It is a well-rehearsed claim that the modern western conception of the human is premised on the ontological distinction between nature and culture (Franklin 2003, Haraway 2008). Nature is the undifferentiated foundation upon which culture is applied, and culture is what distinguishes and differentiates us from other animals. This opposition, as Palsson points out (2006: 73), emerged with the advent of modernism, and rapidly became a key component in our conceptualization of the human. While in medieval Europe the person was viewed as entirely embedded in a nature-culture world, in the western modernist ontology the person is envisioned as the product of a culturally specific process of socialization. Thus, as Ingold describes this view, the person is ‘made through the imposition of a specific cultural form upon a pre-existing and undifferentiated material substrate’ (2006a: 181). While ethnographic examples of non-western peoples have provided a clear indication that the nature–culture divide and other related binaries are not universal, the critical examination of the distinction between the social and the biological within western ontology has only recently gained force (Latour 1993, Descola and Palsson 1996, McLean 2009).