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Redefining Nature
EXPLORATIONS IN AN1HROPOLOGY
A University College London Series

Series Editors: Barbara Bender, John Gledhill and Bruce kapferer

Redefining Nature

Ecology, Culture and Domestication

Edited by
Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui
First published 1996 by Berg Publishers

Published 2020 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

©Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui 1996

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Public:ation Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of

Congress.
GF21 .R43 1996
c.4
Redefining nature : ecology,
culture, and domestication

British Library Cataloguing-in-Public:ation Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.

ISBN 13: 978-1-8597-3135-2 (pbk)

To Hal Conklin
Contents

Ust of Figures xi

Ust of Tables XV

Ust of Colour Plates xix

Preface xxi

1 Introduction
Roy Ellen 1

Part I Nature as a Cultural Concept

2 Human Dimensions in the Sound Universe

Junzo Kawadll 39

3 A Poetics of Place: Ecological and Aesthetic

Co-evolution in a Papua New Guinea Rainforest
Community
SteoenFeld 61

4 A Church Too Far Near a 'Pridge Oddly Placed:

The Cultural Construction of the Norfolk Countryside
Charles 0. Frake 89
5 Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the
Environment
Tim Ingold 117

6 The Invention of Nature

Peter D. Dwyer 157

7 The Concept of Vital Energy Among Andean

Pastoralists
Hiroyasu Tomoeda 187

vii
viii Contents

Part II Relations Between Specific Domesticates and

Human Populations

8 Glutinous-Endosperm Starch Food Culture Specific

to Eastern and Southeastern Asia
Sadao Sakamoto 215

9 Creating Landrace Diversity: The Case of the Ari

People and Ensete (Ensete ventricosum) in Ethiopia
Masayoshi Shigeta 233

10 Human Cognition as a Product and Agent of

Evolution
]ames Boster 269

11 Agrarian Creolization: The Ethnobiology, History,

Culture and Politics of West African Rice
Paul Richards 291

12 Co-evolution Between Humans and Domesticates:

The Cultural Selection of Animal Coat-Colour
Diversity Among the Bodi
Katsuyoshi Fukui 319

13 Domestic Animal as Serf: Ideologies of Nature in

the Mediterranean and the Middle East
Yutaka Tani 387

14 Crops, Techniques, and Affordances

Fran,ois Sigaut 417

15 Domesticatory Relationships of People, Plants and

Animals
David R. Harris 437

Part III Nature, Co-evolution and the Problem of

Cultural Adaptation

16 The Co-existence of Man and Nature in the African

RainForest
Mitsuo Ichikawa 467
Contents ix

17 Image and Reality at Sea: Fish and Cognitive

Mapping in Carolinean Navigational Knowledge
Tomoya Akimichi 493

18 Long-term Adaptation of the Gidra-Speaking

Population of Papua New Guinea
Ryutaro Ohtsulal 515

19 Nurturing the Forest: Strategies of Native

Amazonians
Emilio F. Moran 531
20 Process Versus Product in Bomean Augury: A
'Ii'aditional Knowledge System's Solution to the
Problem of Knowing
Michael R. Dove 557

21 Individual Strategy and Cultural Regulation in

Nuaulu Hunting
Roy Ellen 597
Notes on Contributors 637
Index 643
List of Figures

2.1 Verbal and non-verbal sounds in the French sound

universe 41
2.2 Verbal and non-verbal sounds in the Japanese sound
universe 42
2.3 Verbal and non-verbal sounds in the Mosi sound
universe 43
3.1 Map of place-names cited in lamentation 83
4.1 The Norfolk landscape 90
5.i A comparison between 'non-Western' and 'Western'
intentional worlds 121
5.2 Western anthropological and hunter-gatherer
economies of knowledge 127
6.1 The Kubo Dancer 159
6.2 Papua New Guinea, showing locations of the three
communities discussed 164
6.3 Map of Gwaimasi region (I<ubo) 166
6.4 Walking trails associated with Gwaimasi village:
1986-7 . 167
6.5 Map of Bobole region (Etolo) 170
6.6 Scheduling of primary subsistence activities at
Bobole, 1979-80 171
6.7 Map of Leu region (Siane) 173
8.1 Pounding of Japanese mochi cake 216
8.2 The Thrii gate of a Shinto shrine decorated with
shimenawa 217
8.3 Classification of foods made from rice in Japan in
terms of starch type and form of ingredients 224
8.4 The centre of origin of glutinous-endosperm starch
food culture, main distribution of the culture and
geographical distribution of glutinous landraces
m
found seven cereal crops 229
9.1 The Ari and their neighbours 240

xi
xii List of Figures

9.2 Classificatory dendrogram of thirteen ensete

landraces 252
9.3 Differentiation of four ensete landraces by
quantitative characteristics 255
9.4 An example of an ensete planting pattern in a
garden 258
9.5 Schematized relationship between cultivated and
wild population of ensete 261
12.1 The Bodi and neighbouring peoples 321
12.2 Kinship relations of cattle owners for compound
inventorized in Table 12.1 324
12.3 Some examples of black and white patterns in Bodi
cattle 327
12.4 Bodi classification of colour 329
12.5 Cognition of pattern formation (1) 332
12.6 Bodi classification of typical patterns 333
12.7 Cognition of pattern formation (2) 334
12.8 Patterns the Bodi cannot identity and name 335
12.9 Bodi classification of cows with black-white coat
and their clans 336
12.10 Genealogy of the cow called bheliyach 344
12.11 Genealogy of the cow called bheliyach and
cognition of cross-breeding 349
12.12 Folk genetics of Bodi cattle 355
12.13 A man hums his personal poems about his
favourite ox 361
12.14 A banner made from the hide of a particular bull 367
12.15 A red cow sacrificed at the time of betrothal 371
12.16 Goat killed during a seed-sowing ritual 375
12.17 Ox blood being sprinkled over digging stick
and sorghum in the ritual of the first seed-sowing 376
13.1 Geographical distribution of ethnic groups referred
to in text 395
13.2 Geographical distribution of three types of
flock-guide 396
15.1 A classification and evolutionary model of systems
of plant exploitation 445
15.2 A classification and evolutionary model of systems
of animal exploitation 449
16.1 Ancient African rain forest and hunter-gatherer
distribution 469
List of Figures xiii

16.2 Distribution of hunting camps in the Teturi area,

Central Ituri 474
16.3 Distribution of old viilage sites in the Central Ituri
Forest 477
16.4 Graph indicating the relationship between price,
minimum wage and real wage for the period
1975-84 482
16.5 Price increases in the Teturi area during the twelve
years from 1975 to 1987 483
16.6 Population density (person/km2) in Northeastern
Zaire 484
17.1 Sidereal compass of the Caroline Islands 497
17.2 Diagram to show the learning of yamas 498
17.3 ~odelofp~up~apanap 505
17.4 Diagram to show the fefeu perhan Ayufan
knowledge 506
17.5 Diagram_ to show the navigation of masaccha 507
17.6 Comparison of cartographic and cognitive models
ofp~upwunapanap 512
18.1 Location of the thirteen Gidra-speaking villages
in Papua New Guinea 517
19.1 Amazon-Basin habitats 537
19.2 Stages of Bora 'graded fallows' 540
19.3 Comparison of terra firme soils 545
19.4 Ethnoecological fish classification from Marajo 547
20.1 The Kantu' territory in Kalimantan, Indonesia 560
20.2 The augural practice, betenong kempang 'taking
omens from the kempang stick' 561
List of Tables

2.1 'IYPology of sonic and non-sonic phenomena and

modes of interaction among them 39
8.1 Geographical disbibution of non-glutinous and
glutinous landraces of foxtail millet 220
8.2 Geographical disbibution of glutinous landraces in
seven cereal crops 223
8.3 Glutinous-endosperm rice culture in
southwestern China 226
9.1 Frequency distribution and the order of named ensete
landraces recalled by 39 informants 236
9.2 Most frequently provided landrace names: a
comparison of Sida, Biyo and Baka chiefdoms
(lowland) with the highland area 241
9.3 Frequency disbibution and order of named
landraces recalled by 22 informants in the Sida
area indicating age and sex 242
9.4 The knowledge of ensete landrace names among
sixth-year primary school children in Metsar
viUage 246
9.5 Meaning of vernacular landrace names 247
9.6 Some ensete landraces with their characteristics 250
9.7 Criteria for classification of ensete by the Ari
people 251
9.8 Knowledge of names of ensete not grown in
own garden 257
12.1 Cattle composition of a Bodi compound 325
12.2 Classification of cows and their 'clan' names 338
12.3 Bodi cognition of cattle coat crossing 346
12.4 Cattle types and numbers inane Bodi compound 356
12.5 Cultural uses of particular coat-colours among the
Bodi 360
12.6 The main colour patterns of the morare 363

XV
xvi List of Tables

12.7 Generation and cattle coat-colour in the Hana area 365

12.8 Coat-colour of sacrificial cattle used for Bodi death
rituals 372
13.1 Relationship between role of guide whether and
eunuch 390
13.2 Semantic relationship between subordinated animals
and subordinated persons 404
13.3 Semantic relationship between mother cows and
mother slaves 406
15.1 Classification of man-animal and man-plant
Relationships 441
16.1 Habitats of important food plants 475
16.2 Food plants of major edible insects and their
habitat 478
18.1 Daughter-mother ratio (DMR) and annual increase
rate by mother's group 519
18.2 Daughter-mother ratio (DMR) by mother's birth and
death or dwelling place and the corresponding
increase rate per year 520
18.3 Per cent distribution of villages according to the
stronger antibody titre of two species of
Plasmodium 522
18.4 Dependence on major food-obtaining activities
by Gidra village group 525
18.5 Characteristics of major food-obtaining activities 528
19.1 Cell Means on nine soil characteristics for forty-five
topsoil samples taken near Nuevo Eden, Peru,
during 1981 543
19.2 Forest vegetation indicative of agricultural soils 544
20.1 Incidence of different types of omen taken in each
stage of omen taking, expressed in percentage terms 562
20.2 Inter-household variation in omens 566
20.3 Inter-year variation in type of omen 567
20.4 Inter-swidden variation in type of omen 567
20.5 Correct age-order between first and second omens 568
20.6 Correct fit between 'heat' of environment and omen
bird, expressed in percentage terms 568
20.7 Age-order of first and second omens, and swidden
success 569
20.8 Fit of bird 'heat' and environment, and swidden
success expressed in percentage terms 569
List of Tables xvii

20.9 Incidence of omen-taking, expressed in percentage

terms 570
20.10 Incidence of omen-taking in dryland versus
swapland swiddens, expressed in percentage terms 570
20.11 Prior swidden success and type of omen-bird,
expressed in percentage terms 572
20.12 Prior swidden success, and age-order of first and
second omens, expressed in percentage terms 572
20.13 Prior swidden success, and match of omen-bird
'heat' and environment, expressed in percentage
terms 573
20.14 Prior swidden success and completeness of
omen-taking, expressed in percentage terms 573
20.15 Prior swidden success and omen-taking in
swampland, expressed in percentage terms 574
21.1 Accumulations of peni trophies in Nuaulu sacred
houses 608
21.2 Nuaulu hunting inputs and rewards in terms of
adult male age cohorts 613
21.3 Size of hunting group in relation to return 614
21.4 Meat consumption in Rohua, March to July 1970 615
21.5 Duration of hunting trip in relation to return 617
List of Colour Plates

