Kay J Anderson

A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication:

Against a backdrop of growing interest in animal geographies and the genetic engineering of species, this article critically examines the process of animal domestication. To date, the social selection and breeding of animals have received little deconstructive effort from human scientists. The article begins by reviewing earlier schools of geographic thought on domestication, including the work of Carl Sauer, for whom domestication was a transhistorical process of evolutions unfolding. In working away from that perspective, I historicize animal domestication within a narrative politics of ideas about human uniqueness, savagery and civilization through which the process was conceived and conducted from at least classical times. The article thus develops a cultural critique of technologies that have been fundamental to the transformation of landscapes. Integral to the story are concepts of ‘domus’ and ‘agrios’, the ‘bringing in’ of ‘the wild’, and associated notions of containment, fixity, settling and improvement. These ideas, I argue, became threaded into the relations of not only humans and certain animals but also raced and gendered relations in European-derived societies. The article concludes with appeals to the imagining of more animal-inclusive models of social relations; the relaxation of rigid oppositions of civility and wildness; and a ‘human’ Self more conversant with its own wild side, dedomesticated and unbound.

Exclusionary Politics and the Question of National Belonging Australian Ethnicities in ‘Multiscalar’ Focus

This article builds on recent efforts to cast the understanding of ethnic and racialized tensions less in terms of a coarse logic of racism than within an analytical frame of struggles over national belonging. This theme is developed with respect to intercultural relations in Australia, in all the complexities of its white settler, migrant, and indigenous formations. The article develops a ‘multiscalar’ focus that takes in the global circuits of movement and relationship linked to British colonialism and international migration, through to contests over the meanings, management and stewardship of local places. In so doing, we also highlight some contextually specific versions of ‘whiteness’ whose various mobilizations help to undo a sense of their fixed status as core attributes of Australian nationhood. The article concludes with a case from Jervis Bay, New South Wales, where contested imaginings of, and investments in, appropriate land uses, have given rise to disputes that are productively conceived in terms of a multiscalar politics of national belonging. Although thus grounded in the circumstances of Australian culture, we believe the core argument can be extended (with all the normal caveats) to other ex-British colonial, immigration nations.

The beast within : race, humanity, and animality

Recent years have seen efforts to critique the dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in Western thought, and to demonstrate their coconstruction under specific material conditions. As yet, however, little work has uncovered the discourses of animality that lie buried within a social field whose ontological status until recently has been securely ‘human’. In this paper, I show how Western concepts of animality have circulated across the nature border and into a politics of social relations. Concepts of savagery and vulgarity can, in particular, be found within racialised representational systems with whose historicity, I will be suggesting, we can make fresh critical engagements. In much recent work on colonial power formations, ‘othering’ practices have been implicitly conceived within a psychoanalytic frame—one in which the white selfs ‘interior beasts’ are anxiously displaced onto an externalised other. Whilst not refuting the efficacy of repression I wish to historicise the workings of a peculiar western model of the Human self, ‘split’ into physical ‘animal’ and cultural ‘human’. This is done both through an extended theoretical account, followed by a microstudy of geographies of savagery and civility in Sydney, Australia.

Mutant mobilities : backpacker tourism in ‘global’ Sydney

This essay explores the complex mobilities of contemporary backpackers. Backpackers are not just tourists; they are also frequently students, working holidaymakers, highly skilled professional workers, and even, at times, long‐term semi‐permanent residents. How to define this group of physically and conceptually mobile travellers is often problematic, especially for local authorities. It is difficult to discern what cultural space and identity this type of mobility and this category of traveller occupy. Focusing on the tensions in residential communities which have developed as a result of backpackers not only travelling through but frequently dwelling in place, the essay analyses the ‘backpacker phenomenon’ as a complex and mutating mix of working, holiday and residential experiences that needs to be understood within a framework of increasing(ly) uneven, diverse and contested mobilities.

The Racialization of Difference: Enlarging the Story Field

In this article, I explore ways of loosening the interpretive grid of “race” in critical geographical analysis without obscuring that concepts efficacy as a social force. In recent years, social constructivist perspectives on race have brought much evidence to bear on the logics of race/power formations in America and other British settler societies. The risk of petrifying “race” in the analysis of social life and reinscribing the very power that antiracists wish to undo has, however, prompted efforts to reframe the geographical study of race and racism. This article takes up that challenge by exploring an alternative modality of representational power that can be tracked to figurations of humanity and animality in Western cultural process. Such discursive formations take us some way toward understanding the norms and interiorised anxieties out of which racialized whiteness and its subjugated others were, and continue to be, constructed.

