Progress report

Cultural geography III: Objects

of culture and humanity, or,
re-thinging the Anthropocene
landscape

Progress in Human Geography

2015, Vol. 39(6) 818826
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0309132514566741
phg.sagepub.com

Scott Kirsch
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Abstract
Unless they are to suddenly evaporate, material objects, endowed with varying capacities to move through
the ages, are matters of time as well as of space. Long-term perspectives from the historical to the geological have been engaged by cultural geographers as a means of shedding light on linked discursive and material transformations, offering useful vantage points on the temporalities of human (and inhuman) existence
through the existence of things. In this third and final report, I identify confluences of research taking shape
around two distinct kinds of scenes which embody a range of approaches to problems of culture and materialism: the naming of the Anthropocene; and the persistence of landscape as a spatial model for holding
things together. Calling attention to the intermingled quality of materiality with immaterial things and temporal dynamics, the review highlights the persistent need for cultural analysis of complex and contested social
worlds, and emphasizes the value of cultural geographic research in addressing problems of human subjectivity at a moment when the distinctly human can no longer be taken for granted.
Keywords
Anthropocene, cultural geography, culture, humanity, landscape, temporality, things

I Introduction
It is difficult to imagine anything more culturallyloaded, or more distinctly human, than thinking
in epochal terms. Drawing rhetorical power
from the wells of meaning invested in fixed
points of time, breaks from the past, new ages,
and even in notions of deep time framed in contrast to human historical temporalities, epochal
thinking has been in play lately across the natural
and social sciences and humanities, circulating
widely around the contested geological categorization of the Anthropocene. The term has offered
many a means of evoking the scale of humanitys
material impacts, even as the classification of the

recent age of Man has been embraced cautiously by some geographers, marked by reconsiderations of the categories of the anthropo, the
human, and by extension, the cultural.1 As the
authors of one recent set of essays entitled After
the Anthropocene have observed, the political
and intellectual traction gained by the naming
of the Anthropocene has also meant coming

Corresponding author:
Scott Kirsch, Department of Geography, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 275993220, USA.
Email: [email protected]

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

Kirsch

819

to terms with the terms ostensibly unitary, gendered, and species-specific prefix (Johnson
et al., 2014). For Yusoff (2014a: 454), if anthropogenesis institutes a unitary human into the
geologic record presupposing an understanding
of humans as a singular population and genus,
then, confronted with both a destabilized subject
and a threatened biological environment, the
challenge for geographers is to both trace and
substantiate these differentiating and differentiated bodies politic through the strata and society, materially and discursively . . . to unearth
the material and mythical bedrock of the Anthropocene as a political geology that constitutes the
organization of power and the social conditions
for life. Making the Anthropocene, its conceptualization amidst what has been perceived as a
widespread crisis of the human subject and of
humanism, thus poses epochal time as a set of
problems to be understood, among them how
to productively consider the temporalities of
human (and inhuman) existence through material objects which are endowed with capacities
to move through the ages, matters of time as well
as space. Cultural geographers, many trained in
the close reading and analysis of discourses, and
engaged across human geographys subdisciplines in mapping the relations between discursive and material transformations, have something important to offer these debates, including
useful vantage points on epochal thinking itself
along with (somewhat) more proximate temporalities, as recent contributions suggest.

II Making the cene

Alongside (and in light of) Yusoffs project of
political geology (see also Yusoff, 2013,
2014b),2 it is worth (re)considering the relevance of questions of culture another conceptual meeting ground between humans and the
natural world, albeit one that emerged instead
to distinguish humanity from nature to the
organization of life across the earths surface.
Rooted, paradoxically, in the tending of natural

