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Yearnings for Guácharo Cave: Affect, absence, and science in Venezuelan speleology
Abstract
As a member of Venezuela’s first national society of cave exploration and science (speleology), Ramón Alberto Hernández (1926–2009) participated in the exploration and survey of Venezuela’s famous Guácharo Cave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite his key contributions to the knowledge of this cave and many others in the country, his contributions have received little attention. With an ethnographic account of his last visit to Guácharo Cave in 2008 as focus, this article offers a glimpse into Venezuela’s geographies of science at an important historical moment in the relation among individuals, the nation, science, and modernity. It does so from Hernández’s vantage point, as he yearns to reach a particular point inside of the cavern, a point where his life and the lives of other cave explorers who overshadowed his speleological contributions, the cavern, and my own history become entangled. Building on scholarship that emphasizes absence and hope as important aspects of experience, I focus on this yearning, this emergent, relational, and transformative capacity that animates and constitutes not just these entangled histories and identities but also beings and the cave itself. In the process, I illustrate the ways scientific knowledge and national modernity are co-produced. Beyond Hernández, beyond caves, this exploration reminds us of the need to (1) examine the ways affective attachments are formed in/with extraordinary places and (2) widen our understanding of materiality and presence to encompass absence. Finally, this work illustrates the centrality of yearnings in fieldwork and writing.
In this second review of recent cultural geography research, I use the concept of The Critical Zone (originally from US Geoscience) as a lens. The environment is far too voluminous a field of cultural geographic research to be surveyed here, but it is too significant a body of research to be overlooked. Here, three key dimensions of Critical Zone studies offer a means to navigate this work: (i) multi-scalar (temporal and spatial) considerations of matter, energy and forces; (ii) biotic and abiotic relations; and, (iii) a commitment to producing knowledge beyond disciplinary silos. Discussion explores each of these in turn before reflecting, to close, on what cultural geographical thought and practice might add to considerations of the criticality of the critical zone.
Grotten zijn in staat om ons onrustig te maken – in hen kunnen we ‘diepe tijd’ ervaren die zich op een intieme schaal voor ons ontvouwt. Te midden van mede-grotverkenners in Cuba zag ik ze als vensters naar een onderling verbonden landschap dat in staat is onze relatie met elkaar te hervormen en onze verantwoordelijkheid voor toekomstige generaties te bevestigen.
Scholarship on voluminous geographies not only takes seriously geopolitics’ three-dimensionality, but also the ways bodies experience the diverse materialities and vulnerabilities of volumetric infrastructures on the one hand, and the earth and its dynamic ecosystems, on the other. Focusing on the relational sociality among bodies—or rather, beings—as they explore and map caves, I emphasize the shared quality of how voluminous—and in particular, subterranean—geographies are created, experienced, and represented. The history of collaboration between Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and Cuban speleologists dedicated to the exploration, study, and conservation of the country’s thousands of caves, illustrates the geopolitical implications of this focus. Based on interview and ethnographic data, this paper examines the varied perspectives on the relationship between speleology and defense, beginning with an institutional history, and then shifting to the affective relational qualities of speleological practice, which I argue constitute a shared intimate geopolitics. These relational qualities manifest themselves in forms of relatedness among speleologists and places, some of which structure the organizational (including spatial) features of their practices and their resulting knowledge. Viewed through this lens, cave maps assume an intimate quality as well: as substances that bind, as heirlooms, and as tokens of reciprocity. This perspective challenges approaches to caves as disconnected voids empty of life and sociality. Indeed, caves not only amplify the social, they gather. To speak of caves as only geological phenomena is inaccurate and actually limits scholarly appreciation of their geopolitical transformative potential. In the case of Cuba, this paper makes an important contribution by accounting for intimate encounters with the earth and its representations as key players in geopolitics.
