cultural geographies 2006 13: 600
609

Materialist returns: practising

cultural geography in and for a
more-than-human world
Sarah Whatmore
Oxford University Centre for the Environment, School of Geography

This paper surveys the return to materialist concerns in the work of a new generation of cultural
geographers informed by their engagements with science and technology studies and performance
studies, on the one hand, and by their worldly involvements in the politically charged climate of
relations between science and society on the other. It argues that these efforts centre on new ways of
approaching the vital nexus between the bio (life) and the geo (earth), or the ‘livingness’ of the
world, in a context in which the modality of life is politically and technologically molten. It identifies
some of the major innovations in theory, style and application associated with this work and some of
the key challenges that it poses for the practice of cultural geography.

Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather
thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth . . . involving a gradual but thorough
displacement from text to territory.1

Something/happening

I t seems pertinent, even unavoidable, to begin by confessing that I still feel something
of an outsider in the ‘cultural geography’ camp
at least as it came to be configured
in the formative years of my research career in the late 1980s as the rise of ‘cultural
studies’ in the UK gained disciplinary purchase in the guise of ‘the new cultural
geography’.2 That project’s signature concerns with the politics of representation and
identity cast my obdurately earthy interests in cultivation and property, growing and
eating, in a very unfashionable light. At that time such interests found a more
convenient if not very permissive home in political economy
where the ‘matter of
nature’, as Margaret Fitzsimmons so memorably put it, was marginally less margin-
alized.3 So, in a small but not insignificant way, my being invited to present the cultural
geographies annual lecture4 is testament to some kind of realignment of intellectual
energies underway; that moment of fabulation that Deleuze conjures5 in which cultural
forces regroup and start to generate their own stories: stories which enter the world as
envoys of ‘something happening’
giving that something/happening both shape and
momentum.

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 Materialist returns

This paper might best be thought of as just such a self-conscious act of storying
an
envoy of the recuperation of ‘materiality’ that is gathering force in this something/
happening through energies as diverse as postcolonial, feminist, landscape, urban,
legal and performance studies.6 Through these diverse currents, cultural geographers
have found their way (back) to the material in very different ways that variously
resonate with what I take to be amongst the most enduring of geographical concerns

the vital connections between the geo (earth) and the bio (life).7 The durability of these
concerns bears the hallmark of geography’s history, which (like anthropology and
archaeology) took shape before the division of academic labours into social and natural
sciences became entrenched. It is a division with which these disciplines have never
been entirely comfortable, and with which they continue to wrestle more self-
consciously, and sometimes productively, than others. With the advent of the ‘new
cultural geography’, this earthlife nexus was written out of, or more accurately, into the
ancestral past of cultural geography
at least in the Anglophone research community.8
I argue here that this nexus is currently being recharged and taken in unfamiliar
directions by a new generation of cultural geographers, not least through multiple
engagements with the ‘geo/bio-philosophy’ of Deleuze and Guattari9 from which this
intervention pushes off. Such engagements have been direct, through close readings of
their work and the philosophical industry that it has spawned, and indirect, through the
twin intermediaries of science and technology studies and performance studies in
which it is differently, and variously, inflected.10 A common commitment in such work
is a view of science and philosophy as projects in which theory does not take on a
representational function, but rather an active and practical one, such that every theory
acts as a ‘mechanics’
simultaneously a technology of practice and an intervention in
the world.11 But this storying of cultural geography’s recuperation of the material works
against forging ‘it’ into the latest in a weary and wearying succession of ‘new turns’ that
have been written into the intellectual history of cultural geography, still less one that is
uniformly or exclusively Deleuzian.
Instead, I want to emphasize that this recuperation manifests a rich variety of
analytical impulses; philosophical resources and political projects that don’t ‘add up’ to
a singular ‘new’ approach, let alone one that has a monopoly of insight or value. To this
end, I use the language of re turns to suggest that what is new (as in different) about the
something/happening in cultural geography is a product of repetition
turning
seemingly familiar matters over and over, like the pebbles on a beach
rather than a
product of sudden encounter or violent rupture. Just as importantly, what is different or
innovatory about these materialist returns is generated as much by the technologically
and politically molten climate that informs cultural geographers’ intellectual invest-
ments and worldly involvements as by any academic repositioning. In this case, I think
there can be little doubt that the materialist returns of cultural geography today are
bound up with the proliferation of what Bruno Latour calls ‘matters of concern’12 and
Michel Callon calls ‘hot situations’13 associated with the intensification of the interface
between ‘life’ and ‘informatic’ sciences and politics. This intensification has been
witnessed in serial public controversies since the 1990s, from GM to nanotechnology,14
in which the practices of social, as well as natural, scientists have been caught up.

