliefs about the essential nature of
things by showing how particular concepts
and categorizations of the material world
have been produced and sustained over time
(Demeritt, 2002: 769). Materiality, in this
formulation, occupies an inconsistent position:
on the one hand, construction-as-refutation
centers on exposing apparently essential
properties or conditions of nature as social
constructions; while, on the other, it simulta-
neously conceptualizes materiality as bedrock
naturalism, a reservoir of truth with which to
denaturalize received wisdoms by exposing
them as merely (incorrect) constructions
(a position which, Demeritt notes, accords
with the traditional epistemological positions
of empiricism, positivism and critical realism).
In contrast, those engaging in what Demeritt
terms construction-as-philosophical critique
assert that the social significance of the
material world lies primarily (or even solely)
in the way it is mobilized discursively via
social-semiotic processes of knowledge pro-
duction and claims-making. With materiality

rendered as the production and circulation of
textual referents, construction-as-philosophical
critique leaves little room for the autonomy
(let alone agency) of the non-human. Like
the production of nature, then, the social
construction of nature framework both cre-
ates and is confounded by the question of how
to account for the socio-economic production
and discursive construction of nature, while
simultaneously acknowledging the productive
capacities of the non-human world (see, for
example, Myers, 1990; Zimmerer, 1993; Braun,
2002; Bickerstaff and Walker, 2003).
An additional critique of both the social
construction of nature and production of
nature frameworks is the tendency to move
too rapidly from the concrete to the universal,
so that diverse materialities become conflated
into the unitary category nature. The result
is an underappreciation of the high degree of
internal differentiation within what gets
called the natural world. As FitzSimmons
(2003) points out, this tendency to fail to
recognize the distinct qualities of different
resources is often characterized by the lack of
a basic distinction between living organisms
and non-living (abiotic) things (water, minerals),
despite the fact that the rules of assembly for
abiotic components of ecosystems are quite
different from those of living things.
Underlying this failure to differentiate
between the different capacities for action
that beings and things have in the natural
world, we argue, are two problematic
assumptions about agency. Research on the
ways in which materiality shapes social life
often fails to take into account the different
modes through which material properties
come to have political life. Agency may be
a useful concept for claiming the status
of political subject for non-human species
(ie, as a political tool for levelling up the
non-human world) but it does not seem
appropriate for capturing the dynamic prop-
erties of non-living natures such as landfill
leachate, acid mine wastes, or groundwater
flow biophysical processes that are not living,
but which have a dynamic that entangles
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 11
them with other beings and things in ways
that give them political life. Further more, this
conception of natures agency relies on a
dualist ontology of subjects (having agency)
and objects (on and through which subjects
agency is expressed) an ontology which has
been the subject of thorough critique, as
explored below. As frameworks for analysis,
both the production of nature and the social
construction of nature risk mobilizing (and,
therefore, shoring up rather than transcend-
ing) conventional dualistic conceptions of
nature and society. Our argument, then, is
that any further finessing of these approaches
will yield only limited returns. In the following
section we begin to examine how recent
work on materiality can offer a promising
route out of this impasse, opening up possi-
bilities for new perspectives on agency, and
revitalizing the concepts of production and
construction.
III Invoking the material
In this section, we examine three distinct
approaches to materiality: commodity stories
of resource production and consumption;
textuality and corporeality; and hybridity.
This parsing of such a vast literature is, of
course, contrived; our focus is necessarily
selective, given that our goal is not to survey
the literature in its entirety, but rather to gen-
erate a dialogue among resource geographers
about how and why materiality has been
receiving increased attention across the disci-
pline of geography and in cognate disciplines,
and to explore the implications for resource
geographies.
1 Commodity stories: material cultures
of consumption and production
A significant body of work has emerged
within anthropology over the last couple of
decades (and has entered geography more
recently), building on the notion that social
worlds are as much constituted by materiality
as the other way around (Miller, 1998: 3). In
much of this work, the concept of materiality is
deployed in reference to objects, commodities
12 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
and artifacts, invoking material things as
physical constituents of sociocultural prac-
tice. Through studies of the way commodities
and artifacts are used in everyday life, this
work seeks to demonstrate how material
things through practices such as exchange,
use and disposal play important roles in the
constitution of social relations: to show, as
Miller puts it, why some things matter
where mattering means more than simply
making a difference or being significant, that attach to the surfaces of commodities.
and alludes to the individual and collective
identities and subjectivities that form in rela-
tion to commodities. Drawing inspiration
from critiques of the nature-culture binary
which have dominated anthropological
research (see, for example, Ingold, 1986;
Descola and Plssen, 1996) and ethnographic
research on the way humans interact with
various object worlds (see, for example,
Appadurai, 1986; Miller, 1987; 1998; Graves-
Brown, 2000), work on the geographical and
social lives of things has spilled into geogra-
phy through the work of Crang, Jackson and
others so that the pursuit of commodity
stories, as Hughes and Reimer put it (2003)
has become an increasingly prominent
activity within cultural geography (Crang,
1996; Cook and Crang, 1996; Jackson, 1999;
Hughes, 2000; Kearnes, 2003).
