WEATHERING: A GRAPHIC ESSAY

Abstract

Abstract This graphic essay is part of an ongoing collaborative effort that combines ethnographic research on the relationships between falconers, birds of prey and their environments with research on drawing as an anthropological method and "style". Through a combination of text and drawings, the essay shows the affective materiality of the world through a focus on the aerial perception of birds of prey as they move with the currents of the wind. The term 'weathering', developed in previous work by one of the authors, is here presented as the transformational activity of the weather that is fundamental for the way in which falconers and birds of prey perceive and experience the environments in which they engage. Here landforms and the aerial spaces above are not perceived as separate spheres but rather as mutually constituting each other through the ever-present and ongoing effects of the weather.