Toward geographies of co-dwelling: weaving more-than-human places

Abstract

Geographical space arises from the existential affordances of multiple terrestrial relations and the forms through which they are correlated to the dwelling of human and non-human entities. Thus, the present study aims to problematize the analytical potentialities of more-than-human co-dwelling in places. To achieve this, it follows a dialogical contact between cultural and humanistic geographies and ecophenomenological philosophy. This intersection discloses the ways in which places are co-dwelled by flows of multiple forms of terrestrial sentience. The more-than-human worlds that weave together geographical reality reveal that the experience of being-in-and-of-the-Earth is based upon co-dwelling dynamics that intertwine intersubjectivities and intercorporealities. It is concluded that co-dwelling in places involves the emergence of conviviality amongst telluric cycles and rhythms of reversibility.

Keywords:
Earth; Dwelling; More-than-human worlds; Home

Resumo

O espaço geográfico decorre das virtualidades existenciais de múltiplas relações terrestres e das formas pelas quais elas se correlacionam com o habitar de entidades humanas e não-humanas. Desse modo, o presente ensaio almeja problematizar as potencialidades analíticas do coabitar mais-que-humano no nexo dos lugares. Para tanto, parte-se de um contato dialógico entre os estudos da Geografia Cultural e Humanista com a filosofia ecofenomenológica. Nessa intersecção, vislumbra-se os modos como os lugares são coabitados por confluências de senciências terrestres. Os mundos mais-que-humanos que costuram a realidade geográfica revelam que a experiência de ser-na-e-da-Terra é pautada em dinâmicas de coabitação que enovelam intersubjetividades e intercorporeidades. Conclui-se que coabitar os lugares envolve a emergência de convivialidades entre ciclos e ritmos telúricos de reversibilidades.

Palavras-chave:
Terra; Habitar; Mundos mais-que-humanos; Lar

Resumé

L'espace géographique provient des potentialités existentielles de multiples relations terrestres et des formes par lesquelles elles se corrélèrent avec l'habitation des entités humaines et non-humaines. De cette façon, cet essai vise à problématiser les potentialités analytiques de la cohabitation plus-que-humaine dans les lieux et ses sens. Pour cela, on part d'un contact dialogique entre les études de la géographie culturelle et humaniste avec la philosophie éco-phénoménologique. Dans cette intersection, on entrevoit les façons dont les lieux sont cohabités par des confluences de sentiences telluriques. Les mondes plus-que-humaines qui cousent la réalité géographique révèlent que l'expérience d'être-au-et-dans-la-Terre est basée sur des dynamiques de cohabitation qui enlacent les intersubjectivités et les intercorporéités. On conclut que cohabiter les lieux implique l'émergence de convivialités entre les cycles et les rythmes telluriques de réversibilités.

Mots-clés:
Terre; Habiter; Mondes plus-que-humaines; Chez-soi

Preparing the weave

Dwelling is a fundamental condition and situation of terrestrial experience, and is the bastion for the formation of spaces imbued with meaning. Hence, geographical space, as suggested by Dardel (2011), may be viewed as a living entity that effervesces from the existential potentialities of relationships with the Earth, in all its multiplicity. Given the plurality of the entities that co-dwell on this planet, the geographies constructed in places are situated within the threadwork of dynamic meanings.

By dwelling in a place, the relationships constructed within it thread together bodies, subjectivities, and experiences that become inseparable from the context into which they have been inserted. Thus, beyond the social and cultural characteristics, there is also a vast ensemble of meanings that are constituted by the dynamogeny of the living Earth that forms the basis of this process. Birdsong, the sound of raindrops, the smell of early morning dew, these, for example, are more than just components that contribute to a sense of place. They are elements whose agency must be considered when interpreting geographical reality.