In deploying concepts of materiality and
material culture, this work performs a shift
in the meaning of materiality from the dead
world of artifacts products of human labor
and culture to the living world of objects Holbrook, 1995; Cook and Crang, 1996;
as constituents of social relations (Jackson,
2000). According to some critics, such calls
for the rematerialization of geographical
analysis risk shoring up the material/discursive
dichotomy which acts as a smokescreen for
distrust of contemporary semiotic, textual
and deconstructive methodologies (Kearnes,
2003: 144). Yet much of this work promises
to challenge the reductionist notion that the
social life of commodities can fully be under-
stood by interpreting it as a (superstructural)
product of (deeper) social relations.
Conceding that commodities do indeed have
their origins in social relations that are largely
obscured by the commodity form, this work
demonstrates how commodities through
their circulation, exchange and use also per-
form myriad social functions as things in
motion.
In work on material cultures, then, mate-
riality both invokes the importance of the
tangible world of things in constructing social
reality and draws attention to the meanings
Speaking of the biography of things may
sound like commodity fetishism, yet this work
takes fetishization seriously, by seeking to
understand the sensuous, concrete and poly-
valent nature of commodities as they inhabit
our daily lives (Leslie and Reimer, 1999),
rather than passing fetishization off as some-
thing to be transcended. This interest in
getting with the fetish (Castree, 2001) by
focusing on the properties and meanings asso-
ciated with the consumption and circulation
of commodities across space and time does
not mean that these properties and meanings
should be regarded as intrinsic. Rather, prop-
erties and meanings are seen to emerge from
the interaction of objects with social processes.
As a result, the meanings attached to things
(and the identities and subjectivities produced
through these attachments) are multivalent
and fluid, as demonstrated by an increasing
body of work on commodity cultures and
the mundane material worlds of shopping,
eating, fashion and dwelling (eg, Jackson and
Crewe, 2000; Crang et al., 2003).
Through their focus on the everyday prac-
tices and spaces in which people interact with
things, studies of material culture (as outlined
above) have effectively shifted the empirical
focus implied by materiality to the world of
consumption. The implications for resource
geographies are twofold. First, research
should engage with resources in ways that
creatively transcend the categories of pro-
duction and consumption. This implies more
than simply adding in a consumptive dimen-
sion as a counterweight to the excessively

productivist focus that characterizes most
work on resources. Recent work on food/
agriculture, for example, has sought to move
beyond the facile (yet politically productive)
distinctions of crop (production) and food
(consumption) (eg, Freidberg, 2004). Political
economists such as Hartwick have critiqued
conventional models of resource provisioning
systems on similar grounds, arguing for the
need to dispense with the analytical distinc-
tion between nature and commodities and vides a guide here: its rich anthropological
the academic division of labor between
studies of production and consumption. Her
attempt to reconnect consumption and
production analytically via a materialist com-
modity chain analysis of commodities such as
blood diamonds, oil, timber or gold is also an
effort to connect consumers and producers
politically, and thereby counter the depoliti-
cization of commodities which accompanies
most conventional approaches to resources
(Hartwick, 1998; 2000). Narrating com-
modity stories about global resource flows
has almost achieved the status of a genre: it
has been undertaken by a growing number of
researchers within geography (see, for example,
Gwynne, 1999; Mather, 1999; Le Heron et al.,
2001; MacLachlan, 2001; Hayward and Le
Heron, 2002; Mansfield, 2003; Elias and
Carney, 2004; Guthman, 2004) as well as in
popular microhistories focused on single
commodities (for example, Kurlansky, 1997;
2002; Cohen, 1997; Zuckerman, 1999; Gately,
2003). As Cook (2004) vividly describes (for a
tropical fruits like the papaya), working with
the materiality of commodities to lift the veil
of commodity fetishism means more than a
simple tracing to reveal their physical
flows and connections: commodity stories
that aim to defetishize exotic things play
with the inherent instability of materiality,
emphasizing the different ways in which
traces of production can linger in the expe-
rience of consumption. For example, an
account of Fordism has yet to be written that
takes seriously the properties of new steels
(hardness, ductility, physical and chemical
stability, durability) in enabling the mass
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 13
production of interchangeable parts and the
cultural values associated with the mass
consumption of standardized products.4
Thus, a second implication for the study of
resources is the need to acknowledge how
the meanings and cultural associations of
commodities are constitutive of their geo-
graphies and histories. Resources, in other
words, are far more than the economic.