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Sarah Whatmore

These involvements are reflected in cultural geography’s reworking of substantive

topics (like domestication and sensory perception) in unfamiliar, and sometimes
unsettling, directions such as the burgeoning interest in animal cultures,15 ‘post-
humanism’16 and geographies of ‘affect’.17
I want to start by articulating the broadest sense of this claim that a new generation of
cultural geographers is returning to the rich conjunction of the bio and the geo
or, for
want of a more felicitous expression, to what the writer Jeanette Winterson calls the
‘livingness’ of the world.18 My argument is that the most important difference (a big
claim, I know) in the ‘something/happening’ in cultural geography’s materialist
recuperations is that this return to the livingness of the world shifts the register of
materiality from the indifferent stuff of a world ‘out there’, articulated through notions
of ‘land’, ‘nature’ or ‘environment’, to the intimate fabric of corporeality that includes
and redistributes the ‘in here’ of human being.19 In this it shares the same impulse as
Derrida’s frequently articulated insistence on addressing philosophical enquiry to ‘the
entire field of the living, or rather to the life/death relation, beyond the anthropological
limits of ‘‘spoken language’’’.20 Importantly, however, this redirection of materialist
concerns through the bodily enjoins the technologies of life and ecology, on the one
hand, and of prehension and feeling, on the other, in refiguring the ontological
disposition of research
drawing cultural geographers into new conversational
associations; research practices and modes of address that collectively mark what I
have called ‘more-than-human’ approaches to the world.21 I will tease out this rather
bold claim by sketching some of the key facets of the materialist returns now in play, as
I see them, and the kinds of challenges that they pose.

Materialist recuperations
In the last edition of the Dictionary of human geography , Denis Cosgrove in his entry
on cultural geography distinguishes ‘classical’ from ‘new’ styles of cultural geography
by reference to their approaches to the study of landscape.22 The former, associated
with the work of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley school that he inspired, has as its
reference point his iconic essay ‘The morphology of landscape’ in which
cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the
natural area the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.23

By contrast, ‘new’ cultural geography is associated with the flowering of cultural studies
in Britain, as signalled by the no less totemic essay of Daniels and Cosgrove introducing
their book Iconography and landscape , in which landscape is defined as
a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing . . . surroundings. This is not to say that landscapes are
immaterial. They may be represented in a variety of materials . . . in paint on canvas, in writing on paper, in
earth, stone, water and vegetation on the ground.24

The point I want to draw from these exemplary quotations is rather different from that
for which they have come to stand in demarcating a ‘new’ from a ‘classical’ regime.

