Methodologies for animals’ geographies: cultures,communication and genomics

Introduction

In one of the key publications that relaunched animal geography in the 1990s, Philo and Wilbert offered the useful distinction between two (frequently interwoven) concerns of animal geography. ¹ The first – ‘animal spaces’ – describes the spatial ordering of animals by humans. The second – ‘beastly places’ – refers to the lived geographies and experiences of animals. In the former the concern is primarily with people, in the latter it is the animals themselves. In this paper we want to suggest that progress in these two strands has been unequal. Geographers now know a lot more about animal spaces; but relatively less about beastly places – or what we here refer to as animals’ geographies. This formulation extends beyond the intimate intimations of ‘beastly places’ to encompass a wider diversity of spatialities of animals’ existence; it seeks to pluralize the categories ‘animal’ and ‘geography’ to recognize the differences they subsume.

We propose that one of the reasons for this imbalance is methodological. ² Human geographers have become accomplished at researching the human in the human-animal encounter. We have at our disposal a sophisticated suite of methods for accessing human animal behaviour: in the past and present; of individuals and in aggregate; up close and at a distance; under different modes of political economy and in the form of representations, practices and even (increasingly) affects. These methods are informed by a further diversity of conceptual frameworks for analyzing the data they derive – spanning the full gamut of popular critical theory. In contrast (and in spite of some notable exceptions that we discuss below), methodological innovation and development for researching animals’ geographies have been limited. When we try, we tend still to deploy human-centred methods to examine nonhuman phenomena. We currently lack the field skills, instruments, textbooks and training programmes for doing this type of research. This deficit, we would argue, is impeding progress in animals’ geographies.

Before addressing this deficit, it is perhaps worth briefly summarizing why animal geographers have become interested in developing methods for animals’ geographies. Why not just leave animals’ geographies to biologists? At least three reasons strike us as significant. These help account for the diversity of animal geographies currently underway and the types of methods they require. First, that attending to the spatial behaviours of all animals (and other nonhumans) provides, what Lulka terms, a ‘thicker’ sense of the Earth. ³ Second, because animal geographers (and others) think that animals matter as political and ethical subjects and there is thus a need to comprehend and possibly improve their life experience. Chris Bear has argued that animal geographers have tended to neglect individual animals in favour of aggregations. ⁴ The dynamics of populations of animal species trouble environmental geographers concerned with both biosecurity and biodiversity, while the status of breeds and herds figures prominently in work on domestic animals. Finally, a belief that attending to animals that are ‘big like us’ ⁵ might tell us something about us; it is for this reason of course that so many animals are used as human surrogates in laboratories. We would add that an engagement with animals’ geographies can also help address the spatial lacunae in animal science towards nonhuman experiences of humanized spaces, and thus start to remedy the anthropocentrism common to many recent accounts of the Anthropocene.

Fortunately, methods for researching animals’ lives have been the subject of significant endeavour elsewhere. Here we want to flag and critically assess the potential of methodological developments in three areas that we consider to be especially significant for developing animals’ geographies. The first relates to technologies for the monitoring, tracking and analysis of the spatialities of animal behaviour. These are facilitating rigorous engagement with questions of animal cultures in zoology, ethology and conservation biology. Biogeographers have tended to focus on plants. The second concerns technological, scientific and artistic experiments with modes of intra- and inter-species communication. The final methods are from genomics and involve the use of molecular markers to track historic animal mobilities and to map microbial ecologies within and between animal bodies. Together these developments offer geographers new tools for addressing old questions and pose new questions in themselves, including a fundamental challenge to the coherence and utility of the category animal that organizes this sub-discipline. In conclusion we reflect on some of the opportunities and challenges to developing these methods within a (post-) human geography.

Tracking animal cultures

Animal geographers have deployed ethological concepts and ethnographic methods to understand the animal worlds of fish, birds and mammals as they are sensed and represented by those seeking to count, hunt or herd them. ⁶ They have deployed more-than-representational methods developed by cultural geographers to attune to practice, affect, skill, habit and multisensory knowledges not easily captured by ‘talk and text’ based methods. The resulting multi-species ethnographies’ ⁷ are important and form part of a wider blossoming of this type of work across animal studies. But they have largely been dependent upon the goodwill, expertise and field sites of scientists and other animal experts. Whilst this dependence may lead to interdisciplinary, collaborative and even symbiotic practices of knowledge production, ⁸ such approaches are constrained by their reliance on these gatekeepers, their modes of engagement and their styles of subsequent communication. Furthermore, the bias towards ethnographic methodologies involving participant observation of humans in their interactions with nonhumans; interviews with human subjects about their experiences with nonhumans; discourse analysis of human representations and mobilizations of nonhumans; and the like – leads to the retention of a bias towards human sensings of nonhumans. ⁹