12.1 Some examples of Bodi cattle coat colours

12.2 Various coat-colours in Bodi cattle

xix
Preface

All of the essays especially revised for this volume were first
presented at a MOA symposium held in Kyoto andAtami during
March 1992, entitled 'Beyond nature and culture: cognition,
ecology and domestication'. What is remarkable about the
published collection, and what distinguishes it from anything
comparable, is not only the academic distinction of the various
contributors, but the way in which the volume brings together
the combined insights of cognitive and ecological anthropology
on the one hand, and the approaches and concerns of
ethnography and scientific biology on the other. Although we
have maintained a tripartite grouping of chapters for this book,
the degree of interconnection and integration of the subject
matter is so great that virtually any grouping, or none at all,
would have seemed plausible. Although the focus is a broadly
anthropological one, the issues are of self-evident interest to a
wide readership cutting across some conventional boundaries
between the sciences and humanities. Indeed, the contributions
are relevant to anyone who in their scholarly or professional
work makes use of, or who deprecates, the ·analytical and
conceptual status of nature:culture or cognate distinctions.
The original symposium was funded by a grant from the MOA
(Mokichi Okada Association) International. We would like to
thank MOA for their generosity, and for their warm hospitality
in Atami. The symposium was organized by KatSuyoshi Fukui,
with the support of an executive committee comprising Tomoya
Akimichi, Ryutaro Ohtsuka and Mitsuo Ichikawa; and by an
advisory group composed of Junzo Kawada, Sadao Sakamoto
and Yutaka Tani. All of these individuals have also contributed to
this volume. Vigdis Broch-Due, Harold C. Conklin, Shun Sato
and Kenji Yoshida gave papers which are not included in the
published collection, though their participation at the
symposium was immensely valuable. Tatsuo Kobayashi, Emiko

xxi
xxii Preface

Namihira and Manabu Tsukamoto were present as guest

observers and we are grateful to them for their presence and
active participation in the concluding session, and to Hiroshi
Matsuda.
Most of the editing involved in producing this volume has
taken place at the·University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC), and
we would like to thank Jan Hom of the Department of Sociology
and Social Anthropology for her expertise and efficiency in
preparing the papers to a high standard and in dealing with a
variety of administrative matters. Some of the original figures
have been redrawn with the help of the UKC Printing Unit
(Lesley Fan and Chris Lancaster), and we are pleased to
acknowledge their assistance in this. Finally, we thank Barbara
Delaney, Marion Berghahn, Kathryn Earle, Sara Everett and
Robert Parkin for their patience and cooperation in ensuring that
a complex international collaborative project, long in gestation,
eventually reached fruition.

Katsuyoshi Fukui, Kyoto

Roy Ellen, Canterbury
Chapterl
Introduction

Roy Ellen

I
Background1
Humankind has evolved over several million years by living in
and utilizing nature, by transforming and assimilating it into
culture. Indeed, the biological success of our species has been
widely accepted to rest upon its abilities to influence, manipulate
and completely change this thing called nature. 2 Yet, by the
sixties of the present century, the idea that culture is divorced
from, and necessarily in confrontation with, nature was being
challenged by the experience of non-Western 'holistic' philo-
sophies, by advances in environmental biology, by the
recognition of the damage done by enviroiunentally unfriendly
practices, and in a new generation of more profound anthropo-
logical studies of ecology. The emphasis was now firmly on
people as parts of larger systems, on cUlture in nature, on the
cultural construction of nature, and on species co-existence and
sustainable development.3
Anthropology is increasingly concerned with such matters, as
they become ~ore urgent for Homo sapiens as a whole, and as
they become routinized as parts of political programmes and
management styles. The present volume seeks to review the
current condition of the concept of nature as an analytical device,
and the way it features in anthropological explanation. Whereas
it has now become conventional for ethnographers and
historians to assert, and in some cases demonstrate in convincing
detail, the cultural, ideological and moral construction of nature,
the real challenge is to examine the implications of such

1
2 Introduction

epistemological relativity for the objective practices of scientists

of all kinds, and for those who attempt to build on these to
implement change in the lives of people outside the Academy. We
need to ask, for example, what deconstructionism means for the
way scientists and administrators deal practically with issues
which are seemingly no longer clear cut, and to what extent we
are able to separate our scientific selves, for whom concepts have
precise and understoOd contingent characters, from our broader
cultural selves, where other meanings interfere. Can person and
environment ever be anything but implicate in each other? Is the
'environment' the same as the environment? To what degree can
we anyway cope at a practical level with the multiple ordering of
realities, or do we need the re-assuringly straightforward
certainties of Cartesian dualism? A relativist discourse of nature
and culture is much easier to handle for those who are in a
position to treat all their data as texts, who deny or have no
interest in explicit comparison or pan-human generalization. It is
much more difficult if we wish to translate the import of such
ideas into terms that are understood and productive in the work
of 'natural' scientists and those in the applied professions who
use their insights and models of the world, or if we seek to
explain how it is that humans seem to share a particular
experience of the world sufficiently to be able to find the things
they talk about recognizable.
The present book examines these issues through twenty
contributions based on research conducted among a wide range
of peoples throughout the world, from the prehistoric and
historic past as well as the ethnographic present. The book is
organized around three themes: nature as a cultural concept, the
implications for the nature-culture distinction of studies of the
relations between specific domesticates and human populations,
and the continuing plausibility of the idea of cultural adaptation
to the environment. The first is concerned with the negotiable
character of the nature-culture dichotomy, and seeks to examine
approaches to understanding it which go beyond conventional
unreflexive assumptions. The second theme builds on the
observation that particular species of domesticated plants and
animals have evolved through mutual interaction with human
populations, and focuses on the various cultural strategies
involved. The third theme focuses on the extent to which it
is possible to speak of culture and society as 'reflecting',
Introduction 3

'influencing', 'managing', 'regulating', 'controlling' and adapting

to environmental relations.

Nature as a Cultural Concept

That nature is culturally construed and defined - even

'constructed' -has become a commonplace in anthropology and
the history of ideas. By 'culturally defined' we mean here made
meaningful through practical engagement and cognition
(categorization, labelling, intellection and sensation). Few would
now dissent from the view that nature, and the extent to which it
exists as a discrete idea at all, varies between different
populations, according to different levels of discourse, and over
time. There are now many analyses of the cross-cultural variation
of the concept of nature within the ethnographic present. The
present edition contains some further examples, and it is no
wonder that, given its collaborative character, we are especially
intrigued by the problems of translating between Japanese and
European traditions. There has also been a steady growth of
studies of how conceptions of nature change over time, in both
the realm of scholarly ideas [e.g. Collingwood 1945; Glacken
1967; Horigan 1988; Williams 1976: 184-9], and in the lives of
ordinary folk [e.g. Dove 1992; Thomas 1983]. However, there is
no particular consensus as to what firm conclusions might be
drawn from all this.
The hard relativist position of many contemporary
anthropological writers owes much to the insistence of Edmund
Leach [1964: 34-5] that the environment is perceived as a
continuum which does not contain any intrinsically separate
things, reminding us of John Locke's blank sheet upon which
children impose a 'discriminating grid which we discover
through language'. This is a view which has not stood the test of
time and has been challenged by a later generation of
psychologists and anthropologists, yet we find it echoed clearly
enough by Carol MacCormack [1980: 6]:

The 'myth' of nature is a system of arbitrary signs which relies on a

social consensus for meaning. Neither the concept of nature nor that
of culture is 'given', and they cannot be free from the biases of the
culture ill which the concepts were constructed.
4 Introduction

Similarly, Marilyn Strathem [1980: 177], in the same volume,

reiterates the position:

The point to extract is simple: there is no such thing as nature or

culture. Each is a highly relativized concept whose ultimate
signification must be derived from its place within a specific
metaphysics. No single meaning can in fact be given to nature or.
culture in Western thought; there is no consistent dichotomy, only a
matrix of contrasts.

But in the same passage Strathem is careful to voice a certain

detached agnosticism. 'The question then becomes', she con-
tinues, 'how large a part of the total assemblage of meanings must
we be able to identify in other cultures to speak with confidence
of their having such notions?' She declines to answer her own
question, preferring to 'bypass ... the questions of underlying
structures, and the usefulness of these terms for apprehending
the workings of the human mind'. Instead, she addresses those
styles of interpretation 'which impute to other people the idea of
nature-culture as a more-or-less explicit entity in their mental
representations. Whatever status these concepts have in "ration-
alist" discourse there has been a demonstrable "empirical"
appropriation of them' [Strathem 1980: 176-7 emphases added].
One way of attempting to answer Strathem's question is to
examine the evidence for any underlying cognitive propensities
which might generate the variety of images we intuitively
interpret as conceptions of nature, even though these may vary
between places and times in their degree of prominence and
combinatory properties. We might, for instance, argue [e.g. Ellen
in press] that three such propensities are sufficiently widespread
and primal: the identification of things and perceived patterns
between them, the contrast between self and other, and the recog-
nition of some inner essence or force. Even if we conclude that no
such pan-human cognitive template exists, the rubric is helpful
in reviewing the variable characteristics of conceptions of nature.

The Thinginess of Nature

This refers to the human propensity to identify things (natural
kinds), which, when inventorized and aggregated through
Introduction 5

resemblance, are seen as part of a whole we call nature. Thus, one

of the main sources of data on how humans perceive and interact
with the environment is the language we use to describe it, and
the categories we infer from this. Such an approach has been
integral to a particular branch of anthropology since the 1950s,
and one of its pioneers, most influential advocates and
practitioners has been Harold Conklin. In the paper which he
presented at the Kyoto phase of the conference, Conklin [Conklin
1992; see also Conklin 1986] discusses the properties
distinguishing everyday vernacular forms of environmental
categorization, how linguistically reflected local systems capture
the combined natural and artefactual status of domesticated
plants and animals, and what we can learn from attending to the
way people talk about these complex entities. Using the results
of recent eth.nobiological field research in Ifugao, northern
Luzon, he explores these issues with respect to the multifaceted
and interlocking local classifications of rice. Hundreds of
expressions designate and characterize the myriad forms,
functions, uses and meanings of this cultigen. For example, more
than 50 terms contrastively differentiate parts of the plant, more
than 70 specify uses other than as a food staple, more than 125
refer to distinct techniques of cultivating, storing, processing and
handling; and more than 250 express characteristics of diagnostic
significance in recognizing local (landrace) cultivars. Women
seed selectors, traditional specialists in varietal identification,
naming, and classification, provide excellent information for this
collaborative eth.nobotanical account of all locally distinguished
rice-type categories.
That our images of environmental perception are dominated
by the visual sense was evident from Conklin's paper. But
recognition of this has often led to an underestimation of the role
of the other senses. We perceive the environment as much
through smell, taste, touch and hearing as through vision, even
though science is dominated by visible or vision-based images of
the invisible. Moreover, there is no particular reason to assert that
'thingification' is a cognitive propensity associated only with
sight. For example, spoken language depends on the ability of
the speech organs to produce, and the ear to recognize, particular
kinds of discrete sounds (phonemes), just as sight requires the
drawing of effective visual boundaries. The papers by Junzo
Kawada and Feld pay particular attention to this. Kawada
6 Introduction

compares the interpenetration of culture and nature in the

acoustical universe of the Japanese, French and Mosi (Burkino
Faso). He examines differing degrees of arbitrariness in the
meanings attached to sounds. Thus, in Japanese and Mosi verbal
expressions the use of ideophones i~ preeminent, including those
for non-acoustical sensations, whereas in French these are
virtually absent. Instrumental sound communications range from
pan-human signs such as alarms, through culturally modified
melodic and rhythmic patterns, to highly conventionalized forms
of communication, such as Mosi drum language. The inter-
penetration between nature and culture in the sound universe is
exemplified by instrumental interpretation of natural sounds,
such as bird vocalizations, which are common in Japanese and
French, but virtually absent in Mosi. However, Japanese
interpretations are usually associated with a limited number of
species, mostly based on the idea of the rebirth of human beings
who have died in unfortunate circumstances. Thus, sound
relationships of this kind might best be understood as part of an
idiom of human-animal metamorphosis.
Taking his cue from an observation by Roy Rappaport, that
effective constructions of the environment may be less those that
are objectively correct than those which invest parts of nature
with value 'beyond themselves', Feld looks at two dimensions of
the interrelatedness of adaptation and aesthetics amongst the
I<aluli of Papua New Guinea: the first is the ecology of sound, the
second the cartography of song. The natural soundscape of the
Kaluli rain forest features the calls of some 130 species of bird, as
well as the sounds of many frogs and the rhythms of many kinds
of insects. Additionally, there is the sonic presence of creeks,
streams, waterfalls, pools and other forms of water. These sound
patterns index the time of day, seasons of the year, vegetation
cycles, migratory patterns, heights and depths of forest, and
many other aspects of the environment. In relation to this, Feld
explores what Kaluli perceive and know about natural diversity
in their world through these sounds, and how their own vocal
and instrumental music is inspired by, modelled on, and
performed through them. Similarly, Kaluli song texts are
organized as maps of place names. The sequences of these are
textually co-articulated with names of trees and vegetation,
waterways and birds. Feld explores how nature (place) is quite
literally 'placed' in the memory, and how its codification and
Introduction 7

evocation in the formal genre of song poetics intensifies the

relationship between the feelingful, experiential dimension of
cultural identity, and the adaptive dimensions of ecological
knowledge and awareness.

