For the place of terrain and materialist ‘re’ -returns: Experience, life, force, and the importance of the socio-cultural

Abstract

In this brief response to Stuart Elden’s thought-provoking essay ‘Terrain, Politics, History’, I question whether place, one of the most ubiquitous concepts worked with by geographers, might have a place itself in studies of territory and provide another way of attending to the neglect of the materiality of territory. In raising this point, I further ask if attention should also be shifted more broadly to the terrains of social and cultural geographies. Here an extensive body of work has investigated more-than-human materialist approaches to making sense of the world and examined the agencies and role of landscape. Both lenses, I argue, could offer a great deal to theorisations of territory and its materiality, which are perhaps overlooked, within territory’s position as a concept of the subdiscipline of political geography. In sum, I posit that geography has already dealt quite significantly with the materiality of the Earth in other strands of the discipline, and this work may offer much in dialogue with efforts to materialise our thinking of territory.

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