Animal geographers are beginning to extend existing ethological methods to investigate animal cultures (including those involving humans) for what they tell us about animals – cutting out the gatekeepers if needs be. ¹⁰ A series of tools for this purpose have been developed within the field of ethology, often involving the direct observation of animal behaviour. Direct observation is in many ways analogous to human-ethnographic methodology, involving similar considerations and debates around the extent to which observation should be pre-structured (where specific predicted behaviours are monitored and recorded) or flexible and open-ended (and the analysis thus more akin to grounded theory). ¹¹ However, they differ in that the directness of ethological animal observation affords a more sustained and material engagement with nonhuman lifeworlds and animal cultures than the mediated ethnographies outlined above. It is perhaps ironic that whilst ethologists show little hesitation in treating humans as just one more animal to investigate ¹² and now talk freely (if not equivocally) of animal cultures, researchers even within the more-than-human strands of the social sciences seem hesitant to engage in studying the cultures of nonhumans.

Ethological science has long been tightly wedded to a conceptual framework that explains behaviour in terms of either proximate (mechanism/development) or ultimate (adaptation/evolution) causes. ¹³ Animal observation under this dominant scientific paradigm requires the rigorous testing of a (preferably theory-derived) hypothesis, if possible through experimental means. ¹⁴ Yet it is by no means obvious that such an epistemological route would be desirable within the approaches to investigating culture favoured by many social scientists. Alternatives exist. These include historical ethological studies that place a ‘non-conformist’ emphasis on ‘attitude, intent and purposeful action’ ¹⁵ in animals and active engagements with a different strand of ethological theory (notably Deleuze’s engagement with the work of Von Uexkull). Together these have inspired livelier accounts of animals within (more-than) human geography. ¹⁶ Calls for a more integrative and flexible approach are growing within the pages of ethological journals as well. ¹⁷ As Bateson puts it, through a wider consideration of the factors influencing animal behaviour, ‘behavioural biologists should be able to retain a grasp of what it is to be an intact, freely moving animal’. ¹⁸

These nascent engagements by animal geographers with this direct method form part of a wider enthusiasm amongst social scientists keen to explore the possibilities afforded by experimenting with ethological modes of inquiry. For example, the cultural anthropologist Hoon Song utilizes direct observations of feral pigeons and their interactions with each other to draw conclusions about their (lack of) social structure, which hints at a particular form of human agency in altering their geographies. ¹⁹ A similar use of direct ethological observation informs the multi-species ethno-primatological work of Agustín Fuentes, in which the interactions of macaques and humans in Bali is witnessed in an account of their mutual ecological entanglement. ²⁰ Ethological methodologies are also being embraced by psychologists keen to extend their insights beyond humanistic species barriers – for example, in the work of Gay Bradshaw on post-traumatic shock and ‘elephant breakdown’. ²¹

Field techniques frequently rely on detailed recording of animal movement and action. This is often assisted with the use of video technologies, operated either by a human camera technician, or by enrolling the animals themselves as camera crew, given the capacity video provides for extended and asynchronous review. ²² Although not widespread, video methodologies are also increasingly advocated and used by cultural geographers. ²³ For those willing to shift their viewfinders there is significant potential for developing innovative approaches to exploring animals’ geographies despite the epistemological and practical challenges this will entail. ²⁴

A different methodological inspiration comes from a more classically biogeographic perspective, and highlights the spatialities of animal cultures. Through the innovative use of tracking technologies, researchers – particularly within the ethological and (conservation) biological sciences – have been able to generate animal-cultural insights through monitoring animals’ use of space. As an example, through affixing tracking devices on dairy cows in Switzerland, a recent piece of ethological research monitored the movement and thus the associations of individual cows, allowing an insight into the (mostly) affiliative social relationships within the herd. ²⁵ These tracking technologies are often being used within formal conceptual frameworks that utilize software packages to map (and mathematize) the social networks they trace; for instance, among dolphins and otters. ²⁶ Novel animal technologies also feature in recent artistic and media collaborations with scientists, such as enrolling pigeons as research assistants in monitoring air quality. ²⁷