The Otherness of Nature

In Western notions, nature is most obviously recognizable as

what is 'out there', what is not ourselves and 'that which can take
care of itself'. We find the same idea in many other, otherwise
strikingly different cultural traditions. But the indicative content
of that natural other may vary. In contemporary Europe images
of nature are quintessentially of forest and mountains, of
wilderness, and except for those who live off ~e sea, essentially
terrestrial. But ideas of what is the best exemplar of that natural
other vary. For the Satawalese, described here by Tomoya
Akimichi, it is predominantly the sea. Though the sea is more
intractable than the land when it comes to physical modification,
it is not immune, and is subject to elaborate forms of cognitive re-
structuring. Moreover, cultural 'images of natural otherness do
not necessarily comply with biological history, as the chapter by
Charles Frake in this volume well demonstrates. Frake shows us
how what might be considered the domain of nature and things
natural is the consequence of pre-meditated cultural actions and
dramatic re-interpretations. He is concerned with the narratives
which the people of a part of Norfolk in England employ to make
sense of and orientate themselves within a particular landscape.
The dominant idiom is one which refers to 'the subtle traces of
past hlun.an endeavour enthusiastically discerned and inter-
preted by those in the present with present purposes in mind'.
The Norfolk landscape is a product of past activity that requires
constant cognitive attention and behavioural intervention to
preserve and reconstruct what is valued in contemporary images
of the past. This reading of the landscape is a cultural practice
motivated not only by social entailments and political or econ-
omic agendas, but also by the experiential enrichment afforded
by a meaningful engagement with the past of one's place.
And what works for the English countryside would appear to
work also for Japanese industrial forest, for which John Knight
8 Introduction

[1994] has demonstrated an evocation of the same wild qualities

as those associated with natural forest An even more dramatic
example of the attribution of wildness to what is historically a
tamed landscape is found in that epitome of natural otherness,
'jungle'. This is the English borrowing of the Urdu word jongal
and has come to mean impenetrable tropical forest. Its history,
however, as Michael Dove [1992: 241] suggests, is more complex.
In what is now Pakistan, forest was removed by humans in order
to create jangala, a savanna vegetation suited to the keeping of
livestock. Only later, as jongal, did it come to mean forest in any
sense. Thus, what are categorized as nature and culture not only
shift and merge, but may even change places.
Sometimes the distinction between nature and culture may
seem wholly irrelevant. Thus, it has been observed that the
concept of nature as an oppositional other is inappropriate for
describing hunter-gatherer world views. This is well exemplified
in the review provided here by TID\ Ingold. According to Ingold,
hunters and gatherers deny with marked consistency that there
is a rigid separation between the world of human persons and
that of non-human agencies and entities, between society and
nature. Anthropological accounts, however, typically present this
view as entailing a particular social and cultural construction of
nature, thereby reproducing the very dichotomy that, in other
contexts, is recognized as peculiar to the Western tradition. Two
consequences follow. First, the 'perceived' environment is seen to
differ from the 'real' environment as the product of the ordering
of sense data according to an imposed cultural schema (a theme
to which I shall be returning later in this introduction). Secondly,
the practical operations of hunting and gathering are reduced to
interactions within a given, physical world, as implied in the
notion of 'foraging'. In short, the perception of the environment
is culturalized and the activities of production are. naturalized.
Ingold argues for an alternative theory, more consistent with the
view of hunters and gatherers themselves, where the environ-
ment is only revealed to the perceiver through an active process
of engagement, rather than constructed through an ordering of
sensations passively received.
The argument that nature is an emergent property of culture is
taken still further by Peter Dwyer. In New Guinea, ecological
intensification (e.g. population increase and a growth in the
importance of agriculture) is associated with gradients in land
Introduction 9

use. Increasingly, the domain of the invisible (e.g. the world of

spirits) is connected with these gradients. Inasmuch as nature is
'other than culture', the comparative data suggest that in low
intensity systems, like that of Kubo hunter-horticulturalists of the
lowland interior relying heavily on wild sago and living in
dispersed settlements, the analogue of nature is the invisible
world and that, with increasing intensification, emerging
geographic connections between the invisible and the visible
predispose to an identification of the 'other' with some
components of a perceived external nature. The artefactual
Western notion of wilderness, now largely divorced from the
invisible, represents an extreme position on this continuum.

Nature as Essence

The third cognitive propensity which routinely emerges when we

examine concepts which are nature-like is the attempt to
essentialize a vague and unknown phenomenon. This may
involve recognition of a force exogenous to human will but
which can to varying degrees be controlled, or it may define an
irreducible core or an essence within things, such as the fluids
and pulses associated with life; or it may be simultaneously, or
varyingly, both, in equal or unequal measure. Thus, we have
nature as opposed to nurture, instinct as opposed to reason,
wildness as opposed to control, rawness as opposed to
refinement [Strathern 1980: 217, following Mathieu]. We can see
other examples of the same thing in culturally equivocal
descriptions of nature as variously robust and fragile, benign and
malign, capricious and ordered, perverse and tolerant, eternal
and ephemeral [Schwartz and Thompson 1990: 2-13]. These
qualities do not simply allow us to locate things in the world but
to morally evaluate them as well. To say something is unnatural
is to condemn it as reprehensible. This is not to say, however, that
what is reprehensible is therefore to be understood as the logical
complement of nature, meaning culture. This would not work in
English semantics. On the other hand, to say that something is
uncultured is not to mean that it is natural in this sense. It is all
rather confusing. We biologize things to give them greater
credence in moral arguments, as with ethnicity, and create the
10 Introduction

same effect by taking what is natural and incorporating it into

culture. Thus, as Lofgren [1985: 211] has shown for recent
Swedish bourgeois traditions, an abhorrence of 'natural ways'
does not mean that there is no longing for the 'natural way of
life'. One and the same person can think with animals in different
and conflicting ways, partly because they are, paradoxically, both
within and beyond us [Willis 1975: 9]. Science begins by
distancing humanity from the natural world, and logically ends
up by incorporating the first into the second. The new sensitivity
and empathy towards animals associated with the animal rights
movement bring together science and sentiment, as, for example,
in current primate research [Reynolds 1994]. Lofgren [ibid.: 216]
sums all this up in terms of cultural contradictions arising from
the polarity between spheres of production and consumption in
bourgeois culture: in the first the laws of science and rationality
prevail, in the second sensuality and sentimentality.
Among the chapters presented here, that which best
exemplifies this ambiguous propensity to essentialize is
Hiroyasu Tomoeda's, which seeks to dissect a particular cultural
construction of nature, this time through an examination of the
fertility rituals of camelid herders in the high central Andes of
Peru. Tomoeda argues that the very structure of language
transforms the conventional tripartite relationship between gods,
humans and animals into the bifurcate relationship 'I/you' in
ritual songs, thus requiring us to rethink radically the
appropriateness of conventional distinctions between nature and
culture. This is especially as it is through this dyadic relationship
that the concept of vital energy which permeates both
environmental and social relationships is recharged.

II

The cognitive geometry of thing, other and essence provides a

framework which may serve as the basis, in particular cases, of
elaborate systems of meaning, most obviously those built around
the opposition culture:nature. But the degree to which nature and
culture are opposed, and the degree to which such an opposition
becomes a device for cosmological coherence varies.
Nature need not be a clearly bounded concept, indeed it may
most often not be. In Japan, the complex and multifaceted idea
Introduction 11

bound up in the characters shizen ( El ~·)and tennen (~~.)

captures, depending on situation, the opposite of artificiality, the
opposite of humanity, some inner fundamental property,
common sense (tao), objects in the environment (such as trees),
and creative processes not under human control (such as
earthquakes). At the same time, it is accepted that there are
strong spiritual connections between, say, mountain (yama) and
village (sato) which cut right across any inherent dichotomizing
tendency which these ideas might seem to be suggesting [cf.
Asquith and Kalland, in preparation; Berque 1986; Shaner 1989;
Tellenbach and Kimura 1989).
Where it is possible to extrapolate a 'difference' between
nature and culture, this may not best be represented as an
opposition [Strathern 1980: 179, following WJ.l.den]. The nature in
Frake's Norfolk landscape is not only objectively anthropogenic,
but the intricacy of its interconnections with cultural history give
it a comforting homely feel. Where the opposition nature:culture
is transparent, the terms may not even be labelled. Amongst the
Nuaulu, described in this volume by Roy Ellen, they exist as
convenient covert categories strongly inferred from a series of
contrasts apparent in ritual practice and mythic narrative, the
interconnections between which cannot easily be spoken of in
any other way. Whether labelled or not, they need not be part of
a consistent set of corresponding analogical pairs, such as
left:right, male:female, nor logically comparable to such
classifications [Goody 1977: 64). True, gender is strongly linked
to natuie:culture distinctions, but it need not be; and when the
linkage is demonstrable, it is often contradictory. Thus, the idea
of nature as passive and mute and therefore female, while culture
is active, abstract and male is common enough, but many
peoples do not conform, either all or part of the time (e.g. the
Gimi [Gillison 1980]). Nature and culture often cannot be
resolved into a single dichotomy [Strathem 1980: 178], and are
not always the most appropriate extrapolations. The Hagen
terms mbo and romi can be glossed as a matter of convenience as
planted:uncultivated; belonging to people:belonging to wild
spirits, though neither obviously fits the Western nature:culture
distinction nor correlates necessarily with the male:female
contrast [ibid.: 205]. There is, then, no necessary link between 'the
natural world' and 'human nature'. For Hageners nature and
culture are not concepts of order; 'the tension betWeen the terms
12 Introduction

is different' [ibid.: 218].

European conceptions of nature are no easier to grasp. We
have already seen this with respect to the essential qualities with
which it is associated in contemporary thought, and as it has
been opposed to different doctrines at different points in history
so its meanings have altered [MacCormack 1980: 20]. We shall
explore this further in the next section, explicitly in relation to
scientific thought. But however nature is culturally constructed,
and whatever (if any) its underlying cognitive template, in the
way we use it is always a synergy of the utilitarian and the
aesthetic, the pragmatic and the symbolic, and knowledge of it
can never be independent of relations with it [Norgaard 1987:
118]. Or, to put it slightly differently, how 'society views nature is
in part a function of how society has affected nature. Nature and
the cultural conceptions of nature develop together; they co-
evolve' [Dove 1992: 246].

