Cultural Geography

geographies in which, as Michel Serres puts it,

‘there is sense in space before the sense that

signifies’ (1991: 13). The first of these is with

environmental history (for example, Bird,

1987; Cronon, 1995), exploring shared concerns

with recovering the forceful socio-materialities

of earth and water – with redeeming plants

and creatures in the assemblage and durability

of particular cultural practices from the narra-

tive monopoly of human designs. The second

conversational tack is with the vein of anthro-

pological interest in material culture (for

example, Appadurai, 1986; Ingold, 2000) that

emphasizes the ‘mutualism’ of social agency

such that, for example, a tree stump ‘affords’

sitting as a product of the relationship

between the form and scale of the human

body and that of the material object (Graves-

Brown, 2000: 4). These two conversational

threads are of long standing and refresh

unfashionable currents in cultural geography

associated with natural history, such as

domestication (see Anderson, 1997) as well as

more fashionable ones like postcolonialism

(see Willems-Braun, 1997).

The third and fourth of these conversa-

tional influences are of rather more recent

genesis, and have seen cultural geography

engaging with the proliferation of ‘extra-

disciplinary’ bodies of intellectual work, parti-

cularly those associated with feminism and

science studies. In the case of science studies,

the rich flowering of interest in the knowledge

practices of science (including geography) as

important analytical subjects in their own

right, particularly in its feminist and actant

network theory (ANT) variants (e.g. Haraway,

1997; Latour, 1999), have done most to redis-

tribute the ‘agency’ of their socio-material

fabrications through the associational perfor-

mance of all manner of bodies, devices, docu-

ments and codes. Here, the spatial formations

of these knowledge practices have been

rendered significant in ways previously reserved

for their historicity. Finally, feminist work on

embodiment in terms both of situating knowl-

edge practices and claims and of attending

to the intercorporeal affects of differently

embodied kinds (for example, Kirkby, 1997;

Weiss, 1999) has enjoined a lively re-examination

of the categorical distinction between the

human and the non-human that has marked

the geographical enterprise so deeply, not

least its cultural variants. Pulling these various

conversations together to identify a common

theme in the work critically reviewed in the

chapters in this section, it is the shift from

representational, or discursive, to what Nigel

Thrift (1996) has called non-representational,

or performative, social theories that most

stands out.This shift in the vocabularies of cul-

tural geography promises to be particularly

important for the terms on which the human

and the non-human are admitted into geo-

graphical analysis, permitting more promiscu-

ous and volatile configurations of the social

and the material that complicate the laboured

divisions and rapprochementsbetween culture

and nature (Whatmore, 2002).

The three chapters in this section take up

and explore these currents differently, and

some others besides. The first chapter, by

Noel Castree, surveys the ways in which the

‘question of nature’ has been framed in human

geography and reviews the enduring concerns

and dilemmas of its Marxist heritage. The

second chapter, by Jennifer Wolch, Jody Emel

and Chris Wilbert, explores one of the most

radical efforts in cultural geography at the

millennium to take up questions of non-human

agency by making space for animals (see

Wolch and Emel, 1998). Here, the theoretical

and methodological impulses that have shaped

the ‘new’ cultural geography are charged with

privileging of cognition and language as the

markers of a decidedly ‘human’ geography that

takes no account of our ethical kinship with

other animal kinds.The third chapter, by Steve

Hinchliffe, examines the idea of ‘landscape’

and reassesses the legacy of ‘building’

approaches to the question of nature in

cultural geography as against various efforts

to articulate a ‘dwelling’ perspective in which

the human is situated within, rather than

divorced from, the fabric of heterogeneous

worldly habitations.

REFERENCES

Anderson, K. (1997) ‘A walk on the wildside: a critical

geography of domestication’,Progress in Human Geography

21(4): 463–85.

Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commo-

dities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

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