Animal geographies

Abstract

Animals have long had a presence in human geography, though this has often been a marginal one. This presence has been varied ranging from zoogeographical attempts to map fauna regions in the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth-century focus on domestication and the spread of agriculture that culminated in Sauerian and Berkeley cultural geographies in the 1950s. Yet, by the 1980s, animals had all but disappeared from human geography. Reanimated geographies of animals emerged on the back of newer cultural geographies and their engagement with post-structuralism, but also out of political–economic approaches to food and agriculture, and a wider environmental and ethical focus, and have moved into newer areas that problematize nature/culture dualisms – the historical and cultural separations of humans from animals – and seek to bring animals into a reconstructed, more-than-human geography which acknowledges wider ranges of actors in the making of everyday social life.