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 Materialist returns

Despite the significant differences they articulate, what I find most striking about
them is that they share an overriding common currency, namely that they both cast the
making of landscapes (whether worked or represented) as an exclusively human
achievement in which the stuff of the world is so much putty in our hands. On these
accounts, as I have suggested elsewhere, ‘the world remains untroubled and
untroubling, waiting impassively for us to make up our minds and making no
difference’ to the landscape (or knowledge, or environment . . .) in the making.25 By the
same token, cultural geography’s investments in questions of identity and culture have
remained largely wedded to that most vociferously silent and self-evident subject of the
social sciences, the ‘in-here’ of human being. So it is that recent contributions have
sought to do (at least) three things. The first has been to re-animate the missing ‘matter’
of landscape, focusing attention on bodily involvements in the world in which
landscapes are co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and a lively earth.26
The second has been to interrogate ‘the human’ as no less a subject of ongoing co-
fabrication than any other socio-material assemblage.27 The third in my list has been the
redistribution of subjectivity as something that ‘does not live inside, in the cellar of the
soul, but outside in the dappled world’.28
This redistribution of energies puts the onus on ‘livingness’ as a modality of
connection between bodies (including human bodies) and (geo-physical) worlds. In
turn, that acts as a rallying point for geographers (and others) working against the
lexical cast of the ‘new’ cultural geography and the humanist commitments of cultural
geography more broadly, bringing all manner of philosophical resources to bear on
their efforts. These include the corporeal materialisms inspired by Foucault’s bio-
cultures, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh and the feminist corporeal ethics of
Diprose29 and others; and the energetic materialisms inspired by the relational
ontologies of Spinoza, Whitehead and Deleuze (amongst others), such as Stengers’
co-fabrication or ‘working together’.30 In conjunction with the molten question of what
‘livingness’ means in a life science era,31 such resources and energies redirect
materialist concerns in ways that have profound ethical and political, as well as
analytical, consequences. As the political theorist Jane Bennett recently put it, they
attempt to hold onto the relational and emergent imperatives of material force in which
the ‘thing-ness of things’
bodies, objects, arrangements
are always in-the-making
and ‘humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky
web of connections or an ecology [of matter]’.32
If these are some of the lineaments of the differences/innovations wrought by the
materialist returns of a cultural geography attentive to the livingness of the world, how
is this attentiveness playing out in terms of more specific research directions and
impulses? I want to outline four commitments being taken forward in diverse ways in
such work that strike me as being of particular importance.
The first is a shift in analytic focus from discourse to practice . Inspired by numerous
and non-additive efforts to work against the grain of the logocentric conception of
social agency
‘I think therefore I act’
that is a familiar mantra of orthodox social
science. This shift is associated by some with the so-called ‘practice turn’33 and a variety
of approaches which relocates social agency in practice or performance rather than

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discourse
thinking and acting through the body
and reworks discourse itself as a
specific kind of practice.
The second is a shift from an onus on meaning to an onus on affect . The bodily
register of current work reopens the interval between sense and sense-making, and
multiplies the sensory dimensions of acting in the world and the milieux of inter-
corporeal movement. Affect refers to the force of intensive relationality
intensities
that are felt but not personal; visceral but not confined to an individuated body. This
shift of concern from what things mean to what they do has methodological
consequences for how we train our apprehensions of ‘what subjects us, what affects
and effects us’ or ‘learn to be affected’.34
The third redirection of effort is towards more-than-human modes of enquiry. Such
modes of enquiry neither presume that socio-material change is an exclusively human
achievement nor exclude the ‘human’ from the stuff of fabrication. Animals and
technological devices have variously been used as ‘agents provocateurs’ in tackling the
question of difference and rigorously working it through the specific materialities and
multiplicities of subjectivity and agency.35 Such modes of enquiry attend closely to the
rich array of the senses, dispositions, capabilities and potentialities of all manner of
social objects and forces assembled through, and involved in, the co-fabrication of
socio-material worlds.
The fourth shift is from a focus on the politics of identity to the politics of knowledge .
Here two currents come together in addressing concerns with the ways in which
knowledge is produced, hardwired into the social fabric and contested in a variety
of public forums. One of these concerns the redistribution of expertise attendant
on the recognition of multiple knowledge practices and communities that bear on
the framing of inherently uncertain socio-technical problems.36 The other concerns the
practice of science (including social science) in constituting the phenomena that it
studies as ‘reliable witnesses’ where that reliability is guaranteed by allowing
phenomena to work against, or to exceed, our experimental expectations.37