Combined, these ethological and bio-geographical methodologies for observing and monitoring animals provide a powerful set of tools for geographers interested in mapping a wide range of animals’ geographies. They facilitate work that can interrogate nonhuman dimensions to the Anthropocene. For example, by mapping the ways in which animals are becoming urban or synurbic; ²⁸ the processes by which animals can become native to new areas, including in relation to anthropogenic vectors of movement; and the actions by which animals establish territories and transgress human-demarcated boundaries, especially in relation to concerns about bio-security and biodiversity. ²⁹ In each of these research areas, it is the various geographies of animals – their agencies, their behaviours, and in particular their place-making – that is increasingly recognized as essential, in order to engage fully with the hybridity of discrete contexts and situations.

There are, of course, limits to the inferences that can be drawn from observing, tracking, monitoring and measuring animals, their movements, and their associations. Investigating animals’ geographies – their lived experiences and their social lives – seems to demand something more; yet you cannot ask animals directly what their lifeworld is like. Or can you?

Interspecies communication

Intra- and inter-species communication is not as inaccessible to human researchers as some critics might suggest. The former has long been a focus of ethological research, and continues to be an important trend in contemporary work, particularly through the framework of ‘functionally referential communication’ or the ability to ‘communicate information regarding ongoing external events or object’. ³⁰ This communication tends to be aural, consisting of calls, barks, whoops, growls and the like; and researchers are able to develop a degree of understanding through investigating the consistency of aural communications between individuals of an animal species in relation to external events. Similar work within animal communication research targets inter-species aural communication, such as that between domestic dogs and humans. ³¹ Beyond the aural, innovative techniques have been developed to investigate olfactory communication between species, such as that between native and invasive mustelid species in England. ³² Such multi-sensory investigations help to offset the visual-bias of most observational methods, and provide more of an insight into the lived experiences of animals with a different sensory experience to our own.

Inter-species communication, and particularly animal-human, has also generated increasing interest from animal geographers (and other social scientists), who have engaged in a variety of ethnographic investigations of existing modes of human-animal communication, including: dog agility training; horse riding; livestock herding; animal welfare in captivity; elephant management; and angling. ³³ However, like work on animal cultures, this research is dependent on, and privileging of, particular human knowledges and power relations. Here we want to flag and reflect on the methods behind some experiments that seek to open new spaces for interspecies communication on a more equal footing. These have been designed for a range of purposes – including art, science, entertainment, animal welfare and human behaviour change. Interestingly, all of those we want to mention here focus on play as a reciprocal/equal form of interspecies interaction – not sex, eating or violence. The study of play behaviour within species has long been a staple of ethological research, and such work has often looked to draw inferences about behaviour across species. ³⁴ More recent work across a variety of disciplines has expanded this interest in play to an inter-species scale. ³⁵

The experiments that will perhaps be most familiar to cultural geographers will be those undertaken by artists, seeking to include living and dead animals in their work. ³⁶ For example, Kira O’Reilly’s extended, public, gallery-based performance of interspecies communication entitled Falling Asleep with a Pig. This echoed Joseph Bueys’ famous performances with a coyote in the USA in the 1970s. ³⁷ A more foreign communicative relationship is enabled by Chris Woebken in his piece entitled Beetle Wrestler, which seeks to build what he terms an ‘architecture of reciprocity’ with the world’s strongest animal. ³⁸ In a recent intervention entitled Playing with Pigs, Clemens Driessen and his collaborators are developing a computer-assisted game whereby humans and pigs can interact – and play together – online. ³⁹ In contrast to the previous artistic experiments, this mode of research is grounded in notions of interspecies exploratory learning that retains a focus on the animals themselves.

Moving beyond artistic encounters, technological advances in robotics and virtual simulation hold out a tantalizing possible future for re-scaled, embodied interspecies encounters. In a recent experimental combination of ‘immersive virtual reality’ with ‘teleoperator systems’, an interdisciplinary team facilitated an equal-scale encounter between humans and rats. ⁴⁰ The human subjects were immersed in a virtual reality environment, where their movements were monitored, and in turn drove the movement of a rat-shaped and -sized robotic device; the rat-robot was then placed next to a living rat, whose movements were translated into that of a human-sized avatar in the virtual environment. Thus levelled, it is claimed that the human and the rat were able to participate in a purportedly playful meeting of species that seems straight from the pages of science fiction. Such experiments in adjusting scale do little to shift power dynamics in interspecies communication. Nor does the lab maze create anything more than a novel environment for encounter. Yet the prospect of engaging with animal worlds in more embodied, interactive and exploratory ways opens new avenues for developing richer accounts of animal lifeworlds.