Geographic analyses have centered on how state and capitalist enterprises—often in collaboration with each other—deploy volumetric territorial strategies and processes to achieve their ends, i.e., control in the form of securitization or resource extraction. We invite an exploration of different ways voluminous environments, their flows, and ecosystems can be experienced and represented with analyses of diverse activities of cave explorers in Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. These activities call attention to the heterogeneity of volumetric territorial projects. By exploring and mapping subterranean spaces, cavers co-opt some of the techniques of the state and/or capitalist territorialization and commodification. But the experiences of underground exploration and even mapping exceed and sometimes contradict the motivations and effects rightfully associated with these volumetric practices. Not only are these activities deeply affective and embodied, they typically happen beyond state reach. Moreover, following cavers' explorations requires more open conceptions of both territory and voluminous spaces, and the ecological rhythms and flows that constitute them. Doing so leads to the recognition of how cavers experience and enact alternative volumetric territorial projects. In the process, some of these projects forge defiant national imaginaries, literally from below. The possibility and potential of these imaginaries come from the unique quality of subterranean exploration: only those who explore and survey passages underground know their location, extent, and at times, their content. Yet, there are dangers as well: not only are most of these projects far from emancipatory or inclusionary, they can be co-opted by state and/or capitalist enterprises. The implications of this last point are complex and potentially contradictory: while state knowledge and control of caves and karst environments may limit caver access and activities, lack of state knowledge and control may also result in these environments and their contents’ lack of protection.
Building on reinvigorated scholarly debates on the concept of value, this paper examines forms of valuation that coexist with and challenge those typically associated with capitalist natures. Based on archival, ethnographic, and interview data, we analyze a historical case of the Venezuelan Society of Speleology (SVE) that since 1967 has been exploring and mapping the country’s caves. Its results are published in a national cave survey that the group manages. Not only is each cave entry the representation and materialization of the group’s volunteer efforts. Each is also part of a relational regime of valuation by which all caves are worth mapping. The survey’s classificatory logic not only transforms underground value, it also acts as boundary object bringing together diverse actors and promoting the SVE’s collective ethos, at least in theory, of valuing all members. The survey is the fulcrum of distinct regimes of valuation, wherein value and values are two sides of the same coin. The spaces where these value/s are enacted matters, suggesting the critical contributions that geographers can make in understanding the spatial qualities that contribute to—or hinder—the materialization of certain regimes of valuation over others.
Underlying Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is one of the world's most extensive flooded cave systems. Humans and non-humans can enter this aquifer via water-sinkholes - known locally as cenotes. Cenotes for the Maya of the Peninsula are the entrances to the Xibalba, a mythological underworld. Fostered by technological innovations since the 20th century, this underworld has become a site of explorative calculation. Cave divers travel to the Peninsula for a chance to explore the region's subterranean frontier, to potentially ‘find’ a place where no human has been before. However, it is not just about the destination; for many cave divers, it is about the affect of the watery subterranean; an experience that defies most basic (physical and social) human functions: breathing underwater, timeless space, total darkness, no natural orientation, floating, and no talking (efficiently). As one cave diver noted “once you have swum, snorkelled or dived in a cenote, you have been infected by thrill and curiosity”. In this paper, drawing from interviews with cave divers as well as land and cenote owners, I analyse how caving explorations contributed to processes that socially construct and physically modified the Yucatan Peninsula's subterranean. In particular, I analyse how the embodied conditions of being a cave diving ‘explorer’ have become commodified into an experience that is sold into the region's booming tourism industry. Cenotes have been transformed into a tourism product through the entanglement of diving technologies, emotive exploration narratives and a sacred Maya underworld.
This review article on Volume Geography argues that contemporary geopolitical and environmental issues should be retheorized by volumetric thinking. This review is divided into four main sections. The first section introduces the key concepts in volume studies literature, namely the definition of volume, three-dimensional geopolitics and security governance, relationship between geophysical politics and geopolitics, and affect and body within a volume. The second section elaborates the roles of air, aerospace, atmosphere and weather in security governance. The third section discusses the challenges posed by geophysical processes to related practices of resource ownership, territorial boundary, and soverignty power. The fourth section explains how affect and body experience within the volume are formed, represented and transformed via arts and technologies and through environments. The conclusion notes certain theoretical and empirical implications.