Practising more-than-human geographies

For if the look purchases the transcendence of the human only at the expense of repressing the other senses
(and more broadly the material and the bodily with which they are traditionally associated), then one way
to recast the figure of vision (and therefore that with which it is ineluctably associated) is to resituate it as
only one sense among many in a more general
and not necessarily human
bodily sensorium.38

I have sought to argue that the creativity of cultural geography is generated not by a
succession of ‘new’ turns but by the gathering force of constant re-turns to enduring
preoccupations with the processes and excesses of ‘livingness’ in a more-than-human
world. Trying not to solidify the heterogeneity of ideas and practices at work in the
recuperation of materiality in cultural geography into the latest such ‘turn’, I have
outlined some of what I see as the most important aspects of an ongoing realignment of
intellectual energies. It is a realignment that promises much in terms of equipping
geography in the life science era, but one that brings real and pressing methodological

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 Materialist returns

and political challenges in its wake. Before one gets carried away with their claims to
novelty, it is worth recalling earlier efforts to marry the ‘bio’ and ‘geo’ in cultural
geography. Thus, for example, buried in his ‘morphology of landscape’ essay is an
appeal by Carl Sauer (following Vidal de la Blache) that
Geographers should avoid considering the earth as the scene on which the activity of man (sic) unfolds
itself, without reflecting that this scene is itself living.39

In similar vein, current interests in performativity are anticipated in J.B. Jackson’s

concerns with the ‘vernacular landscapes’ generated by what he saw as the
inexhaustible capacity for improvisation in people’s everyday ways of making
themselves at home in the world with and against the grain of ‘aristrocratic’ or political
designs.40 That said, the differences are profound, as these preoccupations with the
intersection between the ‘bio’ and the ‘geo’ become charged with the socio-
technological possibilities, political registers, cultural sensibilities, and intellectual
enthusiasms of a new generation of geographers. The next edition of the Dictionary
of human geography is a few years off, but some glimpse of the ways in which the
treatment of landscape in the updated entry on cultural geography might be recharged
by this work are signalled in Cary Wolfe’s observations on the bodily sensorium, quoted
at the start of this final section.
So what difference do the materialist recuperations and research directions in cultural
geography that I have sketched above make to the question of how, as Karen Barad
puts it, ‘matter comes to matter’?41 On the one hand, such work is clearly marked by the
distinctive axes of academic exchange that inform it, notably the burgeoning fields of
study emerging between disciplines
such as science and technology studies,
performance studies, and feminist studies. On the other, it is their engagement in
matters of public controversy and everyday concern taking place in a proliferation of
other cultural and political forums that most stands out. Here, what makes the question
of materiality matter is the molten climate of relations between science and society,
technology and democracy42 in which the knowledge practices of social and natural
scientists, civil servants and corporate lawyers, NGOs and direct action groups, citizens
and consumers rub up against one another in the event of all manner of knowledge
controversies. Such controversies (around genetic engineering, MMR injections,
pharmaceutical patenting, stem-cell harvesting, reproductive cloning, for example)
are at once about the most mundane and intimate aspects of social life
food, health
and kinship
and the sites of prolific inventiveness in the life sciences. Taking
the working example of what we might call ‘bio-geographies’, a field set to explode in
the cultural geography literature, it seems,43 I want finally to illustrate some of the
differences in the ways in which cultural geographers are currently recuperating the
material, and to signal some of the major challenges that they pose.
The first major difference is that ‘life’ itself has changed, to become the latest addition
to that peculiar socio-material assemblage called ‘natural resources’. The treatment of
animals and plants as biological resources is hardly new, but with the rise of genetic
and, more particularly, post-genomic biotechnologies any vestige of difference
between the ability to manipulate and commodify their bodies and human bodies

