Cultural Geography

of urbanization into their habitats. This strategy

is fraught with difficulties, including lack of

sufficient scientific knowledge (itself often influ-

enced by behaviourist or evolutionary psycho-

logical views, or constructed to minimize animal

subjectivity and agency) and the temptation to

indulge in excessive anthropomorphism. But

such work attempts to go beyond speculation and

engage animals on their own terms to try to

better understand their interactions with people.

The specific question of animal agency has pro-

voked consternation amongst those committed to

conceptions of agency that require con-

scious intentionality that can result in resistance

to, or transgression of, material or socially con-

structed boundaries – a form of agency that many

argue only humans possess and is thus constitu-

itive of the human-animal divide. Wilbert (2000)

sought to destabilize anthropocentric concep-

tions of agency, pointing to anthropomorphic

radical ecological discourses of human and

animal resistance to ‘civilization’. Rather than

simply rejecting these ideas, he used them to

question whether conscious intentionality was

necessary for acknowledging the agency of non-

humans, framing non-human agency as a rela-

tional effect similar to ANT to argue that animals

may indeed ‘resist’. However, as Thrift (2000)

argued, representing actions in terms of resis-

tance may also be too restrictive and negative a

conception. Other animal geographers have uti-

lized Latour’s notion of ‘agency-as-effect’ to

counter the notion that only humans possess

agency. Woods (2000), for example, in his study

of the British hunting debate, argues that the

‘ghostly representations’ of deer and fox consti-

tute ‘agency as effect’ – unintended yet powerful

in terms of disrupting the spatial imaginaries of

both city and countryside. Another example is

Whatmore and Thorne’s (1998) analysis of

wildlife trading networks, which relied on per-

formative conceptions termed topologies of

wildlifethat reveal how definitions of wildlife

emerge out of complex interrelations within het-

erogeneous social networks, and also how

wildlife matter as active agents, sensible crea-

tures who are subjects as well as objects present

in multidimensional forms (Whatmore and

Thorne, 1998: 451).

For some, this strategy may seem insufficient

to capture animal decision-making and how

resulting decisions, predicated on both their

social and biological subjectivity, shape and are

shaped by human action. Thus a challenge facing

animal geography is the design of research that

considers both human and animal agency simul-

taneously. The most productive model for

such work may be an ethnography informed by

scientific evidence on animal minds, behaviour

and ecology. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ (1994)

narrative about relations between the Ju/wasi and

lions of the Kalahari provides a tantalizing

example of what such work can reveal. She

recounts the relations between Ju/wa hunters and

lions during the 1950s, when she and her family

lived amongst the Ju/wasi. The Ju/wa hunters

respected lions and studied lion hunting tactics to

inform their own efforts. Lions also accorded the

Ju/wa respect, however. After a long chase and

kill, for example, lions would sometimes beat the

men to the carcass. The men would speak to the

lions gently, toss a stone at them, and tell them

softly to be gone. The lions would grumble but

leave peacefully. But sometimes the humans

robbed the lions of their kill, without challenge.

Since the 1950s, however, the dramatic

growth in human population, the emergence of

large-scale cattle ranches, wildlife tourism and

hunting, and the establishment of a nature

reserve (from which the Ju/wasi were removed),

meant increasing pressure on lions. The lion

nation was effectively divided into subgroups

whose culture and interactions with humans had

diverged by the 1980s. In one subpopulation,

lions altered traditional hunting habits; emerging

only at night, they took livestock since their prey

population was badly depleted, and were some-

times shot for this by cattle-keepers. They also

stopped roaring, seeking to live discretely and

minimize contact with people. Another group,

however, living in the reserve, had lost contact

with people (except those who hunted them with

gun or camera), and within two lion generations

their tradition of peaceable relations with

humans had been lost; they were openly aggres-

sive, and would attack people. A third group had

created still a third cultural form, characterized

by different hunting patterns, and a new brazen-

ness but no violence toward people; some resid-

ual respect seemed to remain. Humans had, over

time, gone from fellow hunters to lion enemies

(or potential enemies) who no longer treated

lions with respect and thus were often no longer

accorded respect by lions either. Thomas’ tale

fully captures vital aspects of human identity as

shaped by animals, animal agency as shaped by

human action, and dynamics of change in

human–animal relations.

Animals and place

Currents in social theory and cultural studies

stimulated a rethinking of how nature, culture and

subjectivity were embodied in landscape, led by

‘new’ cultural geographers. The ‘new’ cultural

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