Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond ‘nature/culture’ dualisms

Abstract

This paper reassesses and rediscovers the intellectual legacy of French geographer Eric Dardel (1899–1967). First discovered by geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, Dardel’s book L’Homme et la Terre was considered as a work predating alternatively humanistic approaches and postmodern critiques of positivism, which justifies why it passed substantially unperceived when it was first published in 1952. Yet, most of these authors have manifestly only read that book despite Dardel’s production was much larger, labelling Dardel as a ‘phenomenologist’ in a quite reductive way. Drawing upon recent literature on material agency and on phenomenology/post-phenomenology in geography, and based on the analysis of Dardel’s complete body of work, I argue that the contribution of the French geographer cannot be reduced to matters of phenomenology and subjective perception. To this end, I especially focus on Dardel’s references to the 19th-century tradition of Naturphilosophie that argued for a consubstantiality of ‘humankind’ and ‘nature’. Hence, I show how Dardel’s willingness to take seriously the materiality and agency of ‘the Earth’ through his notion of géographicité [geographicity or geographicalness] can give new and original insights to current geographies dealing with materiality, affect, human-nature hybridity and relational ontologies. Questioning dualisms such as humankind/nature, subject/object and nature/culture, early geographical understandings of the planet as a complex living being can foster the relevance of geography for both the ‘material turn’ advocating for plural agencies and for critical debates denying the principle of human supremacy over the planet.