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has been removed. This disturbing levelling of biological differences, reinforced by the
re-materialization of biological entities in the guise of machine-readable informatic
codes,44 has profound effects on what bodies count and what counts as bodily in the
work of cultural geographers today.45 Not least are the considerable additional skills
required to study the detailed knowledge practices involved in the production and
circulation of such bio-technological artefacts, if cultural geographers are to get to grips
with the specificity (as against the originality) of knowledge objects like artificial life
forms. The cultural potency of ‘artificial life’ suggests that it might be possible to learn
from the repertoire of techniques employed in artistic work that engages science and/or
scientists to stage public experiments in the possibilities of reworking hum/ani/
machine interfaces through robotic, neurological and genomic amplifications or
extensions of bodily competences and temporalities.46 For example, the Australian
performance artist Sterlarc, who has worked with robotics scientists at Sussex
University in devising an ‘exoskeleton’, seeks to produce a choreography of move-
ments in which
instead of seeing the human body as the choreographer and the robot as the instrument, I really see the two
working together. That is how it becomes an artistic performance. I have no desire to control the
machine . . . . I am open to its doing the unexpected. In this sense the human body has always been a kind
of cyborg. . . . . I am not satisfied with just theorising about it. I want to experience what actually happens
and then try to articulate what that means.47

A second major difference is the changed relationship between science and society in
which new scientific knowledge claims and/or artefacts, particularly in those fields that
touch the visceral vernacular of social anxiety relating to food or health, have become
routinely controversial matters. Such controversies take cultural geographers to
unfamiliar forums. At one end of the spectrum stand the law courts in which the
artefacts themselves are called upon as material witnesses48 in the determination of
competing claims to the ‘intellectual property’ in new biological artefacts.49 At the other
are the proliferation of impromptu ‘hybrid’ forums that swell in the face of new
technologies
like GM or mobile phone masts
gathering to them all manner of
concerned citizens and/or consumers; seasoned advocacy groups; scientific dissidents
and the like that can change the commercial and regulatory fabric of such technologies
in unpredictable ways. How do social scientists, including cultural geographers,
position themselves in these forums? As the clamour grows for greater ‘interdiscipli-
narity’ as a way of addressing such knowledge controversies, cultural geography’s rich
tradition of experimentation provides a valuable resource for resisting the pressures on
us (from within and outside the discipline) to assume the position of ‘interpreters’
between concerned publics and natural scientists.
As I see it, perhaps the greatest challenge presented by these ‘more-than-human’
styles of working is the onus they place on experimentation and, by implication,
on taking (and being allowed to take) risks. Let me dwell momentarily on just
two aspects of this experimental imperative. First is the urgent need to supplement
the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text
with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers

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and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject.50
Second, the experimental demands of ‘more-than-human’ styles of working place
an onus on actively redistributing expertise beyond engaging with other disciplines
or research fields to engaging knowledge practices and vernaculars beyond the
academy in experimental research/politics such as the ‘deliberative mapping’ exercise
pioneered by Gail Davies and her collaborators in relation to xeno-transplantation.51
I hope and trust that cultural geographies will continue to play its part as a leading
journal in which scholars can take risks and experiment; in which the worldliness that
has been the hallmark of geographical endeavours is reinvigorated; and in which
conversations and politics proliferate in generative ways rather than hardening into
orthodoxy.

Acknowledgements
I should like to acknowledge the valuable feedback I received from audiences on versions/parts
of this paper presented at the ‘Envisioning geographies’ symposium at UCL; the Lennart
Andersson Lecture at Karlstadt University; and the ‘Exhibition of British geography’ plenary
session at the IGU conference in Glasgow.