The Cultural Construction of Nature in Science

To delineate variations in the cultural construction of nature is

arguably easy and - some would say - increasingly self-
indulgent. The real problem arrives when we observe that the
analytic concepts of science (including anthropology) are
themselves rooted in folk categories and therefore subject to the
same critique. Not only are nature and culture folk concepts, they
also form the basis of a complex series of dichotomies in science
which serve both as descriptive and interpretative devices, and
as ideological props. Many have contributed to this view in
recent years, but few as persuasively as Dona Haraway [1989,
1991; see also Jordanova 1986]. In order to deal with the way in
which nature is used in professional sci~ntific discourse (and I
shall focus here primarily on biology and anthropology) we must
distinguish between several levels of assumption. The first is that
nature really exists out there in the world in a positivist se~,
and that science offers us a realistic model of how it is different
from culture. The second assumption is that nature itself is out
there but that science (including folk science) can only apprehend
it through shifting cultural lenses. The third assumption is that
even if nature is not out there, the contrast between nature and
Introduction 13

culture is a distinction which the human mind is predisposed to

make. Of course, some will say that if the latter is true then so is
the former, or at least we can never know. Let us take the first
assumption first.
Historical accounts of changing modalities of nature in
Western thought and science are hardly new. Collingwood [1945],
for example, provides us with a surprisingly contemporary
interpretation of the shifts and continuities between Greek,
Renaissance and modem views. In the conventions of a
presentist history of ideas it has become usual to locate the origin
of the idea that nature is independent of our perception of it,
and relations with it, in Greek physis and nomos: that which is
unconnected with human agency and that which results from the
human capacity to conceive and execute. But the popular pre-
Christian Greek view of nature was essentially animist, in many
respects resembling that of animist peoples recorded for the
ethnographic present. Outside the treatises of individual
philosophers, the Greek world of nature was saturated by mind.
By contrast, the Renaissance view denies the Greek idea of nature
as an organism, and asserts that it is both devoid of innate
knowingness and more akin to a machine, subject to laws
produced by an exogenous intelligence [ibid.: sr. This is more in
keeping with one interpretative stream in Greek thought, linking
Plato with Aristotle [Lloyd 1992: 10]. But the concept of nature as
a scientific category, as well as one crucial to political discourse, is
basically one of the enlightenment [Williams 1976: 187], though
it begins to find its modem expression towards the end of the
eighteenth century. For Collingwood [1945: 9] the modem view
is based on an analogy between processes of the natural world as
studied by natural scientists, and human affairs as studied by
historians, with an emphasis on process, change and develop-
ment. Hence, we have natural history.
In effect, then, nature and culture became reified as scientific
concepts. A tradition of objective knowledge emerged in biology
(and later in anthropology) in a way which made us think that
knowledge of nature was independent of our relations with it. By
the seventeenth century it had become something which could be
quantified, mechanized and dehumanized [Westfall 1992],
'distanced from the world of sense and common sense' [Torrance
1992: vi]. What some may think even more remarkable is the way
in which this Western tradition has spread and taken hold in
14 Introduction

other parts of the world which have been influenced by Western

science and thought, including Japan. However, such a view of
the emergence, growth, spread and global acceptance of a
European culture of science and its associated conception of
nature is problematic. The way in which scientists have used the
word nature has never been wholly consistent, and it has become
increasingly apparent that what was once thought to be a clear
distinction between nature and culture is at the very least
ambiguous. So, while it is often remarked that oriental and
occidental conceptions of nature are in certain over-arching
symbolic senses opposed, such a view is not necessarily
inconsistent with uniformity at the level of practical experience
[Bruun and Kalland 1995: 16]. There may, in other words, be a
disjunction between the timeless qualities of cosmologies
organized through symbolic logic and the pragmatic, experi-
ential character of everyday subsistence [Croll and Parkin 1992b:
16; Ellen 1994: 456]. The extent to which we can really claim that
Japanese working within the tradition of Western science have
simply internalized for practical purposes a Western opposition
between nature and culture, man and environment, is an
assertion which really requires much further careful investi-
gation. Certainly, we assume, for all intents and purposes, that
there is now one academic culture in which there is a sufficiently
shared understanding of what nature is for science to work as a ·
global discourse. But even though we must make it, there are
problems with this assumption. Let us examine some of these.
To begin with, humans modify the world around them on an
enormous scale, and have done so through co-evolutionary
interactions for many thousands of years. Effectively, all
landscapes with which humans routinely interact are therefore
cultural: and our environment is every bit as much what is made
socially as what is not. Frake's chapter supplies a nice illustration
of this, but in a more esoteric realm high energy physicists, in
their attempts to understand the underlying character of matter,
quite literally produce 'new' nature in a particle accelerator
[Nothnagel 1994], and in this context nature is manifestly not
something which can 'take care of itself'. And perhaps most
significantly from the point of view of this book, the literature on
domestication provides us with many examples which make
nonsense of any hard and fast distinction, none more so than the
proposal that the conservation and regulation of 'wild' animals
Introduction 15

is essentially the same as domestication [Macbeth 1989]. How

strange, then, that in another version of the biological
imagination (that of classical evolutionary taxonomy) domesti-
cated animals and non-endemics are, somehow, not the real
thing. The complexities of biological reality, enhanced by the
insights of modem ecology and genetics, make drawing the
frontiers between organism and environment, between what is
cultural and what is natural, almost impossible.
Secondly, whether some thing is natural or cultural may
depend on the level of abstraction in our arguments, our
methodology, or on time phase or context, not on any intrinsic
qualities. At different levels nature and culture are identified in
different ways: while at the most abstract level Amazonia as a
whole may be seen as nature in contrast to the urban sprawl of
Sao Paulo, at a local level nature is remnants of rain forest as
opposed to secondary forest and cultivated areas. Similarly,
technology is neither intrinsically nature nor culture. A tool may
begin as a stone unmodified by humans, but through perception
of its functions it becomes cultural. Again, a plant or animal may
become food (culture) without any material change ever having
taken place; food is thus simultaneously cultural and natural.
Much the same can be said of bodily techniques: walking, eating,
defecating, and so on.
Thirdly, conceptions of nature of a broadly Western kind, with
which individual scientists of diverse cultural backgrounds may
operate, are often, notwithstanding, affected by local folk or
philosophical traditions. The significance of this has only
emerged in recent years through the ethnographic and historical
study of comparative culture. For example, in Christianity,
movement across the animal-human boundary was, quite
literally, a 'transgression', an abomination against God's creation,
whereas in Buddhism and Shintoism, by contrast, there is no
sharp demarcation. Indeed, in Shinto natural phenomena and
species may be deified. Japanese downplay oppositional contrast
and emphasise the fuzziness between opposites of nature and
culture [Ohnuki-Tiemey 1987], and there is a pervasive folk
ideology that Japanese are 'closer to nature' than those in the
West. Animals can assume human form, which has led to much
greater freedom to anthropomorphize in primate studies
[Asquith 1986a, 1986b]. In a sense, this parallels the breaking-
down of the nature-culture opposiJ:ion among Western
 16 Introduction

primatologists as a result of the recognition of the close molecular

similarities between humans and great apes. Animal rights are no
longer restricted to ideas of the proper human stewardship of
dumb creatures, but involve liberating them, intellectually and
physically [Reynolds 1994]. Primatologists now extend con-
sciousness and free will and culture to non-human animals, even
if that culture is not quite what most anthropologists have in
mind.
The problem is that in the real world finding out how things
work must utilize modes of expression drawn from our
subjective lives. This is so even if what is held to define science is
its counter-intuitiveness rather than common sense [Wolpert
1992]. In this respect science is no different from the pragmatic
knowledge by which all peoples live. As Tomoya Akimichi well
illustrates in his chapter, Satawalese navigational knowledge -
the basis for making routine life-and-death decisions- is not only
practical and technical but involves domains often thought to be
impractical and unrealistic. Orientation involving use of an
indigenous sidereal compass and landfall techniques relying on
the homing behaviour of sea birds are the foremost cases.
However, such techniques are used in conjunction with others
which presume the existence of mythical islands, fabulous
species such as yellow whales and the ghosts of floating canoes.
It would be misleading to polarize such knowledge as either
functional or metaphorical. Rather, we must understand that in
this domain natural and supernatural are parts of a unified
system of knowledge. In one form or another, such views are
present in all systems of ritual and belief, but they are noticeably
and strangely absent from contemporary development planning.
The Satawalese case emphasises just how important it is for
anthropologists and other human scientists seeking to elucidate
one form of knowledge to relate it to the other. We work with not
one, but a series of interacting models. These difficulties have
led, in some branches of science, to a more sophisticated
appreciation of nature as an object of enquiry, and in this volume
Dwyer shows how the relativist conception of nature presents a
challenge to conventionally trained biologists whose method-
ology treats environment as an independent variable. Similarly,
TlDl Ingold argues that our understanding of the environment,
·.and of responsibilities towards it, has been distorted by equating
'environment' with an image of nature that pervades modem
Introduction 17

Western thought and science. More generally, many [e.g. Horigan

1988] have abhorred the qgid oppositional uses of nature and
culture, noting that these obscure more than they reveal.

Nature and Culture as Analytic Categories in

Anthropological Theory

The history of anthropology is - in one way or another - the

history of the categories nature and culture. By posing the
relationship between the two and using it to legitimate
democracy, Levi-Strauss claimed that Rousseau had invented the
subject [Freeman 1983: 30]; and to speak the language of nature
and culture is for many inheritors of the British structural-
functionalist consensus to relive the classic controversies of the
nineteenth century. But in contemporary anthropology we know
and use nature and culture in two ways which bear little
resemblance to Rousseau's concerns: as objective analytic
categories, and as a perceived universal cognitive opposition. As
translated into the rhetoric of naturalism versus culturalism,
these are part of a long and complex debate. This set of chapters
does not seek to resolve, or even specifically to address, this
debate, except in so far as the debate itself has perpetuated and
reified concepts of nature and culture. The nature and culture of
the title are those addressed in the problematic of ecological
anthropology; not the nature and culture within us, but the
interaction between human individuals, populations and social
collectivities on the one hand, and the natural resources (the
environment) which humans manipulate and consume in the
conduct of their lives, on the other.
In early social evolutionism the nature-culture distinction was
largely ignored, and one looks in vain in the writings of, say,
Herbert Spencer, for any allusion to it. And so it was to continue
in certain branches of psychology and in the eugenics of Francis
Galton. For Tylor, like Marx, the history of mankind was part and
parcel of the history of nature [Horigan 1988: 14], not apart from
it, and certainly not against it. With Franz Boas, however, things
began to change: nature became simply that to which the laws of
biology applied, while culture became that which biology could
not explain. Thus the stage was set for that 'unrelenting struggle
18 Introduction

between two doctrines', between 'two fervently held half-truths,

each insufficient in scientific terms, which had originated amid
the theoretical confusions of the late nineteenth century, the one
overestimating biology and the other overvaluing culture'
[Freeman 1983: 33, 35]. Moreover, as Horigan [1988: 4] has
pointed out, the nature-culture opposition took on a special role
in the social and human sciences by ensuring their legitimacy,
providing them, in culture, with an object of study and a
principle of disciplinary demarcation. Hence the importance of
defending the autonomy of culture becomes part of the
justification for 'the unrelenting struggle'. Every social
anthropologist who asserts that there is no need to take heed of
biological explanation is re-asserting the nature-culture
opposition, even if the terms are not used. Yet what is obvious is
that much anthropology since the second world war has
assumed that the issue was an essentially dead one. True enough,
social anthropologists are occasionally shocked and embarrassed
by ethologists and sociobiologists and others claiming that
nature intrudes on human behaviour in more than just a passive,
facilitating sort of way, but these are minor irritants. Instead, in
much socio-cultural anthropology nature:culture came to mean
something else: a cultural distinction itself - in a sense the
cultural distinction - which serves to organize a high proportion
of what we experience of the world. This approach found its
inspiration in the work of Levi-Strauss, for whom nature-culture
was a timeless, value-free model, a mechanism through which
the mind organizes the world around itself, an 'artificial creation
of culture' [Levi-Strauss 1969: xxix]. In more recent times,
suggests Horigan [1988: 33], it is also the idea which underlies
the attachment of Marshall Sahlins - among others - to a purely
symbolic and dualist definition of culture.
The history of anthropological studies of environmental
relations reflects these general theoretical developments, but also
materially influenced them. By insisting on the environment
being outside the object of anthropological scrutiny, Boas forced
the pace of possibilism; but it was empirical studies of hunter-
gatherers and pastoralism which contrariwise showed the
artificiality of eliminating nature from understanding central
issues of social organization and cultural classification. In a
different way, Conklin [e.g. Conklin 1957], in persuading us to
take seriously the environmental classifications of Hanun6o
Introduction 19