growth, culture still refers in compelling ways

to human projects of self-making, and to social
processes of world-making that engender specific ways of life, with the concept finding a
niche in its usage both as a general problematic
of mediation, on one hand, and as a descriptor
and putative explanation of differences
among peoples, on the other (Williams, 1983;
Grossberg, 2013). Where humanity evokes the
universal, culture still tends to evoke the particular. But unlike the triumphalist intellectual
contexts of 19th-century European modernity,
in which models of culture as a means of differentiation took shape, the Anthropocene requires
a bleaker subject position for grasping a world
wherein, as Wakefield observes (2014: 451),
humanity is elevated to the role of geologic
agent at the precise moment it is declared to
be in ruins both as orderer and ordered, simultaneously inundated by disasters it is helpless
to control and exhausted by the imperative to
hold its self together. What sorts of cultural
work have made this condition possible, and
continue to hold the Anthropocene in place?
Among the After the Anthropocene essays,
several authors grapple with the peculiar temporalities of the Anthropocene as an age of
crisis, centuries in the making, in which the
long-term consequences of industrial capitalism
have committed us to unavoidable environmental changes (Lehman and Nelson, 2014:
444). Equating climate change and ecological
carnage with industrialization, the Anthropocene has been a disaster since its inception; the
name refers to the age to call it a failure
(Wakefield, 2014: 450). For some, even under
the specter of sketchy geoengineering schemes,
the conjuncture compels us to embark on a new,
less cynical outlook toward experimentation
(see also Lorimer and Driessen, 2014), highlighting the technological as a necessary terrain
of struggle and arguing for widening the scope
of the political via improved understandings of
dynamic relationships between human and
geophysical forces.3 And yet, the Anthropocene

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

820

Progress in Human Geography 39(6)

also remains something that exists in the eyes of

its beholders. As Rowan (2014: 447) concedes,
the recent popularity of the Anthropocene
within the social sciences, humanities, and arts
relies in part on the fact that it answers a certain
subterranean yearning for a framework to
address macro-scale concerns.
For Anderson (2014), the Anthropocene
problem of decentring the human is one that
can be approached historically, through materialist engagement with the history of ideas of
human exceptionalism. While broadly in sympathy with critiques of humanism equating
human agency to a directive, rational consciousness, Anderson questions the tacit acceptance
among contemporary post-humanists and new
materialists, including Bennett and Latour, of
treating humanism itself as immaterial, as something existing only in Christian or Cartesian
doctrine. The implications, Anderson argues
(p. 6), have been far-reaching for the rethinking
of the human in human and cultural geography,
as evident, paradoxically,
in the tendency to turn away from those aspects
of culture conventionally regarded as distinctly
human, of, for example, intersubjective meaning,
symbolizing, cognition and knowing. These tend
now to be annexed from a geographic concern
with humanitys material existence, as if they
somehow fall outside the domain of culture reconceived as a single plane of human/nonhuman
entanglement. For how else, if not according to
an ontological critique of meta-physical conceptions of the human, to apprehend the logic of
the recent turn in Cultural Geography in which
a supposedly unique order of reason, mind, or
consciousness . . . has been opposed more or
less term for term by an affirmation of the sensory, bodily and affective character of human
existence?

Anderson traces instead the development of

an anatomical humanism which understood
humanitys unique capacity for intelligence as
less a philosophical than a technical matter, situated in the modern colonial practices of

craniometry, and circulating widely in 19thcentury theories of race. Anderson traces the
work of early 19th-century comparative anatomists who set out to physically distinguish
human beings from other animals by virtue of
the uniquely upright nature of the human body
and, with it, the verticality of the human head
(p. 6). Intelligence, the quality that distinguished humans from other animals, could also
be used, it was believed, to distinguish Europeans from other races, as reflected in anatomical concepts of intelligence. What is
fascinating in these supposed correlations
between peoples measurable physical features
and intelligence is the manner in which European superiority was taken as self-evident by
anatomical theorists. In the work of Cuvier, for
example,
the existence of a correlation between variations
in the anatomical, and above all the cranial, structure of different groups of people and their
known level of intellectual inferiority, offered
the possibility of a new biological basis for determining a hierarchy among living beings. The
point of racial craniometry, then, was to establish
this correlation. (Anderson, 2014: 9)

The efforts to develop a distinctly anatomical

humanism, realized in the displacement of
immaterialist conceptions of mind by anatomical and racial notions of intelligence, for
Anderson (p. 14), in turn help us to gauge the
figure of the thinking human subject not as an
otherworldly fantasy, but as a worldly alwaysfragile production, shedding light on humanisms materiality through a critical historical
analysis of the doctrines of race and human
exceptionalism.
By contrast, Robbins and Moore (2013) take
a more diagnostic almost clinical approach
to the Anthropocene condition, drawing on the
psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan to
investigate a culture of anxious environmentalism at work in contemporary environmental
sciences, particularly on the anthropocentric