Unlike the products of academic practices, characterized by Latour (1986) as immutable mobiles, acts of resistance are often very difficult to transport and “consume” in other places. To investigate their mobility and immobility, this volume addresses questions dealing with how acts of resistance are affected by the role of recording techniques, different media, and by the every- day use of public spaces. It also seeks to determine the limits of different kinds of metaphors such as the public space as stage, theatre, or gallery. Other issues include the difference between the event or spectacle and the everyday, the nature of the “claim,” and different issues of ownership in reclaiming the streets and occupation scenarios. To this end, the contributors to this issue explore a range of highly significant and diverse cases in depth—diverse both in a geographic sense, as well as with a perspective that goes beyond the usual focus on Western cultures, and in relation to the actors and policies involved, from the negotiation of the bodies of pregnant women and images of abortion on sidewalk spaces to large-scale protests in places like Tahrir Square in Cairo, Gezi Park in Istanbul, and Tiananmen in Beijing.
This second report on mobilities considers some key themes in mobilities research by (mostly) geographers over the last two years or so. Following on from some of the themes outlined in the first report, this report explores accounts of historical geographies of mobility in order to put claims to ‘newness’ in perspective. Second, it surveys how mobility research has influenced methodology focusing, in particular, on ‘mobile ethnography’. Third, the report looks at the blossoming arena or research on the forms of waiting, stillness and stuckness that have become an important component of our understanding of mobility. The conclusion reflects on the continuing importance of the politics of mobility and urges greater consideration of the mobility of ideas alongside people and things.
This first report on mobilities outlines some aspects of research on mobilities that differentiates it from and connects it to earlier, ongoing geographies of movement such as transport geography. In the context of a world on the move it seeks to bring us up to date with the mobilities turn and make a case for mobility research as a project which focuses on the universal but always particularly constructed fact of moving. Mobilities research is compared to and differentiated from work in transport geography, arguing that mobilities research takes a more holistic view that allows it to make some previously unlikely connections.
Steatornis caripensis (the oilbird) is a very unusual bird. It supposedly never sees daylight, roosting in huge aggregations in caves during the day and bringing back fruit to the cave at night. As a consequence a large number of the seeds from the fruit they feed upon germinate in the cave and spoil.
Here we use newly developed GPS/acceleration loggers with remote UHF readout to show that several assumptions about the behaviour of Steatornis caripensis need to be revised. On average, they spend only every 3(rd) day in a cave, individuals spent most days sitting quietly in trees in the rainforest where they regurgitate seeds.
This provides new data on the extent of seed dispersal and the movement ecology of Steatornis caripensis. It suggests that Steatornis caripensis is perhaps the most important long-distance seed disperser in Neotropical forests. We also show that colony-living comes with high activity costs to individuals.
This book, first published in 1987 and considered a classic in the field of cultural and historical geography, examines the poetic constitution of colonial society. Through a far-reaching exploration of Australia’s mapping, narrative description, early urbanism, and bush mythology, this book exposes the mythopoetic mechanisms of empire. A powerfully written account of the ways in which language, history, and geography influenced the territorial theater of nineteenth-century imperialism, the book is also a call to think, write, and live differently.
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
According to legend, the monstrous Minotaur-half-man, half-bull-made his home in the Labyrinth at Knossos on the Mediterranean island of Crete. The cave-like Labyrinth-large, dark, complex in layout, but homogeneous in appearance-was built by Daedulus for King Minos. To repay the Athenians for the slaying of his son, Minos exacted tribute of fourteen Athenian youths every nine years. This lasted until the Athenian hero, Theseus, decided to assume the role of one of the sacrificial youths, travel deep into the Labyrinth, and slay the Minotaur. But how was Theseus to find his way out of the confusing passages once the deed was done? The answer came from Ariadne, daughter of Minos. She gave Theseus a ball of string and the idea to unwind it as he traveled toward the monster. Theseus entered the Labyrinth, unwinding the string as he went along. After plunging his sword into the Minotaur, Theseus followed the string safely back out to the surface world. For her cleverness and willingness to betray her father for love, Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos during his homeward voyage.