swidden farmers, gave credence to Levi-Strauss's prototypical

nature-<:ulture distinction. Again, Roy Rappaport was trying to
dissolve the hard culture-nature distinction he saw in Julian
Steward's programme of ct,Uturill ecology. In the 'ethno-
ecological' phase which Conklin's work he~alded- indeed he
appears to have invented the worll [Conklin 1954a, 1954b] -
nature becomes bifurcate, a folk nature reflected in the ideas and
discriminations of local people and 'real' nature on to which
these sometimes significantly different conceptual worlds were
mapped. Such a view becomes explicit in the dualistic approach
of Vayda and Rappaport in which cognized (ernie) models are
kept rigorously distiitct,, from analytic (etic) models and become
part of the means by which humans adapt to nature and regulate
it [Vayda and Rappaport 1968]. Thus the systems approach
which enshrined the organism-environment distinction
necessarily upheld a particular version of the nature-culture
contrast. For this reason, claims Dwyer (this volume), Rappaport
was paradoxically on the wrong side of the divide. Indeed, the
objectivist, adaptionist version of ecological anthropology has
been vigorously criticized since the mid-seventies. On the one
hand, there have been those who have placed increasing causal
priority on individual cultural constructions, an approach which
eventually disappears into post-modernism. On the other hand,
contemporary evolutionary ecology, with its inspiration drawn
from methodological individualism, has no particular place for
the concepts of nature and culture, for the distinction between
intentionality and unintentionality, or that between cultural and
natural selection. In fact, it has no need of the conventional
adaptionist programme at all. Thus, the nature-culture
distinction is constituted in different ways in different theoretical
approaches in ecological anthropology, bridging three levels of
analysis: one in which the environment is a biological given, one
in which it is bifurcate (analytic and folk), and one in which all
senses of nature or environment are 'constructed' and negotiable.
What is distinctive about recent work in cultural anthropology,
ecological anthropology and sociobiology is that what we might
mean by nature has again become a central issue, for modernists
and postmodernists cili.ke.
So what is paradoxical about the ecological tradition in
anthropology is that while starting off rooted in the naturalism/
culturalism debate, and while still fostering an objectivist
20 Introduction

agenda, it has been able to show just how insecure and

contingent the nature-<ulture distinction is. It has done this by
demonstrating empirically the extent to which the natural has
been influenced by the cultural, by a systemic approach which
abhors simple dualisms, and by illustrating how the most
esoteric elements of culture might intricately affect our use of the
environment and even regulate our relations with it. Thus, in his
contribution to this volume, Mitsuo Ichikawa shows how such
issues force us to adopt a co-evolutionary and historical stance in
understanding relations between the Mbuti and other elements
in the Ituri ecological system. The equatorial rain forest of the
Zaire basin has been the habitat of hunting and gathering peoples
for many centuries. Ichikawa shows how the Mbuti have made
use of their profound knowledge of the forest: as plants used for
food, medicine, poison, tools and construction, and for ritual and
other non-material purposes. Plants are also shown to be
indirectly useful as sources of food for other species which the
Mbuti hunt or make use of. Ichikawa argues that despite their
heavy dependence on forest resources, the Mbuti have not
obviously degraded plant and animal populations. Indeed, they
have actually improved the forest as a human habitat through
marginal modifications. Understanding the character of the co-
existence maintained between Mbuti and their environment
provides important data for reconsidering what we mean by
nature, and what the implications are for planned state
conservation, for the sustainable use of forest, and for
maintaining the integrity of Mbuti culture itself.

Relations between Specific Domesticates and Human

Populations

The inadequacy of the distinction between what we

conventionally call nature and culture is no better exemplified
than through the examination of particular domesticates, species
which owe their current genetic composition to close encounters
with human populations which harvest them for food and other
products. When domesticated animals appear in human
subsistence systems we see this as the intrusion of culture; when
animals domesticate humans it is natural. From an ecological
Introduction 21

viewpoint the process is the same! Domestication as a process

raises intriguing issues of ~tention, selecti~m ,and co-evolution,
and poses in an acute form the difficulty ol the terms nature and
culture in scientific discourse.
Sadao Sakamoto elucidates the process by which cultural pre-
ferences in the early stages of the domestication of six cereal
cultivars found only in east and southeast Asia led to the
convergent co-evolution of waxy endosperm variants. He argues
that what favoured the selection of waxy endosperm mutants in
various kinds of rice and millets was a well-established prefer-
ence for sticky foods such as yam, taro and banana. He further
adduces that a pre-existing waxy endosperm food culture
favoured the selection of waxy varieties of maize when this was
introduced into the area in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.
Sakamoto's is a classic ethnobotanical study which illustrates the
difficulties of separating an understanding of the genetic process
of domestication from a knowledge of detailed culinary ethno-
graphy. His paper illustrates the importance of ritual in the
development of new domesticates and the essential conservative-
ness of innovation: waxy varieties of rice mimicking waxy
varieties of tubers.
The origin of diversity in cultivated plants has long been
understood to be either the result of natural selection modified
by human interaction or the consequence of deliberate human
actions. But such views cannot explain how and why such
diversification occurred in the first place and was maintained
under earlier agriculture. Taking examples from the ensete
(Ensete ventricosum) zone of southwestern Ethiopia (Ari),
Masayoshi Shigeta examines how new landraces are created and
how and why diversity is maintained. Shigeta argues that
'cognitive selection', the categorization of the external appear-
ances of plants, must be distinguished from utilitarian selection,
that based on the usefulness of particular landraces. He
demonstrates the existence of the former as a qualitatively
different kind of selection, devoid of value judgement, but with
an indispensable role in establishing new types in a repository of
lapdraces. The maintenance of genetic diversity is exemplified by
'folk in-situ' conservation, though why diversity should be
maintained is more complex. Shigeta rejects the utilitarian view
of landrace diversity because it does not accurately reflect actual
patterns of use, and instead seeks to explain why it should be
22 Introduction

that cultural values should underwrite diversity. Such an

approach demonstrates a social mechanism for maintaining
genetic diversity, while avoiding teleology and tautology.
James Boster shares Shigeta's view of the importance we must
attach to cognitive selection in explaining the origin of domes-
ticates. He begins by reviewing research which strongly implies
that diverse groups of informants agree in the categorization of
avifauna in a way which suggests a pan-human perceptual
strategy for the selection of those features of a collection of
organisms that yield the most informative classification. These
results, taken together with those of other ethnobiological and
cognitive researchers, suggest that many features of human
cognition are best understood as having evolved to interpret and
discriminate o~er products of evolution. Focusing on the
relationship between the classification, cultivation and selection
of Aguaruna cultivars of manioc, Boster reviews research that
argues that the procedures cultivators use to distinguish crop
varieties have the effect of selecting for increased variability in
the features they use to distinguish the crops: cultivators ·change
the world in the process of understanding it in such a way as
to make their procedures for understanding more appropriate.
Thus, human cognition has co-evolved with the natural world:
the human mind has evolved to understand the natural world
and leaves its mark as it does so.
The chapter by Paul Richards, like those of Sakamoto, Shigeta
and Boster, emphasises the significance of aesthetic and moral
factors as well as practical ones in the evolution of particular
domesticates. Richards argues that a consideration of a group of
rice types grown by the Mende and Temne peoples of Sierra
Leone provides an opportunity to rehearse an important range of
local ideas about the beginning and underpinnings of social life,
and to discover the place of both elephants and rice agriculture
within the moral economy of the peoples of the Upper Guinea
coast in West Africa. The paper surveys what is known of the
origins and domestication of African rice (Oryza glaberrima),
speculates on the beginnings of agriculture (based on rice) and
overseas trade (based on ivory) in the headwaters of the Niger,
and considers the social significance of the survival of 0.
glaberrima cultivars for the present.
Like Boster and Shigeta, Katsuyoshi Fukui demonstrates the
crucial role of folk classification iit 'the co-evolution of human
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unconscious old man and presently began to weep.
“What good is it now? What difference does it make?” she repeated
bitterly over and over again.

Where before there had been but one, there were now two old men to be
managed, and Hattie Tolliver, understanding that it was now impossible to
follow Ellen, settled herself to waiting. For what? Perhaps for death to
claim her own father. It would have been, as she said, a blessing, for the
fracture concerned far more than a hip bone; the very spirit of old Jacob
Barr was crushed in that fall from the mows. Sinking back upon the pillows
of Ellen’s bed, he gave up the struggle. A life in which there was no activity
was for him no life at all. He became again like a little child, like his own
little children whom his daughter Hattie had cared for through all the years
of his widowhood. Sometimes he sang songs and there were hours when he
talked to himself and to Hattie of things which had happened when she was
a very little girl or before she was born. He lived again in the Civil War and
in the days preceding it when the fleeing niggers hid in his great mows.
Passers-by in Sycamore Street sometimes heard snatches of singing in a
voice now cracked, now loud and strong and defiant.... John Brown’s Body
lies a-moldering in the Grave, But his Soul goes marching on. Glory!
Glory! Hallelujah!
But Gramp Tolliver in his high room walled with books kept spry and
alert, triumphant now in the knowledge that he had survived old Jacob Barr,
that the stern virtue of the old Scotsman had not prolonged his health and
happiness by so much as an hour. He read his old books and scribbled on
bits of yellow paper, ageing not at all, remaining always spare, cynical,
vindictive.
In these days his daughter-in-law rarely addressed him, and less and less
frequently she came to see that his room was in order. There were other
cares to occupy her energy. There was a husband, working now, and two
growing boys and her own father to care for; in addition to all these she had
taken to sewing, secretly, for friends whose fortunes were better. (She was a
magnificent needle-woman.) And she had each day to write a long letter to
Ellen, though the letters in return came but weekly and sometimes not so
often.
 They kept her informed of the bare facts of her daughter’s life. They told
her, in a new, amusing and somewhat cynical fashion of Ellen’s adventures
among the music teachers of the city ... of weeks spent wandering through
the bleak and drafty corridors of studio buildings, tormented with the
sounds made by aspiring young musicians. They described the charlatans,
the frauds, which she found on every side, teachers who offered every sort
of trick and method by which fame and fortune could be reached by the one
and only short cut. There were women called Madame Tessitura and
Madame Scarlatti, who had been born Smith or Jones and knew less of
music than May Seton, and men who wore velveteen jackets and insisted
upon being called “Maestro.” There were the usual adventures (alarming to
Hattie Tolliver who saw her daughter still as a little girl) with lecherous old
men. Indeed, in this connection Ellen wrote with a certain hard mockery
that was utterly strange and carried overtones of an unmoral point of view,
as if such things were to be treated more as preposterous jokes than as
“grave offenses.” And in this Mrs. Tolliver fancied she discerned some
traces of Lily’s influence. To a woman like Lily, such things didn’t matter.
She took them too lightly, as a part of the day’s experience ... carefree,
charming, indolent Lily, so impossible to combat.
And at last, wrote Ellen, she had stumbled upon the proper person ... an
old man, a Frenchman, who bore the name of Sanson. He knew what music
could be, and so she had settled with him, working under his guidance. In
his youth he had known Liszt, and he had been a friend of Teresa Carreño,
until a quarrel with that temperamental beauty ended the friendship. Ellen,
he had hinted, might one day become as famous as Carreño (she was like
her in a way) but she must work, work, work and not lose her head. It
would be a long hard path with Paris at the end! (It was always this thought
which filled Mrs. Tolliver with a nameless dread. Paris! Paris! And Lily!)
But what troubled her most was the absence of any comment upon
Clarence beyond a simple statement that he was well. By now she must
have realized that Ellen had no love for him. From her letters it was clear
that she had not found him actually offensive. He was a good enough
husband; he did everything for Ellen. It was, indeed, clear that he worshiped
her. But on her side there appeared to be only a great void, a colossal
emptiness where there should have been the emotion that was the very
foundation of her mother’s life.
 Mrs. Tolliver worried too about the expenses of her daughter’s
household. In such matters, distance made no difference. It was her habit to
remark to her husband, “If only I could be near Ellen I could teach her so
much about managing. Clarence must make a great deal of money to have
such a flat and pay for her lessons too.”
And when she questioned Ellen in her letters, she received the reply that
Ellen had spoken to her husband and been told that there was no need to
worry. He had, he said, plenty of money ... eight thousand a year.