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

Kirsch

821

registers of invasion biology and restoration

ecology. For Robbins and Moore (p. 5), The
debates in the pages of Nature and Science are
the ones that express the emerging cultural component of the Anthropocene, reflecting deeper,
unresolved anxieties which may be expressed as
phobia and dysfunction. They identify a condition of Ecological Anxiety Disorder (EAD),
pervasive among contemporary biologists and
ecologists, consisting of, on the one hand,
anthrophobia, which is the fear of negative normative influence of humans on the earth, and
which evokes a conjoined sense of urgency
and tragedy; and autopobia, on the other,
which is the fear of the unavoidable influence
of normative human values within science. For
the authors, these phobias are reflected in an
Anthropocene literature in the most formal
sense that includes iconic maps of human presence and impacts. Future archaeologists may
wonder, they suggest (p. 7), why cartographers of our period chose not to portray images
of the extent of the earths surface that have
been impacted by other species or beings, making maps to determine how much of the earth
had been impacted by microbes, for example,
or in pondering the earths recovery if fungus,
rather than people, ceased to exist. Thus, while
anthrophobia produces a political imperative
the urgent need to warn, and to intervene in
aspects of environmental change autophobia
produces anxiety over whether ones claims are
overly normative and prescriptive, and indeed,
such claims are always value-laden. Together
the resulting dysfunction (EAD) brings paralysis and despair, rather than the curiosity and
creativity that may be generated by scientists
working under more normal conditions of
anxiety.
While the tone of Robbins and Moores effort
to put ecologists on the couch is humorous, their
diagnosis is a serious one, I think, as is their remedy: to enunciate our desires to alter the world
even as we measure it, and to create new ecologies even as we fear them (p. 12), embracing

models of gardens, monsters, and sites of struggle in particular as productive conceptual objects
around which the fearful dysfunctions of Anthropocene science need not displace its productive
tensions. Interestingly, here culture is treated
as a disorder the dysfunctional part of science
which can be treated through psychoanalytics,
allowing the scientists to function in a personally
and socially engaged manner. Though this does
run against the grain of recent generations of science studies scholars who have been at pains to
agree on the entangled ontology of science and
culture, if it is the purpose of analysis
to separate things into their component parts
or constitutive elements in order to make them
understandable, then this model of culture-aspathology may offer a useful, and in this case,
successful analytic. Like Andersons decentering
of human subjectivity through materialist analysis, Robbins and Moores diagnostics offer a
glimpse of the thinking subject as a worldly,
fragile production. For both, it is a subjectivity
in need of an epochal re-boot, one geared for
living in a world of human artifice that is, in
many basic ways, beyond human control. For
others, as we will see in the next section, the
remaking of human and cultural subjectivities
is still being examined in historical rather than
geological timeframes, but here, too, novel
dynamics of things through the ages have enlivened research in cultural geography, even
around its most traditional object and analytic
the landscape.

III Re-thinging the landscape?

If it is true that an object may now be defined as
an autonomous unit of reality that exists independently of its relations (Shaw and Meehan,
2013: 218), or that things themselves may be
considered active producers of spatio-temporal
atmospheres (Ashe, 2013), then the persistence
of interest in landscape as an ensemble of
objects, and not (only) as a picturesque visual
scene or scenic representation, stands as an

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

822

Progress in Human Geography 39(6)

interesting point of contrast to those works,

influenced by the ANT-inspired metaphysics
of Graham Harman, that are seeking explicitly
to shift from a process- to an object-focused
ontology (see also Meehan et al., 2013). While
some object-oriented approaches have thus
attempted to cleave materialist from relational
perspectives in this sense, renewed attention to
landscape, along with attention to temporalities
of attention (Hannah, 2013; Wilson, 2014) and
expectation (Porter and Randalls, 2014), have
provided key settings for engagements with the
materiality of the things that, in different
ways, help to relationally constitute space and
human subjectivities. But landscape remains a
complex term, at once a setting and a staging
ground for the momentary and the transient
(Mels and Germundsson, 2013), and an illusion
of unbroken horizontal space (Olwig, 2013), a
kind of totality. Landscape provides both a
material connection through the ages of past,
present, and future, and a means of erasing those
connections (Mitchell, 2012). It is also a kind of
painting or photograph. Landscape is boring,
gibed the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell (2002:
5), we must not say so. And yet, slippery as
it is, landscape continues to enthrall, in part
because of the work that it does holding things
together.
Offering, in different ways, relational conceptions of landscape as a spatial form that
assembles things and different historical evidence of things as intimately bound up with
landscape and place Olwig (2013) and della
Dora (2013) both engage with non-modern
pasts in the effort to recover usable parts from
neglected landscape practices and traditions.
Olwig (2013), using the history of language to
interpellate the largely forgotten relationship
between notions of thing and landscape,
describes a revolutionary inversion of meaning by which both terms went from indicating
a particular kind of political community to signifying instead what we might now call the
(material) thing itself. Following theorists

