09 Jan 2025 | Alina Berg
An anthropology of stones and minerals beyond the nature/culture divide: A reflective essay
Geologists read different material aspects of stones to understand the Earth’s history and specific environmental conditions. Stones, thus, are small fragments that capture a certain, very particular moment in nature’s time.[1] In a way, they are like photographs of the Earth’s structure. What distinguishes them, however, is the fact that they are made from that same structure they tell us about; what they capture is directly inherent in their material quality. Material and content are one and the same. A photograph uses molecules or materials that react to light. While looking at the material used in a photograph can help determine the rough time period it was taken in, the image (unless some very abstract or meta form of art) captures something else entirely – material serves content; it is manipulated to serve a purpose.
This differentiation, here illustrated through the admittedly bizarre example of a stone and a photograph, reflects a binary distinction that has dominated academic discourse in the Global North for centuries. Nature is said to be something immediate and organic whereas culture is whatever is built on top. And since it is built on top of that unquestionable real something, it seems more susceptible to fluctuation, to interpretation, to error, to subjectivity – and, ultimately, more suitable to debate.
In sustaining this often-unconscious distinction, we are (1) overlooking ‘natural’ qualities, entities, and actors and (2) forgetting that there are other, perhaps neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural' aspects, which are immediate and direct.
A stone as a hand-sized fragment of the Earth's structure? Photo: Alina Berg.
Being the anthropologists we are, let us start with colonialism. Its effects are commonly discussed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, it is often treated as a cultural phenomenon, and we can ask ourselves if the approaches we take to study it reproduce this ‘culturalism’. Provenance research, for example, is commonly applied as a method of examining colonial encounters and relationships in the context of ethnographic museum collections and looted art. By focusing on individuals and human relationships that have (literally and figuratively) shaped the objects in question – as provenance research inherently does[2] – we are forgetting what is buried underneath this (arguably) ‘cultural’ top layer. Looking back at the example of our stone, there is something else, captured by the material itself, that could be worth looking at. Why just leave that up to geologists and exclude it from our research?
When we discuss anthropology’s involvement in colonialism, we talk about ethnographic exploration supporting extraction and European expansion. However, perhaps just as many expeditions were lead in the name of geological and mineralogical inquiry. According to their own perspectives and dominant European thinking at the time, anthropologists and ethnographers were, arguably, in search of culture, whereas geologists were seeking out knowledge and information about nature. Does this simple distinction, then, exclude geological involvement in colonial endeavours from critical examination?
Geologists, just like anthropologists, were collecting things that stored relevant information for their discipline – they just happened to be raw materials rather than manufactured or otherwise artistically modified ‘objects’. And, if they were operationally and methodologically involved and have brought ‘things’ to museums, why not include their methods in provenance research of (and, eventually, curatorial approaches to) these ‘things’? Anthropologists are now using the same ethnographic methods that were previously instrumentalized in the context of colonialism to contribute to decolonial approaches. The question is: How can geological methods be incorporated to (potentially) do the same?
Various academics are now starting to show that colonialism was as much of a natural phenomenon as a cultural one.[3] Indigenous and First Nation concepts of living and engaging with the environment, which reflected a particular ontological understanding and relationship, were often repressed in favour of anthropocentric approaches. Thus, taking a decolonial approach to these ‘nature’-related aspects of colonialism may involve a (re)framing of the environment as an active entity in an interactional, collaborative relationship with human (and other) beings. And, perhaps, looking at what was taken from this agency-possessing ‘nature’ (leaving the specific term up to discussion) in the context of colonialism.
Provenance research helps us correct colonial narratives and relationships through the tracing of certain ‘things’ that were brought to Europe from former colonies. If, as we have established, some of these things aren’t just ‘cultural objects’, but literal small pieces of the environment, then how can we take this materiality into account? One way might be to look at the particular ecosystem they were taken out of, and what that means for the natural environment today – which, forcibly, involves collaborations with relevant scientists (including but not limited to geologists). However, they are not the only ones who understand and study environmental systems and fluctuations – Indigenous and First Nation peoples have been doing so for centuries. In the context of climate change, such knowledge (often referred to as ‘citizen science’[4]) is starting to be integrated. Provenance researchers beyond the nature/culture binary can do the same – by taking the Indigenous and First Nation ontologies they often already look at as a whole and not just as isolated ‘cultural’ information.
This whole argumentation, of course, is built upon the same binary we set out to transcend – possibly because it is hard to criticize and critically examine a phenomenon without using the very categories it was first built upon. Yet there is another aspect inherent in the material I want to highlight here. The very material qualities geologists study to understand particular environmental and tectonic conditions by linking them with scientific theories and knowledge, come with inherent associations and affordances. Colours and texture of stones – beyond what they can tell us about minerals, chemical structures and reactions through connections to additional information – evoke sensory reactions, emotions, imagination. There is something else there, perhaps more immediate, that either escapes this nature/culture binary altogether or simply weaves the two together inseparably. Could this almost cosmological quality be a good starting point; and help us bring together these various actors and disciplines?
These questions will be further explored in my PhD research on Pounamu (jade or greenstone) from Aotearoa New Zealand.
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[1] Fonck, Martin. 2024. "Geological (Dis)orientations: Training Sites, Storytelling, and Fieldwork in the Chilean Andes." Science, Technology, & Human Values.
[2] See, for example, von Oswald, Margareta. 2020. Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Leuven: Leuven University Press, p. 320.
[3] See Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. 2017. "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene." ACME 16(4): 761-780 and Ferdinand, Malcom. 2021. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Polity.
[4] See Bonney, Rick, Tina B. Phillips, Heidi L. Ballard, and Jody W. Enck. 2016. "Can Citizen Science Enhance Public Understanding of Science?" Public Understanding of Science 25(1): 2-16.