Cosmohistories and pluriversal dialogues: The future of the history of geography

New geographical histories for the future

This paper discusses the theme of geography's futures by addressing a part of the discipline that is generally considered to deal with the past – that is, the history of geography. We argue that this still neglected area of study can provide significant contributions for thinking about the future of the broader field of geography thanks to its potentiality in bringing diversity and providing intellectual stimulations beyond the paradigms and key ideas that periodically (and temporarily) dominate the field. Amidst growing awareness of the contextual nature of knowledge and its contingent and contested character (Lozano, 2013), recent scholarship on ‘other geographical traditions’ (Ferretti, 2019) discusses dissident tendencies including anarchism (Springer, 2016) and various forms of radicalism that emerged at different times in different countries (Berg et al., 2021), showing a plurality that has not always been seized by disciplinary historiography. This variety emerges from a number of recent studies that cannot be fully referenced here. It is worth mentioning, among other cases, scholarship on the South American and transnational critical geographers who challenged an epistemic setup limited to ‘the bubble of the Global North’ (Melgaço, 2017), works on the history of geography in Africa (Craggs and Neate, 2020), and claims to rediscover histories of women and other marginalized groups (Jöns et al., 2017). Actually, histories of geography are more plural than what is commonly believed.

We argue that these ongoing rediscoveries are increasingly providing insights for an idea of the discipline that is epistemologically and politically ambitious and challenges mere utilitarian uses of academic knowledge. This matches some of the main themes of a recently published special issue on ‘the future of geography’ (Castree et al., 2022), in which authors such as Castree discuss the future of a discipline that can ‘speak various truths to power’ (2022: 8). They significantly stress how scholarship is never neutral, hence the need to defend ‘the principle of academic freedom and academic vocation’ by fostering intradisciplinary dialogue ‘for heterodoxy to be meaningful and positive’ (Castree, 2022: 9). This implies the creation of syncretism that does not deny the (sometimes deep) distance between different specialisms within the discipline, but aims at creating collaborations to ‘improve the world’ (Castree, 2022: 10). This also means committing the discipline to the most relevant political and social agendas of critical theory and radical practices. In Castree's metaphor describing the different fields of geography as a sort of ‘confederacy’, or ‘multi-cultural republic’ (2022: 12), the history of geography can convey innovations that enhance the opening to the world that is needed in the discipline, beyond mere academic needs for financial ‘viability’ or other demands of the neoliberal market.

It is to this inclusivity (in epistemological, social, cultural, and linguistic terms), significantly defined by Castree (2022: 12) as ‘epistemic justice’, that rediscovering different histories of geography can productively serve to inform geography's future agendas. This includes fostering what Head calls ‘the new Indigenous Geographies’ (2022: 94), which try to bring new epistemologies into a field that has traditionally been dominated by imperialism and epistemic violence. Such epistemologies can offer precious insights to deal with anthropocenic matters on human–environment relationships as well as in new conceptions of ontology and epistemology (Head, 2022). This scholarship demonstrates that, by rediscovering alternative disciplinary traditions, one can include new ideas and practices starting by reconsidering figures, concepts, and praxes that, in the past, were excluded by the dominating canons of the discipline for ethnic, national, gender, linguistic, or epistemological reasons.

Yet, these openings are still limited. While there is a certain consensus that ‘an understanding of the past is crucial’ (Rose-Redwood, 2021: 1) to make sense of engaged and politically relevant geographies, re-interpreting disciplinary histories entails recognition of the processes through which Western geographical knowledge became hegemonic. The assumption of one evolutionary temporality made of accumulative advancements was eventually framed by the coloniality of power (Lander et al., 2009). Thus, it is urgent to question what ‘counts’ as geographical knowledge, making space for ‘alternative epistemologies within the discipline’ (Oswin, 2020: 10), a task that has been often performed more gesturally than substantially. Indeed, universalized and objective knowledge are still privileged in the broader field of geography (Howitt, 2022).

In the next section, we introduce the possibility of fostering dialogues with Indigenous knowledge and practices, particularly from Latin America, to further question ontological assumptions, and foster inclusiveness in the discipline's futures. That is, we must listen carefully to, and reflexively engage with, other expressions of geographical knowledge and their histories.

For cosmohistories, or decolonial histories of geography

Our proposal to open pluriversal dialogues draws on the notion of ‘cosmohistory’. According to Navarrete Linares (2021), cosmohistory questions and complicates ideas of homogeneous temporalities and spatialities by shifting from a unique and universalistic ‘regime of historicity’ (Hartog, 2003) to the acknowledgement of diverse historicities. Cosmohistories are attempts to draw connections by journeying across different intellectual worlds (e.g. Indigenous knowledge and European rationality) without pretentions of objectivity or epistemic superiority. They give full consideration to plural and subaltern agencies, including nonhuman ones.

