The recent recognition of the Anthropocene as the geological era marked by the impacts of industrial action demonstrates the depth of the contemporary environmental crisis. According to Danowski and Castro, “the Anthropocene, in presenting us with an ‘end of the world’ perspective in the most empirical sense possible, that of a catastrophic change in the material conditions of the species’ existence, causes an authentic metaphysical distress.”1 This epoch expands a field of ontological and epistemic insecurity that challenges us to create other ways of thinking about the relationships between world and subject beyond the dualistic epistemology of Western knowledge
The concept of a more-than-human world seeks to overcome this nature-culture dualism by creating a broad notion of co-dwelling. Popularized by Abram’s2 eco-phenomenology, the more-than-human world is defined as the open spectrum of the interrelationships between the worlds of living and non-living beings and human societies. This expression refers to a world that includes and exceeds human societies, thereby associating them with the complex webs of interdependencies between the countless beings that share the terrestrial dwelling.
This view includes the different cycles of animals, plants, water, air masses, and rocks. In embracing such dimensions, Abram calls into question the human exceptionalism underlying the current environmental crisis and expresses the multi-species arrangements of the planetary future
As he explains, “The ground and the horizon — are granted to us only by the earth”3. The fundamental assumption of a shared involvement with the Earth reveals how the subtle intertwinings between the planet’s beings are manifested. With their specificity and corporeal variation, the different terrestrial beings are recognized in their particular expression of sentience.
To recognize the more-than-human world is to understand that there are other “selves” with corporally distinct centers of experience that take place in a vast intersubjective and inter-corporeal horizon. The multi-species cosmos of reciprocities and (dis)encounters between different entities is an acknowledgment of what María Puig de la Bellacasa describes as being “in a web of living co-vulnerabilities”4. The interconnections inherent to the vulnerability of being on and from Earth draw together the varied more-than-human forms of existence.
Therefore, it is essential to deconstruct the mechanistic perspective in which animals, plants, and other non-human entities act only on instinct5. These other beings with whom we share our places must be understood as subjects with their own horizons of intentionality.
Abram6 brings together each mineral, vegetable, or animal entity on Earth as a telluric variation of the texture and pulse of the same sensitive world and cosmos. When approaching a center of reference that animates the warp and woof of existence, there are ways to subvert human isolationism regarding other beings that are part of the biosphere’s dynamics. Like the animism of traditional peoples7, it is feasible to contemplate an expansion in thought involving terrestrial sentience shared between the different beings on the planet.
In the face of climate change, the more-than-human relations of places are altered, causing existential mismatches. When considering the need for modes of thinking-with that ensures environmental justice, it is vital to decipher the different interrelationships and how they can be reinvented in contemporary fractured horizons.
The precarious conditions of the Anthropocene have aroused Cultural Geographers’ interest in socio-environmental problems. This recent turn towards the phenomena and spatial arrangements of more-than-human entities has caused a significant thematic and conceptual restructuring in that discipline.
Lorimer8 argues that there is a growing set of cultural geographers interested in approaches to animal studies, bio-philosophy, and other more-than-human perspectives. They seek to rethink landscapes and places through interactive notions between these spatialities’ socio-cultural and non-human elements. Non-human entities and forces addressed in these studies include, but are not limited to: elephants9, reindeer herds10, bicycles11, trees12, and gardens13.
By dimensioning ways of thinking-with and deciphering corporeal polyphonic spellings of inhabiting the Earth, these studies provide opportunities for confluences that challenge Cartesian dualisms. They enhance and expand the explanatory capacities of geographical concepts, particularly place and landscape, for non-human entities.
More-than-human approaches in Cultural Geography are characterized by a shared interest in the different forms of multi-species arrangements. They adopt methodologies and perspectives that try to overcome the trends of human exceptionalism, usually through associations with post-humanist, decolonial, ecofeminist and/or ecophenomenological perspectives. Such attitudes reflect relational, approaches that bring together the bio and geo components intrinsic to more-than-human worlds.
More-than-human geographies
There has been a shift in the interpretation of meanings and representations towards the logic of affects. Affections are forces of varying intensity that inter-corporeally and intersubjectively affect the subjects viscerally involved in the research processes14. By transcending interpretations that reduce it to the irrational or sublime, affects are comprehended as a reciprocal form of corporeal interaction involving emotions, perceptions, and the imaginary.
Bellacasa points out that “Situations of care imply nonsymmetrical, multilateral, asubjective, obligations that are distributed across more than human materialities and existences.”15 Likewise, affective circumstances between corporally different entities occur in the architecture of an experiential fabric specific to each case.
>Contact with native telluric forms reactivates and energizes people’s senses16. Thus, the affective approaches used in more-than-human Cultural Geographies provide reciprocal immersions in the cosmos of plants, animals, and atmospheres. The geographer guided by the primal forms of inter-corporeality experienced in these arrangements can identify ways to affect and be affected by geographical situations.