Mintzs (1985) classic history of sugar pro-
account of the differentiation of sugar as a
cultural commodity articulates the dramatic
socio-ecological transformations of Jamaica,
Barbados, Cuba and Brazil as sugar colonies
with the social and cultural transformations of
industrialization in Britain and Europe, and
refuses to read the rise of sugar in economic
or physical (ie, nutritional) terms alone. To
date it is predominantly the discretionary
commodities (such as food and fashion,
where consumer choice and cultural taste
play an overt role) that have been subject to
cultural analysis. Yet industrial commodities
those that come closer to a classic definition
of fungible commodities should not be
exempt from this cultural analysis. To extend
our earlier examples, an account of the
prodigious rise of nickel production and
consumption during the twentieth century,
would need to recognize the cultural values of
sterility, cleanliness and progress coded as
aspiration for material possessions associated
with the properties of stainless steel (an iron-
nickel alloy accounting for over half of the
total demand for nickel).
2 Bodies and texts: materiality as
inscription and embodiment
A distinct conceptualization of materiality,
and of the relationship between humans and
non-humans, arises in work on the relation-
ship between the material and the textual.
Kay (2000), for example, explores how genet-
ics came to be represented through the
textual metaphor of script, information or
code despite empirical evidence about the
behavior of genes which suggested the limits
14 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
of the metaphor. Along with others, Kay
demonstrates how what we understand to be
material nature is not a reflection of proper-
ties intrinsic to nature but rather a projection
onto the material world, via language, of
categories which are irreducibly social, and
culturally rooted. Science, in other words, is
not natures mirror (Rorty, 1981).
This strategy of social construction is
shared across many subdisciplines in geo-
graphy and beyond (Demeritt, 2002). It
places emphasis on the representation of the
material world through the reading, (re)writ-
ing and enactment of texts (broadly defined),
and how these texts and signifying practices
discursively construct material conditions
by virtue of the ways in which they circulate
within and variously enable and constrain
relations of power. Another important
contribution of a focus on textuality is the
foregrounding of relationships between
knowledge, representation, discourse and
power (see, for example, Barnes and Duncan,
1992; Braun, 1997; 2002; Delaney, 2001;
Linnros and Hallin, 2001; Nesbitt and Weiner,
2001; Gururani, 2002). Much of this work
is increasingly sensitive to the cultural frames
within which authors themselves operate,
and begins from the assumption that the
attribution of properties to material things
cannot be done outside of a particular cultural
frame, as scores of studies on the historical
construction of various natures have illus-
trated (Evernden, 1992; Ross, 1994; Soper,
1995; Wolch and Emel, 1998). To speak of
nature, in other words, is to mobilize his-
torically specific social constructs, such as
natural limits, human rights, interspecies the text. To call forth the material thus raises
competition or genetic code. a challenge: how to express the causal role of
Acknowledgement of the textuality of the
material world is enormously helpful in under-
standing the social significance of material
objects, enabling, for example, commodity
analysis to break out from narrowly econo-
mistic approaches by breaking down (artificial)
distinctions between the economic and the
cultural, and by demonstrating how com-
modities (and the spaces that supply them) are
significant sites of cultural spectacle, key
spaces through which we come to understand
the processes shaping society and seek to
work out alternative forms of social relations
(Bridge, 2001). However, the risk arises of
overlooking ways in which the physical prop-
erties of a resource (whether it is ubiquitous or
localized, whether it exhibits a high degree of
excludability and subtractability, whether its
production as a commodity requires the mobi-
lization of massive amounts of energy/capital)
influence the political-economic relations
within which a commodity becomes embed-
ded. For example, Le Billon has documented
how the biophysical properties of specific
resources influence their lootability and
shape the strategies mobilized by combatants
in resource revenue-dependent war eco-
nomies: guerrilla activity is more compatible
with easily accessible alluvial diamonds
than with concentrated petroleum deposits
whose exploitation requires a high degree of
technological sophistication the latter more
often associated with military coups and
secessionist movements (Le Billon, 2001).
These properties of the material world can be
remarkably durable, in contrast to the
instability of textual constructions subject to
change over time and space, often in ways
that have considerable social significance
(see, for example, the recent emergence of
counterhegemonic discourses surrounding
that most romanced of stones, the diamond;
Le Billon, 2006). Baudrillards revenge of
the object (1990; 1993) can thus be read
in a double sense: as signification without
stable referents; and as the pitfall of fetishing
material without straying into object fetishism
or without attributing intrinsic qualities to
entities/categories whose boundaries are
extrinsic defined, at least in part, socio-
culturally? How, in other words, can we insist
on the importance of things without treating
them solely as things?
Recent work on bodily geographies has
grappled directly with these questions (see,

for example, Callard, 1998; Harvey, 1998;
McKittrick, 2000; Matless, 2001; Imrie, 2003;
Little and Leyshon, 2003). Deploying the
concept of embodiment as a way of capturing
the physically enframed nature of existence,
this work examines the way in which sub-
jectivity and identity emerge not from
disembodied consciousness, but from the
experience of acting through and on the
physical, visceral and mortal vehicle of the
body. These approaches often entail a
recognition of the way in which physicality is
socially constructed through a combination
of material and discursive practices for
example, through work on the idealization
and acculturation of norms surrounding body
shape or eating practices and their inter-
section with corporeal geographies of con-
sumption (Valentine, 1999; see also Butler,
1993; Hayles, 1993). Embodiment can thus
be interpreted as a strategy of liberation
from the confines and constraints of the
material and also naturalized social worlds,
destabilizing natural characteristics of races,
genders and cultures.