In this paper I build on my previous case-study focused research on memorialization to develop a thesis for absence-presence evidenced in vernacular memorial artifacts, spaces and performances at a variety of scales and locations across the British Isles. I make three key arguments: i) for bringing the universally significant experience of absence through bereavement to the fore in cultural geographies of absence; ii) for moving beyond representational and phenomenological analysis of memorial artifacts and spaces to focus critical attention on the contextualized interface between the representational and more-than-representational, embodied and affective practices that surround them, for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the living and the absent deceased; and iii) that this interface of form and practice at a variety of vernacular memorials and locations evidences dynamic negotiations of absence-presence. I explore the ways in which the emotions, memory and materiality of absence through death is expressed and negotiated in different memorial forms and landscape settings in the British Isles. Analysis is based on a range of empirical examples drawn from contemporary practices of memorialization and remembrance, and explores how living with absence as a result of bereavement is mediated through different material forms and practices including expressions of 'continuing bonds'. The discussion is contextualized in relation to wider dialogue on absent presence, but argues that expressions of continuing bonds with the deceased evidence a relational and dynamic absence-presence. Practices associated with absence-presence intersect with growing trends to mark private grief and remembrance of individuals in public space, through the creation of a range of informal memorials that frame a 'Third Emotional Space' for the bereaved. The material memorial scrape is indicative of the interwoven narrative journeys in and through particular place-temporalities for the living, for whom bereavement is a confluence of emotional-spiritual-practical way-finding.
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual's consciousness (an objectivation of the individual's will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.(1)
Recent scholarship on vertical geographies has lead to a critical reexamination of the relationship between space and power. In this paper, I develop a vertical geographies approach in an unexplored context and with a less tested method: that of cave explorers and scientists in the field in Venezuela, from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographic analysis of exploration in practice, viewed in relation to a multi-dimensional environment and the social dynamics, bodies, and technologies involved in traversing it, illustrates the ways vertical geographies are constructed and experienced. For the Venezuelan Speleological Society, a group dedicated to cave exploration and science since 1967, examining these geographies highlights culturally specific ways the tension between sports and science in speleology play out and how new members are socialized in the field. Specifically, attention to verticality highlights the role that age, masculinist heroics, and other embodied dimensions play in the construction of speleological geographies. More broadly, an ethnographic focus on exploration, with humans probing the earth's sinuous contours, guards against thinking of verticality abstractly—doing so risks simplifying and even misrepresenting multi-dimensional and processual engagements among humans, their technologies, and the environment.
This essay engages with recent work on an unusual, yet fascinating theme: absence. Two edited collections have recently been published that deal with the topic: An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss (Bille et al., 2010) and The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality (Hockey et al., 2010). These books explore an almost counterintuitive aspect of absence: its material culture. Indeed, absence has a materiality and exists in – and has effects on – the spaces people inhabit and their daily practices and experiences. Drawing on the discussions in these two books and on other recent developments in the study of absence, this essay considers the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to trace absence. This entails following and describing the processes through which absence becomes matter and absence comes to matter. It means to map out, locate and follow the traces of absence and understand absences as traces, that is, as residual, incomplete, elusive, ambiguous, yet material entities.
How do the lines on a map come into being? What stories do they tell? These questions are examined in the context of cave exploration and mapping in Venezuela. Ethnographic analysis focuses on mapping in the field, the translation of notes into final maps, and discourses surrounding these practices. The lines that cave surveyors sketch in field books while traversing underground passages reveal a dialectic between cartographic and exploratory practices. Two key factors shape this dynamic: first, the experience of probing humans "pushing passages" with no obvious end in sight, and second, the coordinated and skilled use of tools by explorers working in teams. Here, humans define both the scale and perspective of cartographic representations. But bodies slithering along passages make lines, too. This paper simultaneously considers lines of lead on paper and traces of bodies in the earth as a way to think of exploration and mapping as emergent engagements. This case powerfully illustrates the ontogenic nature of maps, highlighting the (re)production of social relations that continually brings them into being along with the environment that engenders these engagements. Finally, cave exploration and mapping illustrate the limits of our vision and technologies to grasp and order nature.