Lorimer17 argues that more-than-human approaches in Geography can draw attention to the interconnected significance of corporeal, affective, and non-human elements. Considering the agency of the interactive elements that affect and are affected in each geographic reality permits the conditions emerging from the inter-corporeal arrangements of precariousness, cohabitation, and/or tension involved in place-making practices to be observed.
These geographers adopt immersive forms of engagement that enable approximations with affective atmospheres and forms of otherness. Therefore, the research practice itself can become a creative context that generates affective nexuses by combining relational activities with those linked to artistic, poetic, and/or immersive action.
Transposing the languages and skills from the Arts to Cultural Geography’s research practices is a way to get closer to non-human worlds. The Arts enable the creation of a cosmos of reciprocity that raises awareness of the Anthropocene’s environmental conditions. If, as Haraway18 argues, this is a time marked by discontinuities, the challenge for the Arts and Humanities is to create ways of acting and thinking that shorten this period as much as possible and build forms of cohabitation that design refuges and alternatives.
More-than-human Cultural Geographies adopt a non-representational perspective in their approach to the Arts, which is a departure from aesthetic issues or meanings pre-defined by symbolic systems. Conversely, they consider the art-scientific contact as a form of inventive engagement with the world, where the senses are produced and recreated during the intersubjective interaction with the entities involved19.
According to Haraway20, Earth’s various beings relate, approach, and know each other, thinking stories through narratives, worlds, and knowledge that break with Cartesian categories or specifications. It is possible to find Earth’s polyphonic existential spatialities through imaginative, poetic, sensory, and empathic contact. Capturing the shared affect between telluric corporal variations demands alternative forms of attention and expression on the part of geographers.
Expressing other beings’ existence geographically means becoming open to their affect and knowledge to find forms of speech through the Earth’s voiceless spellings. This implies being influenced by encounters so that they propitiate changes in the forms of otherness and collaborate in the construction of shared world projects. It is about understanding how to be in-and-of the world in correlation to more-than-human contexts.
Vital and Atmospheric Geographies
Within more-than-human Cultural Geography, Vital Geography focuses on the place-making of animals and plants. This subfield is primarily concerned with how multi-species arrangements are formed in worlds of corporeal contact between different beings. They recognize the intersubjectivities, affects, and forms of sentience of more-than-human and seek to understand their own existential senses of place.
These geographies deal with a diffuse and shared more-than-human corporeality that concerns a spatial ethos of reciprocity between human, animal, and plant worlds. The quest for vital geographies emphasizes the visceral experience of the existential and embodied spaces of different entities. Although each has its variable dimension, identifying shared strands between more-than-human beings unveils multiple spatial dimensions. Therefore, the basic assumption considers the autonomous, vital, and sociable agency of the non-human entities involved.
An exciting study by Barua21 unveils the conditions in which sunai alcoholic beverages transform affective relationships and spatial tensions between humans and elephants in the Indian village of Sundapur. The ethnogeographic research on more-than-human cohabitation showed the micropolitical and cultural conditions of the place. How the non-human animals look for the drink and react aggressively under its influence reveal the biopolitics of place centered on relational contradictions stimulated by human artifacts.
Another example is the work of Philips and Atchinson22, who address how trees interact and shape more-than-human worlds in Australian urban spaces. Based on biographical reports and poetic expressions about these plants’ sensitivity, the authors uncover the networks of imaginative co-fabrication between human and non-human subjects and worlds. The analyzed narratives reveal reciprocities between plants and people, leading to collaboration to turn cities into places of multi-species coexistence. There is a sensitivity in observing the subtle relational correlations inherent in cohabitation and shared sentience between the entities involved in the research.
As Pitt23 suggests in her research into human-plant reciprocity in the place-making of gardens, there is an ethical imperative to recognize plants’ agency. Thinking about plants based on their autonomy transcends the Cartesian and dualistic vice of viewing them as passive and lacking sensitivity. This mechanistic thought structure is part of a link that legitimizes present-day ecological damage. By adopting a vitalist stance, geographers can collaborate to build anti-hegemonic perceptions of relationships with plants and animals.
Vital Geographies seek to unveil arrangements of tension, precariousness, discontinuity, reciprocity, or sharing in the Anthropocene. The endeavor to observe and reciprocate with beings whose corporeality differs from that of humans requires a careful examination of particular variations of more-than-human worlds. They encompass ways of being-in-the-world that differ corporeally from one another, addressing unfamiliar topologies and geographical realities.
Atmospheric Geography is another field with distinct repercussions among more-than-human Geographies. Adams-Hutcheson24 argues that the concept of atmosphere used in these studies is related to the word’s two meanings: both the atmosphere as an affective-aural field emanating from beings and things and manifestations of the troposphere.