It is possible of course that Ellen never loved him for an instant; it is

probable that the state of her affections never progressed beyond the stage
of the kindly pity which is akin to love. She was not a bad wife. She cared
for him admirably. She kept his house in order. She even cooked for him
delicacies which she had learned from her mother. He insisted that she have
a servant, declaring that he could easily afford it. She gave him all that he
asked, even of herself, and yet there was a difference ... a difference with
altered everything. It was that difference which Hattie Tolliver, expert in
such things, sensed in the letters of her daughter. It filled her with a vague
suspicion that Ellen had sold herself to satisfy a thing no greater than mere
ambition.
Of Clarence’s sentiments there could have been no doubt. He sang his
wife’s praises to the men at the Superba Electrical Company, to the men
whom he met on those trips into the west when Ellen was left behind alone
in the Babylon Arms. He bought her present after present until, at length,
the whole aspect of their little apartment was changed. Bit by bit the
furniture altered its character. First there was a small grand piano, and then
a sofa and presently a chair or two, and at last the brass beds which he and
Bunce had once occupied gave place to twin beds of pale green ornamented
with garlands of salmon pink roses. And strangely enough as the apartment
brightened, the little man himself appeared slowly to fade. In contrast with
his handsome and energetic wife, he grew more and more pale. It was as if
he were being devoured by some inward malady. Yet there was nothing
wrong. Doctors could discover nothing save the usual weakness of his
heart.
If he desired a more demonstrative affection than that given him by
Ellen, he said nothing of the desire. He never spoke of love. Indeed, long
afterward, when Ellen followed back her memories of their life together she
was unable to recall any mention of the word. If he desired her passionately
he sought her silently and with timidity, as if each caress she gave him were
far beyond that which he had any reason to expect. He was a shy man and
with Ellen it was impossible to speak of such things; there was a coolness
about her, a chastity of the sort which surrounds some women regardless of
everything. And always it was she who dominated, always she who gave,
coldly and without passion, as if she felt that in all honor she owed him a
debt.
With the passing of the months the breach between Ellen and Mr. Wyck
became complete. The other friends came sometimes to the Babylon Arms
where Clarence, with a sudden expansion of temperament, entertained them
in lordly fashion and beamed with pride in his wife. But Mr. Wyck no
longer came. There had been no open quarrel, not even a hasty word.
Quietly he had dropped from the habit of seeing Clarence at home. It was a
change so imperceptible that before Clarence understood it, it was
complete.
They met sometimes at lunch in one of the cheap restaurants frequented
by Mr. Wyck, for Clarence, so far as his own needs and pleasures were
concerned, had taken to a program of economy. And there, over greasy
food, they talked of the old days together, Clarence speaking with sentiment
and Mr. Wyck with a curious wistfulness. He too had grown pale and
cadaverous upon the diet in his Lexington Avenue boarding house. He hated
Ellen. He had hated her from the moment she had stepped through the door
of the apartment, so cool and arrogant, so sure of herself. But he was too
wise to betray his feeling save in subtle gibes at her and references to the
jolly old days that were passed. He was lost now in the obscenities of a
boarding house, a nobody treated scornfully even by the old aunts in
Yonkers who looked upon him still as an anemic little boy with Fauntleroy
curls playing among the iron dogs and deers of their front lawn.
And no one, of course, knew that Mr. Wyck, wrapped in his shabby
overcoat, sometimes walked the streets after dark in the neighborhood of
Riverside Drive, the gale from the North River piercing his bones, his pale
eyes upturned toward the pleasant light that beamed from the top floor of
the Babylon Arms.
 22

O NE night nearly two years after they were married, Clarence asked,
“What do you hear from your cousin?”
And Ellen, who had been playing all the evening, turned and asked,
“What cousin?”
“Miss Shane.”
“Oh, Lily!” And a shadow settled on her face as if the mention of Lily’s
name suddenly aroused memories which she had been striving to forget.
“Oh, Lily!” she repeated. “I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She never
writes. You know she is indolent.... When I last heard from her she was all
right. She wrote from Nice.”
Clarence kept silent for a moment. “Nice must be a beautiful place. A
man from the office was there last year, our foreign agent. Nice and Monte
Carlo. I guess they’re quite close together.”
“She has a house there. It’s called the Villa Blanche.”
Again Clarence remained thoughtful for a time. The newspaper had
fallen from his hands and lay now, crumpled and forgotten by his side.
Presently he blushed and murmured, “D’you think she might lend us the
house some time.... We might be able to go there.... Not now, but when we
have more money. I’d like to see Nice.”
And the shadow on Ellen’s face darkened. “We will ... some day. When
I’m famous and making money too.”
“But I don’t want to do it that way. I want to take you myself and pay for
everything.... We might have Lily come and visit us.”
Then to fill in the silence Ellen fell to playing again, softly now so that it
did not halt the conversation; yet the sound in some way protected her. It
was like the frail veil of lace which Lily wore. It shut her in suddenly.
Clarence talked no more. He lay back in his stuffed chair, one hand
strumming thoughtfully the wooden arm. A look of loneliness, more and
more frequent of late, came into his brown eyes.
It was Ellen who turned to him presently, in the midst of the soft music
and said, “I have good news for you. I am going to play to-morrow night in
public. I am going to be paid for it. Sanson arranged it. I’m going to play at
a party. It will mean money for us both.”
But Clarence wasn’t pleased. On the contrary he frowned and kept a
disapproving silence.
“It’s silly to feel that way about it,” continued Ellen. “Why should I
work as I do if not to make money in the end? Why shouldn’t a wife help
her husband? There’s nothing wrong in it.”
And then more music and more silence, while she destroyed slowly, bit
by bit, his hopes of grandeur, of conquering a world for the sake of the
woman he loved. He saw, perhaps, that despite anything he might do she
would in the end surpass him.
“You see, we understood this when we married, Clarence. It’s nothing
new.... Is it?... Nothing new. Some day I shall be famous.” She said this
quite seriously, without the faintest trace of a smile. “Some day I shall be
great and famous. I mean to be.”
By now Clarence was leaning forward holding his head in his hands. His
glasses had slipped from his pointed nose and lay forgotten in his lap.
Presently he interrupted the music to say, mournfully, “And then I shall be
Mr. Tolliver ... husband of a famous woman.”
As though amazed by this sudden resentment, Ellen ceased playing for
an instant and regarded him with a curious penetrating look.
“It won’t be like that,” she said. And there entered her voice an
unaccustomed note of warmth. It was the pity again, an old sense of sorrow.
“Besides,” she continued, “the day will come when I must go to Paris....
You see, I will have to polish off there ... I can live with Lily. It won’t cost
anything. You see, we can’t forget that. We have to think of it. It’s nothing
new.... I told you that in the beginning.”

For a long time there was no sound in the room save that of Ellen’s
music, soft, beautiful, appealing, as if she used it now as a balm for the
wounds caused by all she had been forced to say. Presently her strong
beautiful fingers wandered into the Fire Music and the tiny room was filled
with a glorious sound of flame and sparks, wild yet subdued, thrilling yet
mournful. And then for a time it seemed that, wrapped in the color of the
music, they were both released and swept beyond the reach of all these
petty troubles. When at last the music ceased, Clarence roused himself
slowly and, coming to her side, knelt there and placed his arms about her
waist, pressing his head against her. There was in the gesture something
pitiful and touching, as if he felt that by holding her thus he might be able to
keep her always. The little vein in his throat throbbed with violence. There
were times when his adoration became a terrible thing.
It was the first time in all their life together that he had ever done
anything so romantic, so beautiful, and Ellen, looking down at him in a kind
of amazement, must have understood that there were forces at work quite
beyond her comprehension—something which, for the moment,
overwhelmed even his shame of love. The act, by its very suddenness,
appeared to strike a response in the girl herself, for she leaned toward him
and fell to stroking his hair.
“I didn’t know,” she said softly, “that you could be like this.... It
frightens me.... I didn’t know.”
His arms slowly held her more and more tightly, in a kind of fierce
desperation. “You won’t go,” he murmured, “you won’t leave me.... There
would be nothing left for me ... nothing in the world.”
“I’ll come back to you.... It won’t be for long. Perhaps, if there is money
enough you could go with me.”
But all the same, she was troubled by that simple act of affection.
Somehow, she had never thought of his love in this fashion.

The rest of the evening was raised upon a different plane, new and
strange in their existence together. Some barrier, invisible as it was potent,
had given way suddenly, out of Clarence’s dread of the future it seemed that
there was born a new and unaccountable happiness. Ellen, watching him
slyly with a look of new tenderness, played for him the simple music which
he loved.
But at midnight when, at last, the music came to an end Clarence asked,
“Where are you going to play to-morrow?”
“At the house of a Mrs. Callendar ... I don’t know who she is.”
“If it’s Mrs. Richard Callendar ... she’s rich and fashionable. One of the
richest women in New York.... Rich and fashionable....” But the rest was
lost in a sudden return of a bitterness that seized him of late with a growing
frequency. He knew of Mrs. Callendar. Wyck, in his snobbery, had spoken
of her. One saw her name in the journals. It may have been that he had
thoughts of his own which no one had ever guessed ... not even Ellen.
“It is Mrs. Richard Callendar,” she said.
 23