The strategy of sociocultural critique through the 'problematization' or 'defamiliarization' of the habitualized character of everyday life is one that is well-established in the literature, especially for adherents of various neo-Marxisms. However, in recent years, several prominent critics have taken issue with the concept of defamiliarization, arguing that the habit-bound, 'distracted' and routinized character of the everyday cannot be easily contrasted with, or superceded by, the exceptional or the extraordinary. Such a position, it is suggested, both denigrates the integrity of daily life and promotes a kind of incipient transcendentalism. The work of Henri Lefebvre is often taken to be representative in this regard, and various phenomenologies or pragmatisms are promoted in his stead. In this article, I take issue with such critics, by analyzing Lefebvre's writings on such key points as his treatment of routine in everyday life, as well as his concepts of totality, dialectics and critique. I end up asserting that, contrary to what is often said, Lefebvre does not promote a dualistic transcendentalism in which daily life is denigrated, but rather an 'everyday utopianism' in which routine and creativity, the trivial and the extraordinary, are viewed as productively intertwined rather than opposed. As such, I seek to defend the notion of 'critique' vis-à-vis the everyday, and to demonstrate the on-going relevance of Lefebvre's work, as well as that of the 'counter-tradition' that is loosely associated with his name.
This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct.
In light of current attention to the `everyday', this paper attends to the construction and negotiation of one particular building as an avowedly `extraordinary place'. The paper examines how unusual mixtures of diverse properties (such as `artwork' and `tourist attraction') at the Hundertwasser-Haus in Vienna are always actively and collectively operated such that the house produces and maintains its extraordinariness. Moreover, it forwards the contention that a crucial way in which the extraordinary can be produced is in the meshing of the spectacular with the mundane, everyday and practical, rather than in a separation of the former from the latter. The paper concludes by considering how the complexities of this case study might allow us to reflect upon the critical role of extraordinariness in apprehending the geographies that we take most for granted.
This paper presents a critical narration of the South Polar voyages of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. The argument which guides this narration is that it is through embodied, material practices - through relations of becoming anterior to a duality of discourse and world - that distinctive subjectivities and landscapes are produced. Within this conceptual frame, the paper focuses upon the differences between the expeditions led by Scott and Amundsen, and especially upon differences as regards styles of dwelling within and strategies for moving through the Antarctic landscape. Such differences, I argue, may be witnessed and narrated within the varying materialities, mobilities and corporealities enacted by the two expeditions. In analysing these via the format of a critical narrative, the aim is to foreground a sense of Scott and Amundsen’s voyages as concrete, sensuous contexts of practice and performance, and in this way the paper seeks to abet and inflect the interpretative strategies of current critical histories of European exploration.
This article focuses on the leisure pursuit of caving and those whoparticipate in caving (cavers), to explore how some cavers have constructed cavingas a pursuit that is highly sensuous, disrupting conventional constructions of the‘heroic’ figure of caver. The article locates the practice of caving within a broadercontext of outdoor recreation, identifying how caving has been constructed culturally,highlighting dominant ideas about heroic physical pursuit and under ground adventure. However, the physical geography of rock and spaces affects how a humanbody may encounter and experience caves, shaping sensuous and intimateunderground knowledges, and caver subjectivities; sometimes revealed in creativeand highly evocative ways. The article examines work by David Heap and Ian Chandler that demonstrates ‘a love of caving’; they articulate ideas of intimacy andrelations between humans and environments through literature and sculpture,challenging dominant stereotypes, suggesting very particular physical, embodied,emotional and thoughtful geographies.
Since the 19th century at least public monuments have been the foci for collective participation in the politics and public life of villages, towns, and cities. They have acted as important centres around which local and national political and cultural positions have been articulated. Monuments are an important, but underutilised, resource for the geographer interested in debates surrounding national identity. Through a variety of examples, the ways are explored in which examinations of the sociology, iconography, spatialisation, and gendering of statues reveal important ways in which national "imagined communitiies' are constructed. -Author
This paper examines historical geographies of speleology in Britain between 1935 and 1953. As the study of caves, speleology was constructed as a sporting-science. The paper traces the formation and activities of the British Speleological Association, the influence of the speleologist Eli Simpson, arguments relating to the practice of speleology, and the formation of the Cave Research Group in 1947, to examine the geographies of science that emerge through speleology. By tracing some of the spatial, social and practical issues within the histories of speleology, distinct social and regional geographies are uncovered. Debates about practising science, definitions of speleology as sporting-science and ‘the right kind of speleologist’ complicate the geographical histories of speleology within Britain. As well as emphasising the spatial outcomes of these issues, I suggest that personality can also impact upon geographies of science in profound ways.
Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of material culture finds the reasons for this in (a) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, (b) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and (c) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time.
This article is about urban exploration, a cultural practice of exploring derelict, closed and normally inaccessible built environments. The article is, in a sense, an experiment in research, learning and representation and is as much about the way the information is presented as it is about the topic itself. It consists of two parts. The first component is a video article that can be viewed online at http://vimeo.com/5366045 [Correction added on 13 October 2010 after first publication on 3 October 2010: The URL has been corrected]. The second is this document, an annotated script and short article meant to support the videographic document. This piece, as a whole, is a review of the work of five scholars (Alastair Bonnett, Tim Edensor, Caitlin DeSilvey, Hayden Lorimer and David Pinder) who have studied the theories and practices behind contemporary urban exploration from a number of different perspectives. I include video footage of my own ethnographic research on the topic, though I allow discussion of previous work to contextualize those images to establish what might be considered a videographic literature review.
In broad terms, European students of the history of Latin America have concentrated their researches upon colonial policies, interactions between Europeans (and their American-born descendants) and indigenous peoples, economic and commercial structures, and political life (whether of elites or, more recently, of subaltern groups). The last two decades have witnessed a significant expansion in Britain and elsewhere of research into gender studies and cultural studies. Although the latter discipline embraces an awareness of the importance of the history of science, this has tended to be rather narrowly focussed upon travel writing, and the extent to which there were links between the promotion of scientific travel and both imperial and national projects, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, like the great British scientific travellers of the nineteenth century in Latin America, the works of cultural studies specialists tend to reveal more about European attitudes and misconceptions than Latin American reality.
Working out from an encounter with a series of memorial benches at Mullion Cove, Cornwall, this paper develops an account of landscape in terms of absence and the non-coincidence of self and world. Arguing that recent work on the topics of landscape, embodiment, perception and material culture has tended to stress presence in various ways, I seek to explore instead here motifs of absence, distance, loss and haunting. The paper further attempts to combine descriptive and experiential accounts of the memorial benches and the views they open with conceptual arguments regarding the limits of certain phenomenological understandings of self and landscape. In particular, Derrida’s critical reading of Merleau-Ponty is outlined and explored. The final substantive section of the paper then takes a further cue from the memorial benches to discuss what it terms the geographies of love. The argument here is that such geographies constitute a fracture forbidding any phenomenological fusion of self and world, entailing instead a simultaneous opening-onto and distancing-from. It is within the tension of this openness and distance, perhaps, that landscape, absence and love are entangled.
How should informationa bout distantp laces be collected?H ow should it be made available to the reading public? And how far could it be trusted? Such questions were posed by the expansion of exploration and travel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the leading scientific authorities, the making of accurate observations, the use of precise instruments, the methodical collection of specimens and the writing of narratives provided the principal means by which knowledge itself could travel. Yet the relationship between metropolitan science, travelw riting and field observationr emained fraughtw ith difficultyT. his essay considers a variety of ways in which the experience of disturbance shaped the culture of exploration during the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on writing, collecting and sketching.