From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography

This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as ‘urban Aborigines’ to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader changes within the sub-disciplinary field of cultural geography. The paper also reflects on recent criticism that a cultural emphasis detracts from the political edge of geographical research. The influential work of Fay Gale suggests that this claim is somewhat misplaced in the context of the development of the sub-discipline in Australia.

Mind over matter? On decentring the human in Human Geography:

The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal nature is stubbornly persistent in western cultural formations. This article (see Acknowledgements) works with, and against, recent materialist moves within Cultural Geography to critically engage the idea that the human is in some sense irreducible to nature. It considers how comparative anatomists of the early 19th century – in explicitly departing from the 18th-century Cartesian dualism that had identified the human with an immaterial notion of soul or mind – looked to the human body, and above all the head, in order to establish that people were categorically different from all other animals. More specifically, the paper considers how it was to ‘race’ that scientists turned, in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern strand of humanism. The discourse of humanism is thus considered, not – as many would have it – as an otherworldly or flawed myth, irremediably upheld by blind human faith and vanity. It is not the bearer of an idealism set up in (often shrill) negation to the task of ‘re-materializing’ Cultural Geography. Instead it is, itself, a worldly mix of ideas, practices and technologies. Eliciting humanism’s instability via this (overlooked) historical episode is to render it more vulnerable to precisely the scrutiny demanded by the earth’s current state of ecological fragility. It also enables a more rigorous interrogation of the notion of mind – humanist but also colonialist – that has been disowned in recent efforts to decentre the human in Human Geography. For, as this article demonstrates, re-imagining humanity’s place in nature extends to its co-habitation with all manner of others: human as well as nonhuman.

North American spaces/postcolonial stories

10.1191/1474474002eu239xx As nations that have been colonized, and that have in turn acted as colonizers, Canada and the United States share a complex historical imagination and historical geography of national identity formation. In the first instance, as colonies, Canada and the United States formulated stories of statehood drawing on key ideas from the narratives of the European Enlightenment – individualism, equality, citizenship. As the colonizers, they formulated national imaginaries from, in Richard Drinnon’s terms, the metaphysics of Indian-hating and/or Indian-loving.1 These stories set Canada and the United States apart from the ‘Old World’ nations who had colonized them, and above the native cultures they have colonized. In this sense, as national discourses formulated from within historical colonial relationships, but which are constantly re-enacted in contemporary politics, these are postcolonial stories. Although Canada and the United States share a relationship to British imperialism, the diverse experiences of the two nations point to the complexly differentiated contours of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and postcolonialism everywhere. 2 In the case of Canada, the legacies of diverse European metropoles, British and French, exerted profound impacts on the national polity and imaginary. Today, demands by diverse indigenous groups across that country for political autonomy and sovereignty are increasingly insistent.3 By contrast, in the United States, despite the formal recognition of Indian nations within the nation, and the enduring role of the ‘native’ in American notions of manifest destiny and the frontier,4 there are blind spots in public culture concerning colonial occupation of the indigenous lands of the ‘Americas’. There are, then, important differences between the two countries’ experiences. And yet, given the relative silence in the United States surrounding native pasts, presents and futures – a introduction cultural geographies 2002 9: 125–128

Animal Domestication in Geographic Perspective

What, exactly, makes humans human? A close look at nonhuman animal domestication practices reveals how people came to view their own uniqueness in western cultural process. The study of domestication across time shows the multiple human impulses underlying acts of animal enclosure and domestication. Animals can be beloved companions or eaten for a meal. These impulses involve contradictory moralities-a rich subject for inquiries into the dynamics of power and possession, at scales ranging from local to global.

THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLAGE: Theorizing contemporary forms of arts-based collaboration

This paper contributes to theorizing contemporary art collaborations in the context of the mediatory labour required of artists, and the complexity of the collaborative contexts in which aesthetic production is now enmeshed. In order to account for this complexity without reducing its analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘systems’, we use elements of assemblage theory in a quite specific way: drawing on DeLandas work on social and organizational forms; and Laws ‘method assemblage’ to analyse the specificity of working interfaces that craft new boundaries and working relations. We develop a case study of C3West, an Australian initiative encompassing arts institutions, businesses, and communities. The analysis traces assemblage processes that generate dispersed working arrangements (partnerships, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary working interfaces) across apparently incommensurable domains, yet without forming overarching structures or requiring common rationales for cooperation. To demonstrate the work of assemblage, we discuss the practices of French artist Sylvie Blocher and the multidisciplinary collective, Campement Urbain, who employ aesthetic and performative means to forge new institutional practices and alliances for intervening in urban planning processes in regional Sydney.