Beyond cultural models of the environment: Linking subjectivities of dwelling and power

For many decades, the idea of a ‘cultural model of the environment’ was a valuable tool for anthropologists and other social scientists to contest the bio-physical realism of natural scientists. If we were to understand how diverse human groups interact with their specific environments, it was not enough simply to describe the objective features of those environments and human adaptation to them. We could explore what meanings people constructed of their environments, and indeed see how their categorical organisation of the natural world built into distinctive worldviews of humanenvironmental relationship.1 It seemed in effect there could be no pre-cultural human response to nature.