Genomics

For the final set of methods we wish to shift spaces and scales. Methodological developments in DNA sequencing have revolutionized modern science in the last 40 years, allowing biologists to ask and answer new questions about the histories, geographies and fundamental constitution of animal life. While the development and political economy of these innovations and their consequences for human and nonhuman life have been subject to close and critical inspection by a range of social science scholarship, ⁴¹ there has to date been relatively little engagement with these methods in animal studies (let alone animal geography). Here we would like to foreground two sets of genomic methods that should be of interest to animal geographers. The first concerns the use of genetic markers to track contemporary and historic patterns of animal mobility. The second relates methods associated with the rise of metagenomics for mapping the microbial composition of animals’ bodies.

There is a growing interest in conservation biology in the utility of methods from molecular biology for phylogeography, the sub-discipline of biogeography ‘concerned with the principles and processes governing the geographical distribution of genealogical lineages’. ⁴² Attention has focused on mitochondrial DNA markers, which have proved to be especially well suited to tracing how, in the words of one of its main advocates ‘conspecific individuals are genealogically linked through shared ancestors’. ⁴³ Here geography and genealogy can be interlinked to trace historical mobilities. For example, as one of us has reported in more detail elsewhere, ⁴⁴ recent work documenting the phylogeography of the Asian elephant has revealed traces of the long history of elephant trade (and subsequent escape) within the species’ range. This evidence of anthropogenic mobilities scrambled accepted taxonomies of sub-species identity and catalysed wider debates about priorities for the species’ conservation in an effort to recognize historic modes of interspecies companionship long documented by scholars in the humanities. The challenges posed to conservation biology by climate change also point to the utility of such methods. Mapping phylogeographic patterns can proffer important clues to previous species-population responses to changing climates, and thus point towards management priorities for the near future. ⁴⁵

While these methods affirm the coherence of the whole organism, recent developments in metagenomics – the genomic analysis of DNA from assemblages of microorganisms ⁴⁶ – have enabled biologists to explore the microbial composition of and connections between animals’ bodies. While there has long been an interest in the significance of animal microbial life – most famously with the work of Lynn Margulis – it has proved extremely difficult to cultivate (and thus identify) these organisms outside of the body. Metagenomic techniques circumvent this obstacle by mapping all the genetic materials contained within any given sample. Developments in this field have been energized by the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), an international collection of scientific research projects seeking to identify and characterize the microorganisms living in or on the human body. ⁴⁷ There are at least two applications of these metagenomic methods that should be of interest to animal geographers.

The first is an emerging map of the composition and patterns of microbiodiversity within selected hotpots of the human body (nose, mouth, skin, vagina and gut). The results have been striking. It has been suggested that the total microbial cells found in association with human bodies may exceed the total number of human cells making up our bodies by a factor of 10-to-one; while the total number of genes associated with the human microbiome could exceed the total number of human genes by a factor of 100-to-one. ⁴⁸ Ontologically, humans (and other animals) are perhaps best understood as supra-organisms. The second application is to generate a more familiar map of spatial variations in the human microbiome across a diversity of human bodies. The predominant (and somewhat troubling) geographical sampling in these early studies (moving from the US to Amerindians in the Amazon) appears to be taken to represent temporal distance from modernity and its concomitant effects on the human microbiome. ⁴⁹ This research design seeks to test established hypotheses that changes in the human microbiome – specifically the demise of certain ‘old friends’ – are responsible for the dramatic increase in atopic and autoimmune conditions in western communities, as well as those in increasingly urban areas of the Global South. ⁵⁰

We anticipate that there is great scope for animal, more-than-human and health geographers to develop new research projects that deploy these methods. These could bring to bear more sophisticated geographical understandings to help explore and explain spatial variation in human microbiomes. They could engage political ecology to examine the drivers of microbial change in relation to public health interventions, raw food cultures and other experiments in probiotic lifestyles. ⁵¹ These could also develop established methods for citizen science drawn from STS to help source, analyse, interpret and even cultivate both samples and vernacular understandings of our internal ecologies. ⁵² Finally, with an awareness of the risks involved, animals’ geographers could – like a growing number of medical researchers and affected patients – experiment with modes of therapeutic microbial restoration, documenting through a combination of ethnographic and laboratory techniques the processes and experiences through which our bodies learn to be affected by our microbial kin. ⁵³ Such work would help flesh out Haraway’s appeal for modes of learning and training in the ‘contact zone’ ⁵⁴ and document new modes of inter- and intra-species communication.

