Places of Water and of Trees: Affective Embodiment, Identity and Materiality (original) (raw)

Drawing upon recent research into water issues and community, and previous work on trees and places, this paper suggests that new affect based understandings of everyday life and practice can be of use in understandings of how individuals and communities engage with materiality in imaginative and in embodied (practical) terms, and also in how the complex composition of watery and treed spaces (as cultural, ecological, political, economic, and living entities) can be appreciated. Peoples’ engagement with (differing) places and their vibrant materiality is articulated through a range of affective bodily practices such as dwelling (home making, eating), communing, walking, sitting, climbing, doing (hobbies, gardening, diy) and a range of non-cognitive affective processes – haptic, sensing (touch, sight, sound, smell) - emotional (feelings, moods) which are not necessarily articulated or articulable in thought and/or language. Thus these approaches can be seen as post-phenomenological as set out in Ingold’s ‘meshwork’ and Thrift’s ‘ecologies of place’. Places/landscapes are considered to be as much temporal as they are spatial, as complex interviewing of the topographic and the topologic, and as incoherent assemblages of both presences and absences, which never fully settle into stable, (fully) knowable ground. The essential fabric of the production of place is process which is articulated through bodies, martials, which come together in events and which form patterns into which social, cultural, and symbolic meaning entwine. Places are pattern outcomes. This is why things like trees and water – and anything else really - need to be taken seriously because the force of process is channelled through their specific materialities habits. In thinking about how to live sustainably in such an envisioned world key premises is that notions of community need to be extended beyond the social, and that the affective dimensions of life need to be foregrounded. We need an ecologicalisation of philosophy, politics and ethics if we are to make any sense going forward in terms of understanding of society and reimagining of how it can flourish. This can draw upon a whole range of thinking from Latour, deep ecology, ecofeminism, pragmatism, non-representational theory and affect centred politics.