Efforts to understand corporeality in
terms of the materially situated self extend
earlier notions of situated knowledges,
which were largely about situatedness within
a web of social constructs such as gender,
race, and class (see, for example, Jackson,
1987; Rose, 1993). Work on the materiality
of social life focuses, in contrast, on the
situatedness of living in and through the
physical body, through which lived exper-
ience both social and material is embodied
(Nast andPile, 1998; Nelson, 1999; Harrison,
2000; McKittrick, 2000; Longhurst, 2001;
2002; Parr, 2001; Bondi et al., 2002;
Hyams, 2003). The point here is to temper
the social constructionism which effaces the
body by, for example, not severing entirely
the feminine from female morphology. Calls
for a theory of the flesh are, as Whatmore
(2002: 154) points out, narrative strategies
designed to achieve this shift in focus
(Whatmore, citing Moraga and Anzaldua,
1981: 23).
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 15
Taken together, these varied deployments
of embodiment can be understood to make
four statements about what Jasanoff terms
the co-production of beings and social prac-
tices (Jasanoff, 2004). First, this work
emphasizes the ways in which broader social
relations and discourses construct material
bodies (see, for example, Nast and Pile, 1998;
Valentine, 1999). Second, this work demon-
strates how bodies are enrolled in the con-
struction of social places and spaces and
political economic processes (see, for exam-
ple, Grosz, 1992; McDowell, 1993; Harrison,
2000). Third, this work emphasizes the
contestation of coproduction along a variety
of vectors; Butler, for example, emphasizes
the violence of the processes through which
bodies are sexed, and David Harvey reframes
the body as an accumulation strategy in
which the (laboring) body is itself a site
of political-economic contestation over the
processes through which it is created (Butler,
1993; Harvey, 1998). Fourth, work on
embodiment harnesses the sensuous capaci-
ties of the body (smell, sound, taste, touch) as
a way to move beyond the optical register
and, in so doing, to diminish the cognitive and
metaphorical privilege accorded to sight
within academic inquiry (Whatmore, 2002:
33, following Serres, 1985; see also Rodaway,
1994).
Recent work on bodily geographies and
the corporeal is relevant to resource geo-
graphy for two reasons: like work on
resources, it grapples with the simultaneously
biophysical and social character of material
existence; and, in the hands of writers such as
Butler and Grosz, it provides a method for
engaging with the way socially significant
distinctions are produced from a richly het-
erogeneous physical world by, for example,
reiterating some physical variations but not
others. In other words, it provides a way to
acknowledge physicality/corporeality and
the sociopolitically productive nature of
physical variation without surrendering
the social to the biological. This work provides
a way of understanding the body in dialectical
16 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
terms: a physically enframed, material pres-
ence constituted through processes that are
simultaneously internal and external, social
and natural, and which render the body a cer-
tain degree of historical and geographical
malleability (Harvey, 2000: 98). Work on
embodiment, in other words, adroitly estab-
lishes the social construction of the material
world without falling into the trap of social
reductionism, and similarly engages with the
material conditions shaping social life without
falling prey to biological essentialism a
debate with which resource geographers have
long been concerned.
3 Mongrel materialities: hybridity
The motley materialities of everyday life
assume a critical role within recent work on
hybridity. The dense interactions of people
and things which characterize the banal
spaces of contemporary society (the lab, the
fishery, the farm) provide an entry point for
engaging a more pervasive problematic: the
dualisms upon which is predicated the mod-
ern critical stance and the acts of purification
necessary to construct and maintain such
two entirely distinct ontological zones
(Latour, 1993: 10). Work on hybridity is char-
acterized by an insistence on the mongrel
nature of the world: we navigate a world
made up of radically incommensurable things,
suturing them together as we go, yet we con-
struct analytical accounts that present the
world as a set of discrete, pure categories.
The linguistic appeal to hybridity is, there-
fore, no mere whimsy: in the hands of Latour
(1993), for example, it highlights the onto-
logical priority of quasi-objects defined by
associations rather than separations
(Castree, 2002a: 118).5 Thus critics of the
asymmetrical treatment of nature latent in
much geographical research (Murdoch, 1997;
Whatmore, 2002; Castree, 2002a) have
turned their attention to documenting the
ways in which these heterogeneous material-
ities are churned together, a process that
Latour terms translation. Engaging with
materialities, then, is a way of transcending
the nature-culture dualism for some, the
Achilles, heel of conventional geographical
treatments of nature.
The famously proliferating nature of quasi-
objects (Latour, 1993) has been matched in
the last few years by an efflorescence of writ-
ing on the hybrid within the social sciences.
The result is a diversity of invocations of
hybridity that can express significant differ-
ences in their conceptualization of materiality.