Conclusions

In this short paper we have argued that the blossoming of animal geography into a vibrant and diverse sub-field of cultural geography has been uneven in relation to the aspirations of its founding figures. In its neglect of the lived geographies of animals the field still struggles to fulfill its promise of taking animals seriously as subjects and ecological agents. Here we have suggested that this failure is in part methodological and that we could benefit from engaging with and developing new methods for mapping animals’ geographies on offer elsewhere. We have identified three potential sources. These offer techniques for tracking the spatialities of animal culture, for researching inter-species communication and for developing microbiogeographies through genetic analysis. In conclusion we would like to briefly reflect on the promise of this work before flagging some obstacles.

As we outlined earlier, one of the reasons that geographers became interested in animals was to offer a richer description of what is going on in diverse places. Attending to animals was part of a wider interest in the more-than-human forms of agency that animate our multispecies and technological ecologies. In different ways the methods sketched here assist this research agenda by opening up the category animal to recognize its multiplicity of forms of life and spatial practice. As Steve Hinchliffe suggests, thinking animal (and other) geographies as a multiple helps acknowledge intersections, absences, incommensurabilities and discordances within and between the multiple ways and forms of being in the world. ⁵⁵ Animals’ geographies adhere to different topologies and comprise nonhuman mobilities, which frequently do not conform to the territories and networks familiar to humans’ geographies.

Thinking the animal multiple topologically might help us attune to the biopolitics of governing animals. Configuring animals as individuals, as species, as cultures or as supra-organisms results in different and often incompatible outcomes for the organisms and ecologies involved. If one of the other motivations of animal geographers is to live well with nonhuman life, then these methods help us attune to the political and ethical implications of how and where such cuts are made. By working through the material specificities of our entangled worlds they help establish the significant forms of difference and the more-than-human values, knowledges and spatial practices that must be considered in recent appeals for a post-humanist cosmopolitics. ⁵⁶

As obstacles to this endeavour there remains an enduring (and understandable) tendency to view human subjects as the appropriate focus of (social) research. The humanist project is far from complete. There is a hesitancy to challenge existing disciplinary boundaries, particularly the monopolistic grip of ‘scientific’ epistemologies with regard to understanding animal behaviour. Such divisions are institutionalized and policed through the familiar infrastructures for research and pedagogy. There is an antagonism or at least ambivalence amongst animal geographers about subjecting animals to modes of captivity and forms of technological apparatus in lab and field that are associated with some of these forms of experimentation. And finally, important concerns remain about the problems posed by anthropomorphism at both conceptual and practical levels.

Here there is a risk that our focus on methodologies for exploring beastly places, rather than animals spacings, is misinterpreted. We are not suggesting that these animals’ geographies are distinct, unrelated, separate, nonhuman realms whose singular essence needs elucidation by dispassionate and objective observation; we do not wish to rebuild the nature/culture binary that has been so painstakingly disassembled in recent years. We agree with Lestel et al. when they suggest that ‘we still need work that attempts to account for the shared lives that grow up between humans and animals. Simply studying the effect of the one on the other is not enough’. ⁵⁷ Indeed, their approach to ‘etho-ethnology’ has much to commend it in accounting for the ways in which humans and other animals live together in ‘hybrid communities’. Our aim here, however, is to consider tools that may facilitate a re-balancing of this research agenda, towards the lived experiences of nonhuman animals in these shared, relationally configured communities of life. This is a shift in perspective: nothing more, but also nothing less.

We would hope that none of the challenges considered above are insurmountable and many of the wider shifts we have mentioned in this paper hint at their declining significance. Certainly, the once taboo subject of anthropomorphism is now considered an ethical epistemological virtue amongst many for whom it would once have been anathema. Animal geographers will need to be brave, to continue to improvise and collaborate to fulfill the methodological promise we have offered, but with the wider animal turn in rude health the prospects look good.