from Heidegger to Latour who have been drawn

to the etymological origins of thing as an
ancient northern European political assembly,
Olwig thus explores how things went from
being substantive judicially founded meetings
in which knowing people assembled (as in parliaments) to discuss, and thereby constitute matters of common concern, or common things that
matter, to becoming physical objects, or things
as matter (p. 251, emphasis original). But landscape has been largely absent from this story,
and Olwig offers fresh insights by illustrating
how each term was reified, in some respects,
in relation to the other. The political thing
assemblies served to settle disputes, working
to give meaning and identity to matters of
shared concern through discourse and deliberation, and assigning value to things through such
public mootings (see also Latour, 2005). But
Olwig insists that the purpose of the historic
things was not, contra Latour, chiefly to generate a public around issues, but rather to give
substantive meaning to thing which were not yet
clearly defined and objectified a sense of
thing meaning something undefined, or difficult
to define, that, we are reminded, is still common (What is this thing called love? How are
things? . . . ) (p. 254). These deliberations
occurred in legal and political contexts rooted
in customary law dealing mainly with the character and conditions of the land and the organization of things in a land that fell under the
umbrella of the Old Norse concept of landscape
(landskapr), which would also come to include
formal political landscape districts (see also
Olwig, 1996).
The politics of landscape, Olwig argues (after
Holbraad), was hence not about representing
things but about defining them. This distinction
provides the basis for a juridical model of a
landscape defined from within by things
according to cases involving peoples practices
both between themselves and with regard to
their physical surroundings (p. 255). So while
the thing generated a political community

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

Kirsch

823

around issues, Olwig argues, it also produced a

characteristic physical environment or landscape, as the thing, which generated knowledge
of issues such as grazing rights to common and
individual resources, and also gave the matters
discussed substantive independent legal existence as things in law, constituting things that
matter as objective and real, and paving the
way for the contemporary connotation of things
as matter. As this occurred, representations
of landscape in poetry, art, and other forms,
typically used to represent an ostensibly natural
state, were produced as emblems of something
more abstract, which is the character of a place
and the polity shaping it (p. 256). And together
with landscape, the meaning of things has been
inverted and objectified: spatialized, enclosed,
individualized, privatized, sealed and reified as
a constituent of the mental and social landscape
of modernity (p. 257). Might it still be possible,
Olwig asks (turning to the contemporary context of the European Landscape Convention),
for our landscapes to be defined from the inside
by wise assemblies of people who know their
things?
Like Olwig, della Dora (2013) problematizes
landscape histories that take the European
Renaissance and linear perspective as starting points for landscape studies, or even as strict
points of departure from other landscape traditions. She turns instead to antiquity for consideration of the Hellenistic, Roman, and
Byzantine tradition of topia (small places), a
related visual form encompassing landscape
painting, vegetal structures and memory gardens, and decorative floor tiles. While nonlinear landscape perspectives have for long been
treated dismissively, for example, by von
Humboldt, for their lack of compositional unity,
della Dora (2013) attempts to recover from
these practices, which were linked to classical
mnemonic traditions, an aesthetic not structured
by linear perspective, which made distant
objects appear proportionally smaller, but rather
by things and their striking qualities, thus