Trigg explains that “The indeterminate nature of an atmosphere, as something that is both subjectlike and objectlike, means that it can function as a common ground between individuals.”25 This inherent shared characteristic embodies the more-than-human modes of reciprocity articulated by thinking-with multi-species ways of being-in-the-world.
The atmospheric porosity and dynamic flow generated by feelings, bodies, and objects indicate a non-representational expression of variable relationships between presences co-dwelling in a given place.
Atmospheres can be wild, pleasant or challenging, sublime or exciting, comfortable or oppressive. In her research in New Zealand, Adams-Hutcheson26 indicate how the troposphere’s seasonal rhythms influence small farmers’ sense and bonds of place, involving the intertwining of animals, plants, agricultural machinery, rainfall, and mudflats. She states that immersion in atmospheres can demonstrate discreet and dynamic connections that involve the corporeality of the most diverse beings.
According to Trigg27, an atmosphere can be defined by the adhesions it exerts on the bodies with which it interacts. Simpson28 takes this approach when studying the ambiguities of cyclists’ relationships with inopportune winds on the British coast. Alongside the production of atmospheres related to bicycling activities, a counter-atmosphere is produced by the troposphere that hinders the rider’s path. The interaction of these elements generates a particular affective atmosphere that reinforces a more-than-human reciprocity negotiated in places.
Thus, atmospheric studies focus on the webs of meanings, styles, and affectivity generated by amalgams of more-than-human agencies that unfold into situational and circumstantial spatialities.
Closing remarks
In the fractured horizons of desolate geographies continually expanding in the Anthropocene, the possibility of confrontation permeates the formation of other ways of thinking-with. Recognizing the intersubjectivities and intertwinements between different terrestrial beings, as the more-than-human Cultural Geographies have done, is a way of transcending the dualisms that legitimize the environmental crisis.
Transcending the limitations of representational geographies towards the transformative possibilities of the more-than-human worlds entails building ways of earthly co-dwelling. Exploring different entities’ existential spatialities results in identifying experiences of places’ co-vulnerability, reciprocity, precariousness, and affectivity. Cultural Geography’s investigations about the agency of objects, atmospheres, plants, and non-human animals indicate multiple ways of cohabiting our planet.
To immerse oneself in the co-vulnerabilities of the places experienced by different terrestrial entities results from understanding the reciprocities and contradictions of the contemporary geographic situations in tension. Opening up geographical knowledge to these sentient arrangements allows us to decipher modes of being-in-and-of-the-Earth that overcome human exceptionalism towards the possibilities of life in more-than-human entanglements.
1 Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Há mundo por vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins, Florianópolis 2017, p. 48.
2 David Abram, The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York 1996.
3 Ibid. p. 131.
4 María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds, Minneapolis 2017, p. 141.
5 Donna Haraway, When species meet, Minneapolis 2008.
6 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An earthly cosmology, New York 2010.
7 Danowski, Castro, Há mundo por vir?.
8 Jamie Lorimer, Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies, Cultural Geographies, v. 17, n. 2, 2010, pp. 237-258.
9 Maan Barua, Volatile ecologies: towards material politics of human-animal relations, Environment and Planning A, v. 45, n. 1, 2013, pp. 1-17.
10 Hayden Lorimer, Herding memories of humans and animals, Environment and Planning D: Society and space, v. 24, n. 1, 2006 pp. 497-518.
11 Paul Simpson, Elemental mobilities: atmospheres, matter and cycling amid the weather-world, Social & Cultural Geography, v. 20, n. 8, 2018, pp. 1-20.
12 Catherine Phillips and Jennifer Atchinson, Seeing the trees for the (urban) forest: more-than-human geographies and urban greening, Australian Geographer, v. 51, n. 2, 2018, pp. 155-168.
13 Hannah Pitt, On showing and being shown plants – a guide to methods for more-than-human geography, Area, v. 47, n. 1, 2015, pp. 48-55.
14 Sarah Whatmore, Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world, Cultural Geographies, v. 13, n. 4, 2006, pp. 600-609.
15 Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 221.
16 Abram, The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world.
17 Jamie Lorimer, Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene, Progress in human geography, v. 36, n. 5, 2012, pp. 593-612.
18 Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Durham 2016.
19 Harriet Hawkins, For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. (London: Routledge, 2014).
20 Haraway, Staying with the trouble.
21 Barua, Volatile ecologies.
22 Phillips, Atchinson, Seeing the trees for the (urban) forest.
23 Pitt, On showing and being shown plants.
24 Gail Adams-Hutcheson, Farming in the troposphere: drawing together affective atmospheres and elemental geographies, Social & Cultural Geography, v. 20, n. 7, 2017, pp. 1-20.
25 Dylan Trigg, The role of atmosphere in shared emotion, Emotion, Space and Society, v. 35, 2020, pp. 1-7, here: p. 4.
26 Adams-Hutcheson, Farming in the troposphere.
27 Trigg, The role of atmosphere in shared emotion.
28 Simpson, Elemental mobilities.
