Mind over matter? On decentring the human in Human Geography

Abstract

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.