As Abram (1996) proposed, one of the ways with which to analyze these relational arrangements is to step beyond the nature-culture divide, so as to bring them together toward the conception of a more-than-human world. The idea of this concept, which underpins ecophenomenology, is to highlight how the world involves and exceeds human experiences by threading together the intersubjective and inter-corporeal horizons of other entities that cohabit the Earth, such as non-human animals, plants, the atmosphere, rocks and all other presences intrinsic to telluric dynamism. Recognizing the intentionalities and sentience of these heterogeneous entities articulated by the gravitation pull of the Earth helps to understand that each place is a multi-species tessitura.

The human world is just one among the multiplicity of other worlds that converge across geographies stitched together between practices of exchanges, tensions and more-than-human forms of conviviality (Abram; Milstein; Castro-Sotomayor, 2020). Therefore, I believe there is great merit in embroidering ways of thinking that overcome hegemonic anthropocentrism and reveal the plural seams of ways of being-in-the-world in articulations of human and non-human intentionalities.

This endeavor has been woven together by cultural geographers, especially those within the English-speaking world, who have sought to develop more-than-human geographies in order to study association processes of entities that overcome the Cartesian divides between human and nature and subject and object (Lorimer, 2010). As Greenhough (2014) summarized, these are non-anthropocentric approaches that analyze how the affects, practices and agencies of non-human animals, plants, fungi, objects and other entities are intertwined within the relationality of geographic space.

In line with the adopted position of these geographers, the objective is to reflect, geographically and philosophically, on the analytical potential of more-than-human co-dwelling in order to problematize the co-dwelling dynamics of place(s). To this end, my starting point is based on assumptions from cultural geography regarding housing spatialities considered in dialogue with the ecophenomenological philosophies of Abram (1996, 2007, 2010) and Ingold (2000, 2014), as well as other theorists and commentators. This reciprocal interface enables me to expand the geographical conceptualizations of place to terrestrial experiential horizons that transcend human speciesism in conjunction with more-than-human geographies.

In the capacity of an essay with an epistemological proposition, the trajectory of reflection has been woven into three moments. In the first section, I review the phenomenological sense of place linked with dwelling and home. I subsequently expound on the dimensions of co-dwelling that resonate with the more-than-human worlds explicated by ecophenomenology and more-than-human geographies. In the last section, I discuss the theoretical issues that emerge from co-dwelling geographies in order to decipher the contemporary experience of being-in-and-of-the-Earth.

Weaving the threads to situate places

In geographical terms, place results from the constitution of existentially significant spatialities. As Tuan (2013) outlined, what starts off as a kind of undifferentiated space becomes a place as it accumulates definition and meaning through experiences. Building a place signifies endowing a given space with meaning, in such a way as to substantiate a set of relationships, experiences, imaginations, practices, perceptions and interactions that elevate it beyond a generic place or a mere substrate.

In convergence with this way of composing spatial-sensory meanings, Dardel (2011, p. 41) stated that “it is necessary for us to establish the Being and realize our possibilities, a position of here from where the world is discovered, and a there to where we will go”.¹ From a phenomenological perspective, place is a response to the fundamental need to create a shared composition of directions and meanings in order to exist. In essence, places represent the emergence of a significant here-and-now, in which spatiality is broadened by our relational experiences of discovery and interaction with the world(s) around us.

The concept of place explains the Bachelardian principle that “[I]nhabited space transcends geometric space” (Bachelard, 1964, p.47). As the philosopher points out, the condition of being-in-the-world implies intentional efforts to bring meaning to the inhabited where. Through this process, the relational core of dwelling is established through the convergence of multiple experiences, which collectively construct spatialities imbued with meanings derived from the geographical nature of the phenomena.

It is because of this process that phenomenologically “places work as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events” (Seamon, 2018a, p.2). As significant loci of existential arrangements, places emerge as geographical reality that bring together ways of coming-to-be that involve body-sensorial sharing. Each place is a relational spatiality in which the housing dynamogeny of affordances and conditions of being-in-the-world converge.