In some accounts, the hybrids primary sign-
ificance is its role as a prominent marker of
a temporal cleavage: with technoscientific
change blurring the boundaries of nature and
technology, the propagation of hybrids in
increasing numbers ushers in a new age of a
qualitatively different materiality character-
ized by the the end-of-the-millennium seed,
chip, gene, database, bomb, foetus, race,
brain and ecosystem (Haraway, 1997: 12).
Illustrative of such work is Warks (1994)
elaboration of Third Nature; literal readings
of Haraways (1991) cyborg metaphor as a
body/technology splice, focusing on pros-
thetics, biotechnics and the slow penetration
into our daily life of almost invisible techno-
logical gadgets (Terranova, 1996: 167); and
Lights discussion of artificial life as life in
silico (Light, 1997: 184, drawing on Langton,
1988).
From the point of view of geographies of
resources, the most interesting accounts of
hybridity eschew this Toffleresque focus on
the monstrous/miraculous objects of a fast-
arriving tomorrow in favor of the hybrids
potential for an ontological critique of materi-
ality itself (Latour, 1993; Law, 1994; Law and
Mol, 1995). Indeed, the significance of work
on hybridity for resource geography lies not in
the figure of the hybrid or quasi-object, which
ultimately are rather blunt analytical devices
(not least because of the profligacy of
hybrids). It lies, rather, in the relational and
distributed view of materiality that provides a
way to unpack apparent permanencies and
stabilities, and to show how the competencies
and capacities of things are not intrinsic but
derive from association. Whatmore (2002),

for example, effectively deterritorializes
notions of the wild and shows how they
emerge as the apparent properties of species
(eg, jaguars, elephants) or spaces (wilderness)
only as network effects: to the extent that
these non-human entities have an active
role . . . in making history and geography it is
through the way they are embedded in a
wider set of sociotechnical relations (Castree,
1995: 13). The explicit spatiality of these
networks is also a valuable component of
work on hybridity, although in fairness the
capacity to map relational skeins is not a
necessary feature of (nor is it limited to)
actor-network theory. This suggests that
there is useful work to be done in understand-
ing how the material attributes and qualities
of other resource spaces particularly those
so readily naturalized in physical terms as the
resources of oil fields, watersheds or hot
spots of biodiversity are produced topolog-
ically rather than being inherent or contained
within those spaces. Renewed attempts in
the USA to drill for oil in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, for example, suggest the
analytical value of approaches able to deterri-
torialize some of its more iconic permanen-
cies (not the least of which are its huge oil
reserves and white (empty) wilderness) and
show how these politically contending, yet
similarly purified, natural spaces are pro-
duced through the conjoining of many different
materialities.
This application of hybridity to the study of
resources is not without potential pitfalls. As
Kirsch and Mitchell (2004) argue, the empha-
sis on connection rather than differentiation
produces a strangely dull critical edge to a
field that envisions itself as quite progressive.
This weakness, as Latour notes (1999, cited
in Kirsch and Mitchell, 2004: 693) is reflected
in the ridiculous poverty of the ANT vocab-
ulary with its imprecise specification of the
nature of connection as association, transla-
tion, alliance, obligatory passage point, etc.
The insistence on connection rather than
differentiation, and on agency rather than
accountability (Fuller, 2000; Kirsch and
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 17
Mitchell, 2004) produces an account that
seems to tell only half the story: it reveals
motley assemblages (rather than things
with essences) with rare clarity, yet says
very little about how or why such assem-
blages are put together, and is often silent
about the tensions and contradictions that
make the connections so precarious.
A distinctive approach to hybridity which
avoids this pitfall is one which seeks to his-
toricizes Latours notion of networked asso-
ciations (Swyngedouw, 1996; 1999; see also
Castree, 2002a; 2003a; 2003b). Swyngedouw
(1996; 1999) couples Latourian notions of
networked reconstruction with Lefebvres
(1991) concept of the historical and geograph-
ical production of space (nature). In doing
so, Swyngedouw develops an approach to
urbanization in which it is not the hybrid that
has ontological priority but the process of
hybridization the historical-geographical
process of production, of becoming, of
perpetual transgression (Swyngedouw, 1996:
73; 1999: 447). The emphasis on the pro-
duction of quasi-objects reflects the origins of
this approach not in actor-network theory,
but in historical materialism and, in par-
ticular, within Lefebvre (1991) and Smiths
(1984) work on the production of nature.
Swyngedouw asserts that we cannot engage
with the agency of actors (whether human or
non-human) without examining the geome-
tries of power which structure production.
In Swyngedouws approach, connection and
differentiation arise simultaneously through
process of production, enabling his analysis
of resources (specifically water resources) to
take on an explicitly critical edge (Swyngedouw,
2004). As we explore below, this approach
opens up promising possibilities for resource
geographies.
IV How does matter matter?
Underlying many contemporary conversa-
tions about nature and society is a common
desire to shift our frames of reference by
saying something quite simple: things other
than humans make a difference in the way
18 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
social relations unfold. Frequently, researchers
seek to animate the non-human through
seeking to understand how matter matters.
