Customer Reviews

Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces

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In Hybrid Geographies, Whatmore attempts to invent a new way of approaching geographic understanding of space, such as allying thinking space with thinking through the body, mapping "lively commotion" of associations, recognizing "intimate, sensible, hectic bonds," etc [3]. What results, however, are long elaborations that are still descriptive rather than analytical. To match the seemingly difficult concepts she was working with, she used the most cumbersome and difficult language she could find, with more (un)helpful combi-nations of Paratheses and Hyphens than you could shake a (st)ick at. By the end of the book (required reading for a geography graduate seminar), actually, by the end of the second chapter, I was asking, so what? For me, her experiment completely failed and here's why:

In chapter 3, in "becoming" elephant, she traces how elephants are being translated through conversation and tourism networks into abstract units of consumption, "drained of all the multi-sensual business of becoming elephant" (55). Yet in her discussion of Earthwatch Institute, she focuses on the glossy literature and marketing strategies used to attract volunteers to projects and fails to connect this "thinking space" to the body, namely those of the volunteers. Had she spoken with them, or participated in a project herself, she would have seen the incredible spiritual and emotional dimensions that bring many of the volunteers to these projects, driving them to pay substantial amounts of money ($5000 in my case) to bodily feel those "lively commotions" and "intimate, sensible bonds." She doesn't come anywhere close to animating these feelings, what it's like to look into a "wild" elephant's eye and see the incredible intelligence and "humanity" that's there; to watch these massive creatures trot at surprising speeds and yet not make a sound because of the incredible engineering of their bodies; to witness the caring and cohesion of family units. She doesn't talk about what can happen as a result of such an experience (finding it so profound you quit a well-paying job to go back to grad school), or the passion that motivates directors and researchers to do whatever they can to "help" these animals, while bringing local knowledge and human issues into the process as well. Certainly she brings attention to the changing positionality of wildlife, but her treatment is just a draining and one dimensional as any other. What was the point, where is the meaning? Just because you call it hybrid doesn't mean it works any better.