This article examines attempts to capture and form knowledge about the Antarctic landscape through expeditionary photography and embodied practice. It begins with a visual piece. As an antidote to contemporary investment in heroic Antarctic narratives, Action Man, Antarctic Inertia takes the original 1970s special issue Antarctic Action Man on another kind of journey, restaging his adventures through the landscape. Concentrating on the excessive expenditure of explorers' accounts, as opposed to the heroic destinations of the original, this visual mapping considers non-productive landscape encounters in order to explore other possibilities of staging history and geography. The written essay that forms the second part of this article concentrates on the anxieties of representation that emerge from the interplay between mark making and being marked, and the marks that fall beyond this visual register. Using the metaphor of light, which includes both the light cast on a photographic plate and the dubious physical light of the Antarctic landscape, I examine how this marker both constitutes a trace of history and a fleeting form of knowledge production. As a mode of representation, landscape photography simultaneously illuminates and obscures the histories of encounter with landscape. The argument proceeds by looking at how the photographic frame both arrests landscape and points to a subtle beyond (Barthes). Using narratives from the Heroic era (1890s—1910s) expeditions, I then consider how landscape exposure collides with photographic exposure to present other inhabitations that are in excess of the photograph. In these other narratives, the landscape writes through the body to disrupt the heroic narrative of a contained and purposeful body in the landscape. This Antarctic `look back' ultimately points the way to new geographies of visual culture that expand understand ings of the Antarctic landscape. At the same time, by exceeding the visual, this approach provides the grounds for a renewed ethics of engagement with the ability of landscape to inscribe the explorer's body as he inscribes the surface of the continent through embodied journeys and representational practice. In conclusion, I argue for a reciprocal dialogue between landscape and vision, one that acknowledges that vision is entangled with pain, blindness and excess as much as with a clear sighting of encounter.
In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline an explicit theory of the more-than-rational or less-than rational in the context of the recent attunement to issues of the affectual and emotional in social and cultural geography. In the first part of the paper I outline an expansion of the more-than-rational or less-than-rational into three modalities: affect, feeling, and emotion. From this basis I question an assumption in the literature on affect that the emergence and movement of affect enable the multiplication of forms of life because they takes place ‘in excess’. In the second part of the paper I exemplify an alternative, more melancholy account through a description of the emergence of hope and hopefulness in two cases in which recorded music is used by individuals to ‘feel better’. Emergent from disruptions in various forms of diminishment, hopefulness moves bodies into contact with an ‘outside’. Becoming and being hopeful raise a set of issues for a theory of affect because of, rather than despite, the sense of tragedy that is intimate with how hope heralds the affective and emotive as always ‘not-yet become’. The conclusion, therefore, draws the two parts of the paper together by reflecting on the implications of thinking from hope for both a theory of affect and an affective cultural politics.
In the context of human geography’s encounter with the problematics that surround matter and materiality, this paper offers a principle that works towards a distinctive material imagination. This principle states that our image of matter should be multiplied, so that it can be attended to as taking place with the properties and capacities of any element or state. We elaborate this principle through three substantive discussions of materiality as turbulent , as interrogative , and as excessive . In doing so we draw upon, in turn, forms of relational materialism associated with actor-network theory, the postphenomenologies of Lingis, the animate or enchanted materialism developed by Bennett, and the figurative and affective (im)materialities of Deleuze. The conclusion clarifies why we do not call for geography to be ‘rematerialised’.
1 Cueva del Guácharo-2nda Parte
- Mo
SVE, 'Mo. 1 Cueva del Guácharo-2nda Parte'.
Los Chaima del Guácharo (Caracas: Editorial del Banco Central de Venezuela
- M De Civrieux
M.De Civrieux, Los Chaima del Guácharo (Caracas: Editorial del Banco Central de Venezuela, 1998);
Notas sobre una Excavación en la Cueva del Guácharo (Mo. 1)
- M Perera
M.Perera, 'Notas sobre una Excavación en la Cueva del Guácharo (Mo. 1), Estado Monagas, Venezuela',
Boletín de la Sociedad Venezolana de Espeleología, 7, 1976, pp. 249-65.