Thus work on materialities centers on its pro-
ductive capacities what matter does rather
than what its essence is (Anderson and
Tolia-Kelly, 2004: 672). Referencing the
material is thus a way of acknowledging
the embeddedness of social action, whether
it be embedded in world of things, bodies,
networks or socio-ecological relations. In
other words, this work tries to do for the
biophysical world what Polanyi (1944) did
for the social: that is, to show how conven-
tional, contemporary understandings (eg, of
processes such as globalization) rely on the
abstraction or disembedding of concepts
like the economic from socionature.
Yet the material is more than just a call
for a heterogeneously populated world: it is
also an acknowledgement that the things
(commodities, bodies, biophysical processes)
that make a difference in the way social
relations unfold are not pregiven substrates
that variably enable and constrain social
action, but are themselves historical products
of material, representational and symbolic
practices. Thus, the motivation behind a turn
to the material may be straightforward, but
doing materiality as analytical and repre-
sentational practice is considerably more
complex, as it calls into question many of
the precepts and concepts with which we
customarily order the world. To discuss mate-
riality, then, is to engage with metaphysical
questions of ontology, agency and intention-
ality, as attested by the linguistic and syntac-
tic gymnastics that characterize much writing
on materiality.
One of the most fruitful outcomes of
recent work on materiality is the problemati-
zation and reformulation of the concept of
agency. Recent work has sought to recapture
the lively capacities of biophysical systems
by taking seriously the question of how the
different materialities of resources may be
sources of unpredictability, unruliness and, in
some cases, resistance to human intentions.
Thus Bakker (2004), for example, documents
how water is uncooperative in the process
of commodification and, therefore, a source
of differentiation in the institutions governing
resource access and regulation; while Boyd
et al. (2001) explicitly frame nature as a source
of surprise on account of the emergent and
unpredictable character of biological systems.
Similarly, work in the nascent field of
evolutionary history has begun to identify the
ways in which emergent properties and
behaviours of biophysical systems can
become historically significant for example,
the development of insecticide resistance by
some insect species over relatively short time
periods (Russell, 2003; Schrepfer and
Scranton, 2004). Similar acknowledgement
of the generative capacities of biophysical
systems underpins a rethinking of conven-
tional ecological models within ecology. For
example, researchers have attempted to
incorporate instability and innovation as char-
acteristics of ecosystems, and to re-envision
their unpredictability not as capriciousness
but as panarchy: inevitably dynamic and
unpredictable (even playful), thereby opening
up new worlds of possibility for human-
nature relationships (Gunderson and Holling,
2002).
In making the case that matter matters,
work on materiality has to confront the
problematic of how heterogeneous objects
join/are joined together such that particular
outcomes result. Here the vacillation over
the active/passive verb form is deliberate,
since it demonstrates how conceptions of
agency lie at the heart of much recent work
on materiality: do things activate their
conjoining, are they conjoined by the opera-
tion of processes that lie outside them, or do
things interiorize the processes that produce
them such that it makes sense to speak of
them as both conjoined and complicit in
their conjoining? In addressing this problem-
atic, much of the work on materiality strives
to denaturalize agency as an inherently or
solely human quality: it questions dominant
definitions of agency, acknowledges the

agency of non-human actors, and displaces or
undermines the concepts of rationality, con-
sciousness and will assumed to be unique to
humans and upon which definitions of agency
are often predicated.
To denaturalize agency is effectively to
redistribute it away from human agents. Yet
there is a tension within work on materiality
over precisely what such redistribution
entails. Some accounts notably those
stressing the agency of nature have sought
to denaturalize agency as a property of
human subjects by admitting a wider range of
potential agents (by giving standing to non-
humans as subjects, analogous to Stones
(1972) proposal regarding the extension of
legal rights from human subjects to natural
objects). This work enlarges the class of
agents but still rests on a conceptualization
of agency as the other of structure. The
term agency implies, in this reading, that we
have imperfect knowledge and/or incomplete
control: nature surprises us, thwarts our
plans, and evolves in unexpected ways. From
this perspective, the agency of nature debate
can be seen as an artifact of our incomplete
understandings and representations of nature:
it is only possible to speak of the agency of
nature by simultaneously mobilizing (and
reaffirming) two dualisms (nature/society;
agency/structure). This redistribution of
agency to a broader class of subjects stands in
contrast to the ontological reworking of
agency within actor-network approaches to
hybridity (Whatmore, 2002). These sever
agency from the subject-object binary by
understanding agency in relational terms:
agency becomes an emergent property of
network associations rather than a property
inherent in discrete entities.