favoring singular elements of landscape over

their holistic integration. By drawing eyes to
things rather than into the totality of a natural
or artificial world, topia focused on the singular
characteristics that made places or landscapes
memorable. Villas and gardens adorned with
landscape paintings (topia) and vegetal topia,
a term which extended to include the ropes used
to shape the living objects of the garden, functioned as training spaces for memory and aesthetic contemplation. Memory was understood
as an embodied practice that could be activated
via sequential movement in gardens which promoted attention to constitutive elements as symbolic devices, and which, for della Dora, also
serve to challenge false dichotomies between
being in the world and representing it. The
Roman topia would survive in the East into the
Middle Ages via the Byzantine empire, at least
after it was safe again (in the 6th century CE) to
celebrate nature without fear of association with
paganism, taking form as topic floor mosaics,
as the object form of the topia shifted from Hellenistic wall paintings to Roman gardens to the
floors of Byzantine basilicas. Drawing from
these pre-modern traditions, in which landscape
works as a persuasive rhetorical system and a
container of symbolic memory places, della
Dora (2013: 705) reminds us that memory
among other forms of human experience
does not obey the rules of Euclidian space
or linear perspective, offering an alternative
of embodied visual participation over Cartesian distancing.
While singular elements were typically
exalted in topia over the compositional totality
of landscape, the goals of Mitchells (2013)
recent work on landscape, returning to the terrain of mid-20th century industrial agriculture
in California, are different, as he seeks to understand instead how landscape, as a particular
arrangement of things on the land the relatively permanent endowment of infrastructures
(p. 219) has functioned, and been struggled
over, in its necessary and complex relations

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

824

Progress in Human Geography 39(6)

with the larger totality of capitalism. For while

landscapes may serve as repositories of cultural
values, conventionally mobilized as an image of
stability and permanence, tendencies toward
declining rates of profit from fixed investments
also drive capitalists to continually revolutionize landscapes, so that they might be reassembled in more profitable arrangements.
Despite these tensions, as Mitchell argues, landscapes (and attachments to landscape) often
remain deeply conservative, not least because
those who profit from the landscape will do all
they can to preserve their values and prerogatives (p. 231). Hence if, after Lefebvre, capitalism persists only by producing the space of its
own survival, then for Mitchell, the organization of things in the landscape which may
present practical barriers to change also reflects the persistence of tensions between revolution and anti-revolution, as marked by the
social contest between capitalists as well as
between classes, that tend to undermine these
set-ups over time. Or as Mitchell describes for
the Second World War and post-war Bracero
guest worker program that kept California agriculture profitable, sometimes the preservation
of landscape was only possible by means of a
revolution in labor relations.

to emphasize the need to persistently rethink the

cultural in cultural geography, and in doing so,
to identify what I see as important confluences
of conceptual and empirical proficiency taking
shape around problems of culture and materialism. Here, I have continued to emphasize those
processes conventionally regarded as distinctly
human (universal) and cultural (differentiated),
such as intersubjective meaning, iconography,
cognition and knowing (Anderson, 2014), even
as the distinctly human can no longer be taken
for granted, or for some, taking stock of the
human condition in the recent age of man,
even to make sense. Whether such long-term
perspectives ultimately succeed in creating new
post-humanist subjectivities remains to be seen,
but in the meantime, the epochal and the historical still usefully remind us that objects materials invariably extend in time as well as space,
at least until they fall apart and (as we all inevitably will do!) become other things. By calling
attention to the material significance of cultural
work in the world, along with the intermingled
quality of materiality with immaterial things
and processes, I have tried to highlight the persistent need for cultural analysis of complex and
contested social worlds, and the relevance and
value of cultural geographic research in addressing some of these problems.

IV Conclusion

Notes

In my first two reports, I emphasized in different

ways the transformative, meaning-making
capacities of cultural work, turning to processes
of valuation and waste (Kirsch, 2013) and to the
linked construction of nature, culture, and technology (Kirsch, 2014), to engage with clusters
of geographic research exploring the materiality of cultural processes and their geographies, whether or not this work has, in the first
instance, been called cultural geography. In the
context of a highly porous sub-discipline within
a wider field of human geography that is possibly still not as porous as we would like to think,
my purpose has not been to draw boundaries but

1. The naming of the Anthropocene epoch is credited

to environmental scientists Crutzen and Stoermer
(2000). For a recent review of geographers engagements with the Anthropocene, see Castree (2014);
and for a recent interdisciplinary effort to rethink
the age through a mixed media cabinet of curiosities,
see the Anthroslam website from the University of
Wisconsins Nelson Institute: http://nelson.wisc.edu/
che/anthroslam/.
2. For Yusoff (2014b: 5), highlighting the inhuman elements of humanitys origin stories via the living
pigments of the Gwion Gwion rock art in Western
Australia, in which black fungi and red bacteria have
colonized the paint pigments and refresh themselves
over millennia to generate a living artwork, the value

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

Kirsch

825

of opening subject positions to inhuman and nonhuman

forces and in pondering how this thing can exist as
both a work of Paleolithic art and a symbiotic fungus
and bacteria colony lies in the possibility of rethinking
humanitys relations with the earth in ways that are not
bogged down by boundary-work, beginning and ending
with the human subject.
3. This is also, in principle, the argument of Ulrich Beck
(1999), although the temporal basis for Becks world
risk society is historical rather than geological.