As for the notion of the ‘pluriverse’, we refer to the Zapatistas’ idea of a world in which many worlds can fit. This is put in political terms by Escobar (2020: viii), who argues that: ‘If worlds are multiple, then the possible must also be multiple’. To re-imagine histories appraising the variety of geographical knowledge and practices beyond disciplinary boundaries and hegemonic discourses, we should value diversity and co-create theories and plural ways of producing knowledge (Ferretti, 2019; Martínez Ramírez and Neurath, 2022). Beyond acknowledging exclusions, historians of geography should commit to pluriversal dialogues with Indigenous knowledge and practices, questioning traditional understandings of the past, present, and future of the discipline (Scott, 2020) by creating spaces for new spatiotemporalities.

As for temporalities, we should scrutinize hegemonic ideas of time that define geography's trajectories under modern and Western frameworks, also considering the diversity and complexity of subaltern standpoints (Sidaway, 2023). While linear, evolutionary, and positivist approaches to geography have been widely criticized (Livingstone, 1993) and replaced by critical and non-essentialist views of geography's histories (Lozano, 2013), there is still work to be done in questioning the epistemic and ontological hierarchies established by colonialism, including its presumed ‘historical superiority’ (Blaut, 1993: 2).

The normalization of particular ideas of space-time serves to exclude other expressions of geographical knowledge, thereby incorporating and validating particular hegemonic narratives. In the same way, Indigenous peoples’ dispossession and marginalization has been justified by liquidating them as ‘people without geography’ (Howitt, 1993). Against this, cosmohistory should be considered as a way to engage with other historical traditions, acknowledging the always complex, contested, and fragile interactions between worlds (Navarrete Linares, 2022: 24). Drawing on Stenger's (2014) ideas of cosmopolitics, cosmohistories seek to proliferate temporalities by avoiding discriminatory and selective historicity. They produce partial and contested historical truths between different worlds (Martínez Ramírez and Neurath, 2022), overtaking what Latour (2005: 453) calls ‘mono-naturalism’, and considering ‘more ways to be other’.

By recognizing other pasts as history and other forms of biocultural memory (Barrera-Bassols, 2019), this perspective opens possibilities for dialogue across different understandings of space-time. Nevertheless, what cosmohistory defines is not radical alterity but the complex interaction of worlds such as those that characterize the histories of Indigenous peoples in Latin America. This helps in situating expressions of geographical knowledge and practices within contradictory and conflictive temporal enactments (Martínez Ramírez and Neurath, 2022). This awareness is a necessary step to lay the groundwork for the new theoretical frameworks that we need to further proliferate diverse and dynamic spatiotemporal experiences.

On the one hand, Indigenous knowledges and their spatiotemporalities expose the contingency of geography's historical accounts to create spaces for alternative geographical knowledge (Clastres, 1987). On the other hand, they should be understood in their variability as ‘multiple knowledge systems, epistemologies, worldviews, and traditional practices’, where tradition is ‘far from a solidified, bounded, or value neutral category…being reinterpreted, invented, and contested’ (Nelson, 2014: 188, 191). Social mapping and calendars designed with and by communities represent variegated expressions of geographical knowledge that negotiate, resist, and provide alternatives to hegemonic geographical imaginations (Sletto et al., 2020).

Historicizing these alternative geographies and spaces of enunciation by relying on people's (cosmo)histories provides the grounds to re-interpret landscapes, introducing new understandings of geographical thought's trajectories in Indigenous territories (Barrera de la Torre, 2017). This way, the very notion of geographical tradition can be enlarged by recognizing the rejection of those who resisted the exclusionary historicity of modern/capitalist/patriarchal/statist universal history.

Conclusion: Other histories for other futures

In this commentary, we have considered the potentialities of the history of geography in charting a course for the future of the discipline by first rediscovering silenced voices that provide new intellectual tools fostering inclusion in the discipline, epistemic pluralism, and political relevance. Second, rescuing what was considered not ‘scientific’ enough by dominating canons and paradigms can open the way to further enhance inclusive practices and therefore make room for new epistemes in the future of geography, inspired by pluriversal dialogues and cosmohistory.

Cosmohistory can provide precious methodological insight for the future of geography, understood as a practice of crossing and putting in relation different spatialities and temporalities. Cosmohistories can help to avoid reductionist views of a disciplinary unity in which ‘the type of difference recognized and affirmed is severely constrained’ (Grove and Rickards, 2022) following the epistemic frames imposed by colonialist cultures (García, 2018). We should instead invent and experiment with plural modes of knowing and being as alternative approaches that aim to generate and proliferate novel difference (Grove and Rickards, 2022), laying grounds for horizontally sharing and connecting diverse traditions and mindsets. Histories of geography are plural, and so too will be geography's futures.