The analytical challenge for resource
geography, we suggest, is to preserve this
emergent and decentered conceptualization
of agency (as it proves particularly capable
for capturing the interpenetration of people
and things so characteristic of resource and
environmental questions)6 while moving from
sketching topologies of connection and
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 19
exchange across networks to understanding
the processes through which socionatural
networks are generated and maintained
over time. If nothing else, resource geogra-
phy has demonstrated how the processes
of translation (and subsequent purification)
that produce resources are far from random:
resource flows (including the negative
resources of pollution) are highly structured
in space and time. Yet, whereas earlier
accounts treated the resource as a passive
terrain carved and channelled by social
agents, we argue that recent work on
materiality enables a decentering of agency
through which resource geographies can
better express the generative capacities of
biophysical processes, without either
having to appeal to the agency of an external
nature or rendering agency a function of a
lack of knowledge or control. The production
of nature, in other words, becomes recast
as a coproduction of socionature in which
humans and non-humans alike participate
(albeit unevenly, and subject to dynamic and
evolving constraints).
Rethinking natures agency similarly implies
a reworking of concepts of social con-
structionism. No longer should construction
represent, in Butlers (1993) phrase, the can-
cellation of the natural by the social. Such a
view of construction even one shorn of its
more extreme modalities where the natural
is merely effaced by the social will not do.
As Butler argues in Bodies that matter (1993),
we need to understand construction in the
context of corporeality (what does it mean to
say matter is constructed through discourse?
how does doing become being?), and from
this to inquire whether materiality implies
necessity. Butler argues that to acknowl-
edge the inevitability of the act of construc-
tion does not imply an acceptance of the
inevitability of specific constructions of
nature, the body, the self. Butlers argument,
therefore, is for the productive possibilities
of construction understood as constitutive
constraint. Reconceptualizing construction
in this way enables Butler to shake loose the
20 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
materiality of sex from its stability (and social
power) as an apparently prediscursive fact
(considered as the biology around which
cultures of gender are constructed) and
allow sex itself to emerge as a regulatory
ideal (Butler, 1993, following Foucault, 1978).
To Butler, sex is part of a regulatory practice
that constructs and in many cases forcibly,
violently the body it governs; a body that,
nonetheless, often contests and fails to
comply with the norms by which its materi-
ality is governed. Feminists following Butlers
approach to non-innocent topographies
(Katz, 2001) thus begin from the assumption
of the mutual constitutiveness of sex/gender,
enacted and (imperfectly) produced and
governed through highly regulated practices
which inevitably enact a violence through
their regulatory orderings. Flowing from this
analysis is an imperative empirically to disrupt
the sex/gender binary and the biological
essentialism to which it often gives rise.
This reworking of social constructionism is
a similar strategy to that adopted by those
who seek to disrupt the natural/social binary,
and to refute conventional claims about
causality of natural or social processes. geographical inquiry has often failed to
Thus, political economists venturing into
ecology have sought to refute natures limits,
and demonstrate how these apparent limits
are, in fact, socionatural constraints (Harvey,
1974; Lipietz, 1992; OConnor, 1998). For
example, analyses of droughts have demon-
strated that water scarcity is not absolute, but
relative an intersection of multiple socio-
natural factors: meteorological variability; the
social construction of scientific knowledge
of climate, demand and consumer behav-
iour; and political economic restructuring
of water supply systems (Nevarez, 1996;
Bakker, 2000). This has important impli-
cations for resource management policy; if
drought is co-produced, to use Jasanoff s
(2004) term, then responses to drought must
involve a reworking of perceptions of nature
and socio-economic practices not without,
we should add, much contestation. For exam-
ple, Australian drought policy recognizes the
socially constructed nature of drought
impacts; and defines drought not as a natural
hazard but as a natural climatic feature, the
impacts of which are mediated by social
processes (such as agricultural practices) and
economic factors (such as terms of trade).
Accordingly, the Australian governments
drought policy emphasizes self-reliance and
risk management rather than emergency
relief (Drought Policy Review Task Force,
1990; Botterill, 2003), raising the ire of rural
and farming communities a reflection of
how the myth of drought is linked to, and
arises from, Australian notions of community
and identity (Day, 1987) and emblematic of
the political controversies which may be
ignited by an assertion of the interpenetration
of the natural and the social.
V Conclusions
Human geographers have increasingly
deployed concepts with which to express
the physicality and copresence of the non-
human both animate and inanimate within
conventional human worlds. These invoca-
tions stem in part from the recognition that
interrogate nature (and its analogue, the
environment) or treated it reductively (see, for
example, Hanson, 1999). The anthropocen-
trism of much writing on nature is not limited
to geography, but, as Castree notes in a recent
review, it is particularly troubling to those
geographers who feel that naturesociety issues
are (or ought to be) central to disciplinary
identity (Castree, 2002b).
We have argued in this paper that recent
work on materiality opens up some interest-
ing new avenues for research on resources,
and enables one to move beyond rather tired
debates about the production of or social
construction of nature. Research on material
cultures and commodities, for example, sug-
gests how one might consider questions of
consumption and production simultaneously,
thereby extending the conventional (and
sometimes myopic) focus of resource geogra-
phies on production. Work on embodiment

offers new approaches to analysing the
shaping of social relations by material condi-
tions, without falling prey to environmental
or biological determinism. The decentering
of agency upon which this approach rests also
underpins work on hybrids, where new
approaches to the subject/object binary sug-
gest ways to transcend the nature/society
divide that has characterized much research
on the geographies of resources.