I N the beginning Mrs. Callendar had regretted the sudden indisposition of

the great pianist she had engaged. It was, she said, embétant. But
presently as the hour of the reception drew near, the things which old
Sanson had said of his unknown prodigy began to have their effect and,
being like most women of affairs, a gambler as well, she saw in the
approach of the unknown substitute the possibility of an adventure. She
was, in any case, willing to take the word of old Sanson; he was, when all
was said and done, no humbug. He knew a performer when he saw one. He
did not go about his studio in a coat of velveteen calling upon his pupils to
address him as “Maestro.” In a satisfactory way, he got down to brass tacks.
What he had to offer must at least be interesting.
The drawing-room of the house on Murray Hill was enormous. It
extended the full length of one side of the house, finishing in a little alcove
where to-night space had been made for the performers, who sat shielded by
a lacquered screen reaching almost to the ceiling. Before it a little place had
been cleared and a small dais, covered with black velvet, erected to serve as
a stage. There was a great piano at one side and then more cleared space
reaching out to where the row of collapsible chairs had been placed for the
guests.
The room itself was painted gray and high up near the ceiling hung in a
row portraits of the Callendars, male and female, who had existed since the
immigrating member, an honest Dutch chemist, founded a fortune in
America by buying farms that lay north of Canal Street. The usual furniture
had been pressed back against the sides of the room or removed entirely,
but some of the pieces remained ... chairs and sofas of gilt and salmon
brocade, American adaptations of the monstrosities of Louis Philippe—the
furniture of some preceding Mrs. Callendar. And in gilt cases of glass there
ranged the famous Callendar collection of Chinese bric-à-brac ... bowls and
idols of jade, porphyry, and carved sandalwood, row upon row of tear
bottles (it was for these that the collection was especially noted) in jade,
ivory and porcelain. All these ornaments represented the second period in
the fortunes of the Callendar family ... the days when the clipper ships of
Griswold and Callendar carried cargoes around the world from Singapore,
Shanghai and Hong-Kong. The fortune was now in its third stage. The
clipper ships had vanished and the money they once represented was now
safe in the best stocks and bonds it was possible to buy.
The room had never been brought up to date. Indeed it had remained
untouched since the Seventies, for Mrs. Callendar spent only a month or
two of the year in New York and, being thrifty, had not found it necessary to
alter anything. The caretaker, once a year when her mistress returned, sent
for a small army of charwomen, dusted, cleaned and scrubbed the old house
and engaged a corps of servants. The rest of the time it remained empty but
solid, immersed in the quiet dignity which is acquired only by houses of
great bankers, a symbol in the midst of less enormous and somber
dwellings, of all that is enduring and respectable in a changing effervescent
world.
At ten o’clock on this particular evening the lacquer screen concealed
behind its shimmering walls the figure of a Russian tenor, a Javanese dancer
(really a low caste Hindu woman who had her training in some brothel of
Alexandria) and the unknown American girl whom Sanson recommended
as a fine artist. They were entertainers, mountebanks, brought together only
to divert a crowd of guests, who presently would arrive, jaded and
somewhat torpid, from monstrous dinners of twenty courses held in houses
from Washington Square as far north as the east Sixties. In the behavior of
the three performers there was no great cordiality. They sat apart, without
interest in each other; indeed there were in their manner unmistakable traces
of jealousies as old as their very profession.
Sometimes the tiny dancer, with skin like café au lait satin, stirred
restlessly, setting all her bangles into jangling motion, to address the
Russian tenor in bad French. He was an enormous blond man with a chest
like a barrel and hands that rested like sausages upon his knees, a man
gauche in manner, a little like a bear let loose in a drawing-room ... a
mountain between the little Hindu woman and the American girl who sat a
little apart, slim and tall as Artemis, her black hair wound low over a face
that was pale with excitement. She knew no French and so, after the first
exchange of “Goot eefning!” with her two weird companions, she lapsed
into a silence which concentrated all its force upon a crevice in the
lacquered screen. Thus she was able to see the whole length of the great
drawing-room and witness the spectacle of the arriving guests.
 At first there appeared only her employer, a squat, plump woman laced
until her figure resembled the hour glass shape of the ladies in Renoir’s
pictures of bourgeois picnics at St. Cloud. From sources hidden in a
veritable upholstery of satin and velvet, so cut as to emphasize all her most
voluptuous curves, little ladders and tongues of jet sprang forth and
glittered darkly at every motion of her tiny plump feet. The face too was
plump and, despite a drooping eyelid (which in her youth might have been
fascinating and now only made her appear to be in a constant state of sly
observation), it must have been lovely, perhaps even subtle. The tight little
mouth had an expression that was pleasant and agreeable. It was as if she
said, “Ah, well. Nothing in this world surprises me. It will all come out
right in the end.”
The sleek black hair she wore pulled back into an uncompromising knot,
though in front it was frizzed into a little bang which once might have
passed for a weapon of coquetry. Over all this was flung the glittering sheen
of jewels, prodigal, indecently Oriental in their extravagance. Above the
fuzzy bang reared a tiara of emeralds and diamonds and beneath, sweeping
over the mountainous curve of her bosom so that it entangled itself in the
plastrons of diamonds fastened beneath, hung a necklace of emeralds. All
these repeated their glitter in the rings on the plump hands emerging from
long tight sleeves of black satin, which stretched perilously at each
dominating gesture employed to direct the small army of servants. But all
the jewels were a little dirty. It was probable that no money had been
wasted in cleaning them in more than twenty years.
This, then, was the Mrs. Callendar, appearing to-night in grande tenue to
receive a small and shrewdly picked list of guests at her only entertainment
of the season. To Ellen, peering with breathless curiosity through the crack
in the screen, this plump middle-aged woman must have appeared a highly
bedizened figure of fun; for Ellen, having come freshly from the provinces,
could have known nothing of all the glamour and power that lay concealed
in the hour glass of velvet, satin, and soiled diamonds.
There was no secretary hired by this thrifty woman to send lists of her
guests to the daily papers and see that her picture or paragraphs concerning
her appeared once or twice a week. She did not even give twenty course
dinners interrupted by false endings of Roman punch, nor circus
entertainments like those of some women who filled the pages of the noisier
journals with columns of diversion for shop girls. Through the barbaric
spectacle of the late nineties and the early nineteen hundreds she made her
way quietly and firmly, knowing perhaps that she was above these things, a
power beyond power, living most of the year abroad, seeing only those
persons who amused her (for she had learned long ago that in order to
survive one must be selective). Indeed her name was more likely to appear
upon the pages devoted to stocks and bonds than in the columns given over
to what was known variously as the beau monde and the Four Hundred.
Queerest of all was the fact that behind this stout-willed dowager lay an
impossibly romantic past.
In the early Seventies when the steam freighters were making their final
inroads upon the business of the clipper ships, the house of Griswold and
Callendar, Shippers, Importers and Bankers with offices in Liverpool, New
York, Marseilles, Bombay and Shanghai, was already on a decline. Already
the capital was being shifted into bonds. In these days there remains of this
firm no importing business at all but only a great banking house with
offices in Wall and Threadneedle Streets and the Boulevard Haussmann; but
in the Seventies it was still a great shipping company whose ships circled
the globe and dealt alike with Chinese, Indians, Frenchmen, Greeks, and the
men of half a dozen other nations. In consequence of these dealings there
arose from time to time many disputes, so that always there was some
member of the firm on business in a distant quarter of the world. It was to
Richard Callendar, the youngest and most vigorous member and the only
Callendar in the firm, that most of this traveling fell; and so, in the course of
time, he found himself in Constantinople on the business of settling claims
with a crafty fellow, one Dikran Leopopulos, whose bank had offices in
Calicut and Alexandria with the main house at the Golden Horn.
The contest between the two was drawn out, resolving itself at length
into a battle between Yankee shrewdness and Levantine deceit. Leopopulos,
a swarthy fellow with narrow green eyes, opened the engagement by an
onslaught of hospitality. He entertained his young visitor in the most lavish
and Oriental fashion. There were dinners to which the chic foreign world of
Constantinople were invited ... ambassadors, secretaries and their ladies,
French, German, English and American, in the banker’s palace in Pera;
there were pique-niques beside the River of Sweet Waters, and moonlight
excursions in caïques propelled by dark oarsmen, on the Bosphorus near the
Greek banker’s summer palace; and excursions in victorias to the ruins of
Justinian’s fortifications. He sought as a wily means of gaining his end to
dazzle the blond, romantic young American, to coddle him by eastern
luxury into a false bargain. And to make the entertainment complete, he
brought from her seclusion his young daughter, a girl of eighteen, slim,
dark, fresh from a French convent, dressed in the very latest modes from
Paris, to preside over his entertainments. The girl’s mother was dead,
having swooned and later passed away of the heat and confusion at the
great Exposition in Paris whither she had gone to visit, after many years,
her great-aunts. For the wife of Leopopulos had been French, the daughter
of an impoverished, moth-eaten Royalist, and in her child, the slim young
Thérèse, there was much that was French ... her wit, her self-possession, her
sense of knowing her way about the world. But there was much too that was
Levantine.
When at last the revels came to an end, there were bickerings and
bargainings in which Yankee shrewdness, in the end, got the better of
Levantine deceit. The green-eyed Leopopulos to hide his sorrow gave a
farewell dinner aboard the young American’s ship (a Griswold and
Callendar clipper named Ebenezer Holt) and so, he believed, closed the
incident. It was not until the following day, when a veritable army of fat
Greek aunts and cousins, wailing and lamenting, burst at dawn into his
green bedroom, that he learned the full extent of his sorrow. His daughter,
the dark-eyed Thérèse, had sailed on the Ebenezer Holt as the bride of
young Richard Callendar.

Thus Thérèse Callendar came to New York, a stranger out of the oldest
of worlds entering into the newest, confused a little by her surroundings and
by the primness of her husband’s family, so like and yet so unlike the
caution of her own Greek aunts and cousins. In those early days at long
dinners in rooms hung with plush and ornamented with Canalettos and
Cabanels, her sensations must have been very like those of an ancient
Alexandrian, civilized, cultivated, and a little decadent among the more
vigorous and provincial Romans of Cæsar’s day. In that age of innocence
she found it, no doubt, difficult going; for there was in New York no warm
welcome for a foreign woman, no matter how great her beauty, her
cultivation, or her charm; much less for a Greek from such a frontier as
Constantinople, the capital of the cruel and abandoned Turk. An alien was a
creature to be regarded as a curiosity, to be treated, unless he possessed a
great title, politely but with suspicion. She was, to be sure, probably the first
Greek who came to live on Manhattan’s rocky island; but despite this and
all the other barriers, she succeeded in the end, because she was, after all,
older than any of them, more civilized, more fortified by those institutions
which come only of an old race. In her French blood she was old, but in her
Greek blood how much older! She was as old as the carved emerald which
she wore always upon her little hand, now so plump with middle age, in a
ring which legend had it survived the sack of Constantinople. In tradition
she was as old as Justinian and Theodora. The family of Leopopulos was
proud—so proud and so old that one no longer discussed its pride and age.
After two years she bore a son, and before the end of that year she
became a widow when her ardent young husband, swimming in the surf off
Newport, went in his reckless way too far out and never returned. The son
she called Richard, after the father, and together with her he inherited the
great Callendar fortune, to which was added with the passing of years the
gold, the olive orchards, the vineyards, and the palaces of the green-eyed
old Banker of Pera. But Thérèse Callendar never married again; she
devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and to the husbanding of a
great fortune which by shrewdness and will she had long since doubled and
tripled. She was, in her soul, a Levantine; thrift and shrewdness were a part
of her very flesh and bones. She lived here and there, always on the move,
now in Constantinople, now in Paris, now in London, now in Cannes, now
in New York, even making at times trips to such outlandish places as
Bombay and Sumatra; a woman of sorts, of vast energy and sharp
intelligence. And slowly as she passed down the corridor of the years the
slim chic figure became an hour glass hung with jet and diamonds. Her eyes
were no longer good and she was able to see now only with the aid of
lorgnettes through which she stared with a petulant intensity into the faces
of all her companions.
But she was rich; she was respected; she was fashionable. Indeed in
those days of the Nineties and the early Nineteen Hundreds when European
titles had not yet acquired a doubtful character, she achieved an added
glamour through the unsought visits of bankrupt Royalist relatives, distant
in relationship but much in need of American heiresses. And at least two of
them took home as brides the respective daughters of an American nickel
plate king and a wizard of Wall Street. They were gaudy days, less pleasant
perhaps in the eyes of Thérèse Callendar than the quiet provinciality she
had known in the beginning as the bride of Richard Callendar. This capital
of the new world she knew, in the depths of her racial instinct, to be an
awkward affair, flamboyant, yet timid; vulgar yet aspiring; arrogant but still
a little fearful. It was the day of twenty course dinners and banquets at
which the cost of feeding each guest was estimated in the daily press. The
Greek woman knew that some day this city would come of age.
So Ellen, trembling with excitement in her hiding place behind the
screen, must have caught a little of the smoldering magnificence that lay
hidden in the plump corseted figure, for presently she forgot entirely the
bearlike Russian tenor and the exotic dancer with her outlandish bangles.
She had eyes only for Mrs. Callendar and the guests who had begun to
arrive.