Notes
1
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? (French original 1991), trans. Graham
Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London, Verso, 1994).
2
See C. Philo, ed., New words, new worlds: reconceptualising social and cultural geography
(Lampeter, Dept of Geography, Saint David’s University College, Lampeter, 1991).
3
M. Fitzsimmons, ‘The matter of nature’, Antipode 21 (1989), pp. 106
20.
4
This is a version of the Cultural geographies annual lecture given at the centennial conference
of the Association of American Geographers (Philadelphia, March 2004). My thanks to the
journal’s editors, Mona Domosh and Philip Crang, for the challenging invitation to present the
lecture, and to Hodder Arnold for sponsoring the event.
5
Deleuze is here following Bergson. See G. Deleuze, Negotiations 125 (New York, Columbia
University Press, 1995), p. 125.
6
Exemplary of these recuperations of the material in various fields of cultural geography are the
following: in relation to the postcolonial, I. Cook and M. Harrison, ‘Cross over food: re-
materialising postcolonial geographies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28
(2003), pp. 296
317; in relation to feminist scholarship, C. Nash, ‘Genetic Kinship’, Cultural
studies 18 (2004), pp. 1
34; in landscape studies, J. Wylie, ‘On ascending Glastonbury Tor’,
Geoforum 33 (2002), pp. 441
54; in urban studies, A. Latham and D. McCormack, ‘Moving
cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies’, Progress in human geography 28
(2004), pp. 701
24; in relation to legal geographies, D. Delaney, ‘Making nature/marking
humans: law as a site of (cultural) production’, Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 91 (2001), pp. 487
503; and in relation to performance studies,
J.D. Dewsbury, P. Harrison, M. Rose and J. Wylie, eds, ‘Enacting geographies’, special issue of
Geoforum 33 (2003).

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7
There are clearly other ways of conceiving of the re-materialization of cultural geography that
owe more to anthropological traditions in the study of material culture; see e.g. P. Jackson,
‘Rematerialising social and cultural geography’, Social and cultural geography 1 (2000),
pp. 9
14.
8
Notable exceptions include the institutional hold of cultural ecology in the Nordic countries
and its persistence as an active research grouping in the Association of American
Geographers. It should also be noted that reservations about the ‘linguistic’ turn in British
cultural geography were articulated even at its height (see esp. Philo, New words, new
worlds ).
9
Both ‘geo-philosophy’ (see J. Bonta and J. Protevi, Deleuze and geo-philosophy: a guide and
glossary (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2004)) and ‘bio-philosophy’ (see K. Ansell-
Pearson, Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze (London, Routledge, 1999))
provide useful ways into the work of Deleuze and Guattari.
10
Hence e.g. Latour’s famous quip that the acronym ANT (Actant Network Theory) could just as
easily have been ART (Actant Rhizome Theory). See T. Crawford, ‘An interview with Bruno
Latour’, Configurations 1 (1993), pp. 247
68.
11
T. Murphy, ‘Quantum ontology: a virtual mechanics of becoming’, in E. Kaufman and
K. Heller, eds, Deleuze and Guattari: new mappings in politics, philosophy and culture
(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 213.
12
A term he uses in contrast to ‘matters of fact’ and as shorthand for refusing the distinction
between what is controvertible (e.g. values) and what is not (e.g. observational data).
B. Latour, Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 2004).
13
A term he uses to describe situations in which ‘everything becomes controversial [in] the
absence of a stabilised knowledge base’; M. Callon, ‘An essay on framing and overflowing’, in
The laws of markets (Oxford, Blackwell, 1998), p. 260.
14
See H. Nowotny, P. Scott and M. Gibbons, Rethinking science: knowledge, and the public in
an age of uncertainty (Oxford, Polity, 2001).
15
C. Philo and C. Wilbert, eds, Animal spaces: beastly places (London, Routledge, 2000).
16
N. Castree and C. Nash, eds, ‘Mapping posthumanism’, theme issue of Environment and
planning A 36 (2004).
17
D. McCormack, ‘An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 28 (2003), pp. 488
507.
18
J. Winterson, Gut symmetries (New York, Knopf, 1997), p. 85.
19
See P. Sheehan, ed, Becoming human: new perspectives on the inhuman condition (Westport,
CT, Praeger, 2003).
20
J. Derrida and E. Roudinesco, ‘Violence against animals’, in For what tomorrow . . . a dialogue ,
trans. J. Fort (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 63.
21
S. Whatmore, Hybrid geographies: natures cultures spaces (London, Sage, 2002).
22
D. Cosgrove, ‘Cultural geography’, in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and M. Watts, eds, The
dictionary of human geography , 4th edn (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), pp. 134
38.
23
C. Sauer, ‘The morphology of landscape’ [1925], in J. Leighley, ed., Land and life: selections
from the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1963),
p. 343.
24
S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, ‘Iconography and landscape’, in S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, eds,
The iconography of landscape (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 1.
25
S. Whatmore, ‘Generating materials’, in M. Pryke, G. Rose and S.Whatmore, eds, Using social
theory: thinking through research (London, Sage, 2003), p. 92.