Venezuelan speleologist and founder (along with Juan Antonio Tronchoni and Roberto Contreras) of the Speleology Section of the Venezuelan Society of Natural Sciences (SE-SVCN) Eugenio de Bellard Pietri, however, disagreed with Urbani, siding with Humboldt. E.de Bellard Pietri
- Personal Humboldt
- Narrative
Humboldt, Personal Narrative, p. 81. Based on Humboldt's description, however, Venezuelan geologist, speleologist, and SVE member Franco Urbani argues that Humboldt's party only traveled 422 m
within the cave. F.Urbani, '¿Hasta Dónde Llegó Humboldt Dentro de la Cueva del Guácharo?', Boletín
de la Sociedad Venezolana de Espeleología, 6, 1975, pp. 136-42. Venezuelan speleologist and founder
(along with Juan Antonio Tronchoni and Roberto Contreras) of the Speleology Section of the Venezuelan
Society of Natural Sciences (SE-SVCN) Eugenio de Bellard Pietri, however, disagreed with Urbani, siding with Humboldt. E.de Bellard Pietri, 'La Visita de Alejandro de Humboldt a la Cueva del Guácharo
a la Luz de los Documentos Históricos Disponibles', Boletín de la Sociedad Venezolana de Ciencias
Naturales, 34, 1980, pp. 355-64.
History of Cave Science: The Exploration and Study of Limestone Caves to
- T Shaw
T.Shaw, History of Cave Science: The Exploration and
Study of Limestone Caves to 1900 (Crymych: Sydney Speleological Society, 1979).
With 'yearning' I build on Judith Butler's notion of desire and embodiment, with an emphasis on not just bodies but organisms living, on the move
With 'yearning' I build on Judith Butler's notion of desire and embodiment, with an emphasis on not just
bodies but organisms living, on the move. J.Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
(New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011).
For more-than-representational theory's perspective on the everyday, see also H.Lorimer
- J See
- D Dewsbury
- Bissell
- Geographies
See J.Dewsbury and D.Bissell, 'Habit Geographies: The Perilous Zones in the Life of the Individual',
cultural geographies, 22, 2015, pp. 21-8. For more-than-representational theory's perspective on the everyday, see also H.Lorimer, 'Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being "More-than-Representational"',
Progress in Human Geography, 29, 2005, pp. 83-94. But see B.Sandywell, 'The Myth of Everyday Life:
Toward a Heterology of the Ordinary', Cultural Studies, 18, 2010, pp. 160-80.
- T Boellstorff
- Editorship
- American Value
- Anthropology
T.Boellstorff, 'Editorship, Value, and American Anthropology', American Anthropologist, 114, 2012,
pp. 567-70;
Writing Qualitative Geography
- D Delyser
D.DeLyser, 'Writing Qualitative Geography', in D.DeLyser, S.Herbert, S.Aitken, M.Crang
and L.McDowell (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010), pp.
341-58;
On the vulnerabilities associated with this kind of work, see R.Behar, 'The Vulnerable Observer
- J Sundberg
J.Sundberg, 'Masculinist Epistemologies and the Politics of Fieldwork in Latin Americanist Geography',
The Professional Geographer, 55, 2003, pp. 180-90. See also A.Maddrell, 'A Place for Grief and Belief:
The Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland', Social & Cultural Geography, 10, 2009, pp.
681-3. On the vulnerabilities associated with this kind of work, see R.Behar, 'The Vulnerable Observer',
in R.Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press,
1996), pp. 1-33.
States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order
- S Jasanoff
S.Jasanoff (ed.), States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
British Speleologies
- Cant
Cant, 'British Speleologies', pp. 775-95.
For a history of these exploration societies more generally, see T.Shaw, 'Exploration Societies
For a perspective on how this diversity of people impact field dynamics among Venezuelan speleologists,
see M.Pérez, 'Exploring the Vertical: Science and Sociality in the Field among Cavers in Venezuela',
Social & Cultural Geography, 16, 2015, pp. 226-47. For a history of these exploration societies more
generally, see T.Shaw, 'Exploration Societies', in J.Gunn (ed.), Encyclopedia of Caves and Karst Science
(New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), pp. 350-2.
Ramón Alberto Hernández: Un gran Espeleólogo y Explorador
- E De Bellard
- Pietri
E.de Bellard Pietri, 'Ramón Alberto Hernández: Un gran Espeleólogo y Explorador', Unknown
Newspaper (Caracas, 1996).
Historia Espeleológica Venezolana. Parte 10
- Urbani
Urbani, 'Historia Espeleológica Venezolana. Parte 10', p. 51.