That wise hostess might have written an entire book on the subject of an
amusing entertainment. From the procession of guests it was clear that she
considered them a part of the evening’s diversion, a kind of preliminary
parade about the arena which provided variety and color. She understood
that people came when you provided rich food and amusing types, the more
preposterous the better.
A Tzigane orchestra, much in fashion, assembled itself presently and
played an accompaniment to the grand march of arriving guests. Among the
first were the Champion girls and their mother. These represented the old
families. The two girls, already past their first youth, wore gowns made by
Worth, cut low back and front, which fitted their thin bodies in the Princess
style. But these gowns, Thérèse saw instantly, they had ruined; for in a
moment of caution the deep V’s, front and back, had been built up with
modest inserts of lace and tulle, and short sleeves of similar material had
been inserted to shield the upper portions of their white arms. They held
themselves stiffly. Nothing of them remained exposed save the fact that
they were virgins.
Close upon their heels, so close that the mother in her haste appeared to
shuffle her daughters into a corner with the air of a hen covering her chicks
from a hawk, came that elderly rake, Wickham Chase, and Mrs. Sigourney,
the latter dressed tightly in black and diamonds rumored to be paste—thin,
piercing and hard, too highly painted, a divorcée. (None but Thérèse
Callendar would have dared to ask her.) And then Bishop Smallwood,
whom Sabine Cane called “The Apostle to the Genteel,” a Bishop with a
See in the far West, who managed to divide his time between New York and
Bar Harbor and Newport ... a fat, pompous man with a habit of alluding too
easily to “My wa’am friend Mrs. Callendar” and “My wa’am friend Mrs.
Champion” and “My wa’am friend Mrs. So-and-so” ad infinitum through
the lists of the wealthy and the fashionable. Trapped between the Scylla of
Mrs. Champion and her Virgins and Charybdis of the questionable but very
smart Mrs. Sigourney, the poor man found himself at once in an untenable
position. Seeing this, the small eyes of his hostess glittered with a sinful
light.
Next came the Honorable Emma Hawksby, a gaunt Englishwoman of
some thirty-eight summers with a face like a horse, projecting teeth, and
feet that appeared to better advantage in the hedgerows than in the ball
room. To-night they emerged barge-like from beneath a very fancy gown of
pink satin ornamented with sequins and yards of mauve tulle. It was in her
direction that the anxious Mrs. Champion steered her two virgins. Was she
not a cousin of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom?
And then the four Fordyce sisters, arriving unattended in a hollow square
formation, large, dark, powerful girls ranging in age from twenty to thirty-
one, filled with an inhuman energy and zeal for good works, the very first
of those who struggled for the enfranchisement of women.
Then one or two nondescript bachelors, of the handy sort seen
everywhere as conveniences, stuffed with food and wine taken at some
monstrous dinner in the Thirties; and on their heels Mrs. Mallinson, who
belonged in the category of Mrs. Champion and her virgins, but who had
escaped years ago into the freedom of the literary world wherein she wrote
long novels of society life. She was a hard woman and beginning to sag a
little here and there so that she threw up against the ravages of decay
bulwarks in the form of a black satin ribbon ornamented with diamonds
about her dewlapped throat. She lived outside Paris in a small château, once
the property of a royal mistress, and spoke with a French accent. Because
she was literary, she was considered, in Mrs. Champion’s mind, also
Bohemian.
In her hiding place behind the painted screen, the dark eyes of Ellen
Tolliver grew brighter and brighter. Behind her the Javanese dancer and the
Russian tenor had relapsed into a condition of moribund indifference.
 More and more guests filtered into the room, old, young, dowdy,
respectable, smart, one or two even a little déclassée. They regarded each
other for a time, slipping into little groups, gossiping for a moment, melting
away into new and hostile clusters, whispering, laughing, sneering, until the
whole room became filled with an animation which even the great dinners
of two hours earlier could not suffocate.
With the arrival of Lorna Vale the excitement reached its peak; even the
gipsies played more wildly. She was an actress! And in those days it was
impossible to imagine an actress and the Champion virgins in the same
room. The Bishop stared at her, somewhat furtively to be sure, and Mrs.
Champion, quivering, again executed her swooping gesture of protection
toward her two daughters. But Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps seeing in her an
ally, pierced the surrounding phalanx of eager young men and found a place
by her side. Each benefited by the contrast, for the one was large, an
opulent beauty with tawny hair, and the other, thin as a hairpin, black and
glittering.
Then, during a brief pause in the music, the wide doors opened again and
there entered Sabine Cane and Mrs. Callendar’s son Richard.

At their approach there was, even in that nervous, chattering throng, a

sudden hush, a brief heightening of interest as if the crowd, like a field of
wheat, had been swayed faintly for an instant by the swift eddy of a zephyr.
Then all was noisy again. It was a demonstration of interest, polite,
restrained, as it should have been at a gathering so fashionable, but a
demonstration that could not be entirely disguised.
It was in the women that the excitement found its core ... women who
saw in the dark young man a great match for their daughters, girls who
desired him for his fortune and his rakish good looks and found the legend
of his wild living a secret and sentimental attraction; widows and spinsters
who discerned in him matchmaking material of the first order. Beyond
doubt the glittering Mrs. Sigourney and the tawny Lorna Vale held other
ideas, not to be expressed in so polite an assemblage. He had been, after all,
notoriously attentive to both though they were years older. But there was
one element in the situation which raised the interest to the pitch of
hysteria; it was his attention to Sabine Cane, a fact of growing importance
which many a jet-hung bosom found hard to support.
 She was a year or two older than Richard Callendar (every woman
present could have told the very hour she made her entrance into society)
and she was not, like most of young Callendar’s women, an acclaimed
beauty. Yet there were other qualities which set her aside from the
commonplace round of marriageable girls. She was easily the most smartly
dressed in all the room; there was about her clothes a breathless sort of
perfection that bespoke the taste of an artist. In place of an overwhelming
beauty, she had developed a wit that could be infinitely more disastrous. In
this, she resembled Cleopatra, Madame de Staël and the Montespan. These
things made her perilous and caused many an ambitious mother hours of
sleeplessness.
A long nose, a generous mouth frankly painted, green eyes set a trifle too
near each other, a mass of brick red hair and a marvelous figure ... these
things comprised the physical aspect of Sabine Cane, a combination that
was changeable and a trifle bizarre and therefore, as Thérèse Callendar had
observed more than once, enormously intrigante. But there was more than
this, for in the green eyes there lay a light of humor and malice and beneath
the brick red hair a brain which had a passion for the affairs of other people.
What disconcerted her enemies most was her air of entering a room; she did
not walk in, she made an entrance. It was as if such women as Mrs.
Sigourney and Lorna Vale did not exist. Lily Langtry or Cléo de Merode
were less effective. To-night she wore a brilliant yellow dress with a wide
full train. It was as if she understood shrewdly her ugliness and made
capital of it.
Sabine knew things about these people who filled the drawing room—
little bits of gossip, scraps of information picked up here and there in the
course of her twenty-six years. She knew, for example, that Mrs. Champion
(mother of the virgins and most rarefied of aristocrats) had a grandmother
known as Ruddy Mary who in her first assault upon the social ranks had
invited people to a monstrous ball by invitations written in red ink, and so
gained a sobriquet that was now forgotten. She knew that Wickham Chase
had a maternal grandfather who had been a Jewish pawnbroker and laid up
the money which he now spent. She knew that the Honorable Emma
Hawksby (niece of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom) was without a
cent in the world and found an easy winter in New York by living off those
who liked to speak of the dear Duke’s cousin. “Honorable” was not a great
title, but it went far enough in those days to keep the Honorable Emma in
bed and board for the winter. She even knew that a brother of the Apostle to
the Genteel had to be kept, at some expense to the Apostle, in an out of the
way country town in order that he might not make a drunken spectacle of
himself before the Apostle’s many “wa’am friends.”
Sabine kept a great many family skeletons in her clever memory and it
was impossible to know the moment when she might bring them forth and
rattle them in the most grisly fashion.
It was clear that her companion, shrewder than the well-fed young men
about him, penetrating with those instincts which came to him from the
plump bundle of satin and diamonds who stood receiving the guests,
understood perfectly the atmospheric disturbance. He was young, clever,
handsome in a fashion that was a little sinister, and very rich, so rich that
the whispers of gossip that clustered about him—even the talk of Mrs.
Sigourney and Lorna Vale—made no difference. Mrs. Champion found him
not entirely beneath consideration as a possible match for Margaret or
Janey, the redoubtable virgins.
“Look at Boadicea and her daughters,” Sabine whispered maliciously in
his ear as they came abreast of this virtuous group.
Young Callendar was tall, with dark skin, closely cropped black hair and
a wiry kind of strength that was an heritage of his green-eyed grandfather,
the Banker of Pera. When Sabine said “Boadicea,” he laughed and showed
a row of fine teeth set white against an olive skin. It was this same dark skin
which gave his eyes a look of strangeness. The eyes should have been
brown or black; instead they were a clear gray and had a way of looking at
a person as if they bored quite through him. People said he was fascinating
or wild or vicious, according to their standards of such things. The women
morbidly watched his greeting of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale, but they
discovered nothing. All the talk may only have been gossip. He was, after
all, only twenty-four ... a boy. But, of course, he had French and Greek
blood and had lived on the continent. “That,” said Mrs. Mallinson, the
escaped novelist, with an old world air, “makes a difference.”
Behind the screen, the Hindu dancer had begun to droop a little with
boredom, like a dark flower turning on its stem. Close by her side the bear-
like Russian tenor had fallen asleep, his enormous blond head bent forward
against his rumpled shirt front; his enormous hands, bursting the seams of
his civilized white kid gloves, hung limp between Herculean thighs clad in
black broadcloth that would have benefited by a visit to the cleaners.
Only Ellen remained alert and nervous, peering through her crevice, all
interest now in the handsome young man and the bizarre red-haired woman
at his side. These, her instinct told her, were characters, individuals,
powerful in the same fashion that the plump little woman covered with dirty
diamonds was powerful. And deep down in her heart a tiny voice kept
saying, “This is the great world. Some day I shall be on the other side of the
screen, seated no longer with mountebanks.”

Behind the screen she experienced a swift tumult of emotions, confused

and ecstatic like the sensations she had known on sight of her first play in a
real theater. The scene was glamorous, extravagant. Perhaps for an instant
she caught a sense of what was really passing before her eyes; it may have
been that she understood the spectacle even more clearly than any of the
participants save only Thérèse Callendar ... that these people were not
gathered in the tomb-like room because they were drawn by any bond of
affection, but rather because they had been summoned, each of them, to
play his little rôle in a comedy of manners which the world called
fashionable life. There was the Bishop who played a part quite his own (two
bishops would have been too many and so, by giving the evening a clerical
aspect, have dulled the edge of its chic). Mrs. Sigourney, wicked and
painted, played the rôle of Sin, a fascinating and indispensable part, just as
Mrs. Champion and her virgins as Virtue, Purity and Chastity, were her foil;
and Mrs. Mallinson and Lorna Vale were the Muses of Literature and the
Drama. Others stood for Family, and Wealth and what-not, while Mrs.
Callendar, hidden behind the drooping lids of her near-sighted green eyes,
understood all this and pulled the strings. She made for the piece an
admirable showman.
Ellen, watching them, grew excited, and out of this excitement there
emerged slowly a new ambition, which had nothing to do with a career in
music. It was, rather, a passionate desire to conquer this world as well, so
that she might fling her triumph back into the world of the Town; it would
serve as an admirable weapon to flaunt in the faces of those who had
mocked her poverty. For she had not yet escaped the Town; she had not
even learned how difficult it would be ever to escape.