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26
For instance, S. Hinchliffe, ‘‘‘Inhabiting’’
landscapes and natures’, in K. Anderson,
M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift, eds, Handbook of cultural geography (London, Sage,
2003), pp. 207
26.
27
See e.g. K. Anderson, ‘White natures: Sydney’s Royal Agricultural Show in post-humanist
perspective’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2003), pp. 422
41.
28
B. Latour, ‘Body, cyborgs and the politics of incarnation’, in S. Sweeney and I. Hodder, eds,
The body (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 140. See e.g. Wylie, ‘On
ascending’.
29
R. Diprose, Corporeal generosity (London, Routledge, 2002).
30
I. Stengers, Power and invention: situating science (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1997).
31
See R. Doyle, Wetwares: experiments in postvital living (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).
32
J. Bennett, ‘The force of things: steps to an ecology of matter’, Political theory 32 (2004), p. 365
(emphasis original).
33
T. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. Von Savigny, eds, The practice turn in contemporary
theory (London, Routledge, 2001).
34
Latour, ‘Bodies, cyborgs and the politics of incarnation’, p. 140.
35
E.g. C. Wolfe, Animal rites: American culture, the discourse of species and posthumanist
theory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003).
36
See Nowotny et al ., Re-thinking science .
37
Stengers, Power and invention , p. 85.
38
Wolfe, Animal rites , p. 3.
39
Sauer, ‘The morphology of landscape’, p. 321.
40
J.B. Jackson, Discovering the vernacular landscape (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press,
1984), pp. 7
8.
41
K. Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to
matter’, Signs 28 (2003), pp. 801
32.
42
M. Callon, P. Lascoumes and Y. Barthe, Agir dans un monde incertain: essai sur la démocratie
technique (Paris, Seuil, 2001).
43
In the context of giving the cultural geographies lecture, I was responding here to a number of
sessions at the Centennial Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers at
which I was speaking, and thinking in particular of the ‘Geographies of biotechnology’
sessions organized by Beth Greenhough and Emma Roe.
44
See Doyle, Wetwares .
45
See P. Thurtle and R. Mitchell, eds, Semiotic flesh: information and the human body (Seattle,
Walter Chapin Simpson Centre for the Humanities, 2002).
46
O. Dyens, Metal and flesh (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001).
47
Quotation from www.stelarc.va.com.au.
48
See M. Strathern, Property, substance and effect: anthropological essays on persons and things
(London, Athlone Press, 1999).
49
See Delaney, ‘Making nature/marking humans’.
50
For an example, see S. Whatmore and S. Hinchliffe, ‘Living cities: making space for urban
nature’, Soundings: journal of politics and culture 22 (2003), pp. 37
50.
51
See G. Davies, J. Burgess, J. Eames, M. Mayer, K. Staley, A. Stirling and S. Williamson,
Deliberative mapping: appraising options for addressing the kidney gap (Wellcome Trust Final
Report Grant 064492, 2003). See also: http://www.deliberative-mapping.org

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