References
Anderson K (2014) Mind over matter? On decentring the
human in human geography. Cultural Geographies
21: 318.
Ashe J (2013) Rethinking affective atmospheres: Technology, perturbation and space times of the non-human.
Geoforum 49: 2028.
Beck U (1999) World Risk Society. London: Polity
Press.
Castree N (2014) Geography and the Anthropocene II:
Current contributions. Geography Compass 8: 450463.
Crutzen P and Stoermer E (2000) The Anthropocene.
Global Change Newsletter 41: 1718.
della Dora V (2013) Topia: Landscape before linear
perspective. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 103: 688709.
Grossberg L (2013) Culture. Rethinking Marxism 25:
456462.
Hannah MG (2013) Attention and the phenomenological
politics of landscape. Geografiska Annaler: Series B
95: 235250.
Johnson E, Morehouse H, Dalby S, Lehman J, Nelson S,
Rowan R, Wakefield S and Yusoff K (2014) After the
Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a
new epoch. Progress in Human Geography 38(3):
439456.
Kirsch S (2013) Cultural geography I: Materialist turns.
Progress in Human Geography 37(3): 433441.
Kirsch S (2014) Cultural geography II: Cultures of nature
(and technology). Progress in Human Geography
38(5): 691702.
Latour B (2005) From realpolitik to dingpolitik or how to
make things public. In: Latour B and Weibel P (eds)
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.
Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA: Centre for Art and Media
(ZKM)/MIT Press, pp. 1441.

Lehman J and Nelson S (2014) Experimental politics in the

Anthropocene. In: Johnson E and Morehouse H (eds)
After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry
for a new epoch. Progress in Human Geography 38(3):
444447.
Lorimer J and Driessen C (2014) Wild experiments at
the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking environmentalism in the Anthropocene. Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers 39: 169181.
Meehan K, Shaw IGR and Marston SA (2013) Political
geographies of the object. Political Geography 33:
110.
Mels T and Germundsson T (2013) Figures in the revolutionary landscape: An introduction. Geografiska
Annaler: Series B 95: 213218.
Mitchell D (2012) They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in
Bracero-Era California. Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press.
Mitchell D (2013) Labours geography and geographys
labour: California as an (anti-) revolutionary landscape.
Geografiska Annaler: Series B 95: 219233.
Mitchell WJT (2002) Landscape and Power. 2nd edition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olwig KR (1996) Recovering the substantive nature of
landscape. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86: 630653.
Olwig KR (2013) Heidegger, Latour and the reification of
things: The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape of things the Lake District case.
Geografiska Annaler: Series B 95: 251273.
Porter JJ and Randalls S (2014) Politics of expectations:
Nature, culture and the production of space. Geoforum
52: 203205.
Robbins P and Moore SA (2013) Ecological anxiety disorder: Diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene.
Cultural Geographies 20: 319.
Rowan R (2014) Notes on politics after the Anthropocene.
In: Johnson E and Morehouse H (eds) After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new
epoch. Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 447450.
Shaw IGR and Meehan K (2013) Force-full: Power,
politics and object-oriented philosophy. Area 45:
216222.
Wakefield S (2014) The crisis is the age. In: Johnson E and
Morehouse H (eds) After the Anthropocene: Politics
and geographic inquiry for a new epoch. Progress in
Human Geography 38(3): 450452.

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016

826

Progress in Human Geography 39(6)

Williams R (1983) Key words: A Vocabulary of Culture and

Society, rev. edn. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilson MW (2014) Paying attention, digital media, and
community-based critical GIS. Cultural Geographies.
DOI: 10.1177/1474474014532949.
Yusoff K (2013) Geologic life: Prehistory, climate, futures
in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 31: 779795.

Yusoff K (2014a) The Anthropocene frack. In: Johnson E

and Morehouse H (eds) After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch. Progress
in Human Geography 38(3): 452455.
Yusoff K (2014b) Geologic subjects: Nonhuman
origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman. Cultural Geographies. DOI: 10.1177/
1474474014545301.

Downloaded from phg.sagepub.com at UB Heidelberg on January 27, 2016