Our appeal to materiality is, in part, a call
for a research agenda that addresses the ana-
lytical significance of concrete differences in
the material world and the way these enable
and constrain the social relations necessary
for resource production (as outlined above).
But it is also an explicitly discursive strategy,
a call for a broader anti-colonial project
within geography which seeks to destabilize
the discourses and practices through which
are constituted the materiality of others
whether these others be human, animate
non-human, or material objects. Ecological
economists or resource geographers, for
example, may undermine conventional tales
of resource exploitation through exploring
how biophysical characteristics of specific
resources disrupt hegemonic models of capital
accumulation. This echoes work in feminist
and gender studies, which have focused on to
the materiality of the (female) body as a
means of destabilizing and interrupting patri-
archal representations, and of undercutting
hegemonic models predicated on the
mind/body dualism.
Deploying materiality, then, can be viewed
as situated strategy or what Adrienne
Rich terms a politics of location (Rich,
1986; Punday, 1998). Richs understanding
of location is, of course, both metaphysical
and concrete. Matter matters because it is
through grounded research that we encounter
differences that make a difference. By insert-
ing materiality into our analyses, we situate
ourselves: resistant to binaries, suspicious of
master narratives, and plagued with dualisms.
Common to the different conceptions and
usages of materiality across human geography
Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge 21
is an effort to problematize the social pro-
duction of knowledge. Appeals to materiality,
then, can be part of an anti-colonial project,
if colonization is conceived broadly as the
reiteration of Latours modern Constitution,
whereby dualisms nature/culture, male/
female, mind/body, self/other are (imper-
fectly) distilled from within a highly differ-
entiated world. In this sense, a turn to the
material can play a central role in efforts to
decolonize the social sciences. Consideration
of societys materiality and natures socializa-
tion provides an empirical grounding from
which to question the adequacy of dualistic
accounts (look, this is neither nature nor cul-
ture nor has it ever been!). In other words,
deploying concepts of materiality to inter-
rogate nature deepens our reflexivity about
ourselves.
We think there is much to be gained,
therefore, in teasing out the analytical
significance of concrete differences in terms
of the biophysical properties of the material
world. These material differences are signif-
icant because they enable and constrain
the social relations necessary for resource
production. Materiality matters, then,
because of the way its heterogeneity differen-
tially enables, constrains and/or disrupts the
social practices through which resource
regulation is achieved. In contrast to much of
the historical materialist and commodity
chain analysis discussed above, however, it is
important to assert that the unruliness of
materiality should not be located in natural
laws or limits. Rather, the critical issue and a
fruitful focus for research is the way in
which contemporary materialities have been
produced historically, and the ways in which
we can think imaginatively about creating
new natures as possible futures (Smith,
1984; Cheah, 1996).
Acknowledgements
Trevor Barnes, Noel Castree, Matthew
Gandy and Scott Prudham provided helpful
comments on a much earlier draft version of
this paper. We gratefully acknowledge the
22 Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature
insightful contributions of Bruce Braun,
Margaret FitzSimmons, Cindi Katz and Paul
Robbins who participated as panellists in the
Material Worlds session at the Annual
Meeting of the Association of American
Geographers in New Orleans (March 2003).
We also wish to recognize and thank the
Economic Geography, Cultural Geography,
and Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty
Groups of the AAG for supporting the
session. Four anonymous reviewers and
Alexander Murphy provided incisive com-
ments which improved the final version of the
paper. The usual disclaimers apply.
Notes
1. Howitt (2001) attempts the sort of critical,
constructive engagement with resource
management practice that we have in mind.
2. Spectres that do not apparently haunt all social
scientists witness the success of physiologist/
evolutionary biologist Jared Diamonds Pulitzer
Prize-winning inquiry into the origins of
colonialism, which he explains by reference to
differences in environmental resources avail-
able to early hominid populations (Diamond,
1997). See also Harvard economic historian
David Landes inquiry into the origins of global
disparities in wealth, rooted in part in differ-
ences in geography and climate (Landes, 1998).
Not to be missed is Landes introductory
chapter on Natures inequalities, the opening
sentence of which reads Geography has fallen
on hard times(!) (Landes, 1998: 3).
3. This should not be interpreted as suggesting
that efforts to map such flows are without
merit. Far from it: an exhumation of the
physical flows (of energy, food, water, wastes)
that undergird economic activity can be a
powerful tool for engaging discussion on why
economies (at a range of spatial scales) are
structured as they are. The point here is that
the two approaches imply quite different
approaches to materiality.
4. Thanks to Dick Walker for this observation.
5. Latour locates quasi-objects as follows:
quasi-objects are in between and below the
two poles (nature and society), at the very
place around which dualism and dialectics had
turned endlessly without being able to come
to terms with them (Latour, 1993: 55).
6. As illustrated by Latours (1993) choice of
resource and environmental questions for
the opening of We have never been modern,
examples which he uses to demonstrate the
practice of translation.
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