Cultural Geography

(though this had less appeal in Europe: Harris,

1996: 442; Simmons, 1980: 150) and a focus on

material culture.

Later British geographers such as Harris and

Donkin were influenced by Sauer. Harris

initially focused on goat domestication, and

devel-oped evolutionary models for domestica-

tion stressing the ecosystems in which early

domestications were embedded (Harris, 1962;

1977; 1996; Simmons, 1980: 150). Donkin

produced meticulous work on domesticated, or

transitional, animals in the Americas, such as

the peccary, the muscovy duck and the

cochineal insect, incorporating the study of

language, based on historical records, indige-

nous folklore and analysis of local dialects

(Donkin, 1977; 1985; 1997). Yet, much ‘tradi-

tional’ cultural geography (or cultural ecology)

treated domestic animals simply as cultural

artifacts, an evolutionary technological devel-

opment, little more than a medium of further

environmental transformation (Fraser-Darling,

1956). McKnight, for example, suggested that

Australia’s feral livestock ‘represents an

immense amount of wandering protein on the

hoof’ constituting a ‘biomass approaching

800,000,000 pounds’ but with deleterious eco-

logical (as well as economic) effects on areas in

which they were concentrated (1976: 93–4).

While stressing human powers and agency, as

well as ecological processes, possible roles of

non-human animals were minimized, limiting

human–animal relations to dominatory or

symbiotic forms.^6

By the 1960s, cultural geography was under

heavy attack, partly owing to the Berkeley

School’s organic approach to ‘culture’ and its

treatment of culture–economy relations. For

some cultural ecologists such as Clutton-

Brock, culture was ‘a way of life imposed

over successive generations on a society of

humans or animals by its elders’ (1994: 29).^7

Such a view seemed too simple. Moreover,

with only two interacting realms (cultural and

biological), analysis of how activities and

meanings are contested and imprecated in

power relations was precluded. Sauerian ideas

were also criticized based on re-examinations

of archaeological evidence (Bender, 1975: 21;

Blumler, 1993; Rodrigue, 1992). In particular,

Rodrigue (1992: 336) criticized Sauerian

beliefs in the non-economic origins of animal

domestication, and argued on the basis of

archaeological research for a more materialist

lens. Thus cultural geography arguably

became a backwater, and its central questions

about human–environment relations receded

from view as well.

RETHINKING CULTURE, NATURE

AND SUBJECTIVITY

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the

term ‘animal geography’ had vanished from

geographic discourse. In the 1990s, however,

interest revived, inspired by the encounter

between human geography and social theory, cul-

tural studies, selected natural sciences and envi-

ronmental ethics. In the US, efforts to ‘bring the

animals back in’ were taken up by Wolch and

Emel, who discovered some isolated albeit

prescient and intriguing attempts to address the

animal question. Tuan’s Dominance and Affection

(1984), which traced inherently unequal and

‘paternalist’ power relations entailed in pet keep-

ing, was perhaps the best example. Trying to

stimulate a broader discourse about animals and

society, Wolch and Emel organized a 1995

thematic issue of Society and Spaceand the

edited book Animal Geographies(1998). Here,

Philo wondered what might develop if concepts

of the ‘new’ cultural geography were applied to

human–animal relations. Together with Wilbert,

Philo posed the ‘animal question’ within the

context of British cultural geography, resulting

in the collection Animal Spaces Beastly Places

(2000).

These efforts touched off the flowering of

discourse that, harking back to Newbigin, we

simply term animal geography.^8 What stimu-

lated this re-emergence? Figure 9.2 is an attempt

to untangle the relevant context and intellectual

currents. Certainly, growing concern about

environmental degradation, habitat loss and

species endangerment, and the plight of animals

relegated to the killing zones of shelter, lab,

factory farm and slaughterhouse, served as

central contexts motivating a renewed focus on

animals. During the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds

of new organizations sprang up to lead social

movements in defence of the environment and

animals (pets, farm animals, wildlife, lab animals).

The most radical, such as PETA and the Animal

Liberation Front, challenged people to rethink

their relationships with animals, drawing explicit

linkages, for example, between racism, sexism

and ‘speciesism’; slavery and animal captivity;

and the Holocaust and factory farms, fur farms

and research labs.

Against this turbulent backdrop, the emer-

gence of new research in social theory and

cultural studies led to a profound rethinking of

cultureand especially a rethinking of subjectiv-

ity. Simultaneously, however, natural science

disciplines concerned with the environment and

animals per se(including cognitive psychology,

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