Due to this phenomenal character, places are inseparable from their inhabitants. Each place is shaped by the inexorable fabrics of encounters that blur the boundaries between the (re)signified inhabited space and the beings that inhabit them. The localized dynamics are experientially multivalent, as Seamon (2018b) reaffirmed, since they express the broad spectrum of emotions and meanings of everyone who is immersed in their relational arrangements. Whether topophilic, topophobic, or intermediary universes between the two, the meanings of places are imbued with multivalent affective networks.

This is what a home, especially in the form of a house, primarily demonstrates. The constructed residence concentrates and focuses the localized psyche of those who live there (Tuan, 1982). As an archetypal example of place, homes situate the ways in which the inhabited space gains dimensions that surpass extension, quality and quantity amidst the ways in which existential projections infuse them with intersubjective meanings.

In transcendence of a simple construction, Schmidt (2020, p. 273, emphasis in the original) expressed that phenomenologically “Home is the feeling of being part of a topographic wholeness”. The experiential figure of home provides a primary meaning through which place gains concreteness. This conception highlights the character of the here, of discovering the world indicated by Dardel (2011), in order to be the first point of contact with a there. The topology of this domestic space conceived as a place unfolds from the geographical experience of inhabiting and being inhabited.

As an archetype of place, the home embodies the emotional and experiential dimensions of dwelling on Earth. Houses are constructions that locate the establishment in a given geographical situation, creating body-sensorial nexuses that generate bonds related to the potential stability derived from the multiple threats that its walls aim to ward off (Tuan, 2012).

Thus, the home transcends the house that is inhabited, since it is not limited to the material construction of the domestic space. As Relph (1976, p. 39) explained, “[it] is not just the house you happen to live in, it is not something that can be anywhere, that can be exchanged, but an irreplaceable center of significance”. It is a body-sensorial phenomenon that reveals the basic contact with the geographical reality of being-in-the-world. The original meaning of home is the power to intertwine the starting point of the relationality of and in the inhabited space.

The home results from the closest associations we have with spatiality, an expression of the intimate geography that we build on a daily basis when composing body-spatial routines (Seamon, 1979). David (2015, p. 82) summarized this condition when describing that “to live in a house is to be in it as if you were not there and by not being there it is as if you were in it”. This relational principle expresses that there is an intrinsic connection between the person who inhabits and the place inhabited.

The link with home unfolds from what Seamon (1979, p. 78, emphasis in the original) calls “at-homeness – the taken-for-granted situation of being comfortable and familiar with the world in which one lives his or her day -to-day life.” In the reciprocal relationship between the inhabitant and the inhabited, the experience of being at home reveals the porosity through which one permeates the other in an association of affects that are dynamized in becoming a dwelling. As a primal and archetypal place, the home is felt before it is cognitively thought of, planned or built.

As Marratto (2012) argued, being-at-home is an experience of coming into being. It concerns a continuous evolving contact, which is never completely finalized, since it is a process involving the constant flow of shifting affectivities that are transmuted by the relationships established between those who inhabit the space. Each home is a fluid, perpetually incomplete place that is successively reconstituted through the experiences of everyone who lives there.

Homes are loci demarcated by bonds in which routines and sociocultural behaviors are intertwined with the development of that place (Tuan, 1998). The association provides a primal meaning that emerges from the current experience and blurs the boundaries between the different inhabitants. This process fosters an intricate network of intersubjective convivialities, which arise from the diversity of lived experiences by each home within modes of being-in-the-world, and are further permeated by geographical experiences, which enables the appreciation and stability of homes to blossom.

However, as a place, the housing expressiveness of the home also implies that it can be (re)defined and (re)signified by aggression, persecution, anguish and fear. For those experiencing domestic violence, for example, homes can become sites of immense instability and fear. The violence, brutality and terror that plague some places extends into the stronghold of the home, as evidenced by the experiences of many women, those in the LGBTQIA+ community and even maltreated domestic animals, all of whom are victims of these harmful tensions within these spaces.

In home spaces, bonds are created in a visceral, close manner. In the view of Marandola Junior (2021, p. 53), “it is at home that we feel most protected and therefore it is also where we allow ourselves to be most vulnerable”. The various forms of domestic violence are often intensified within the confines of the home, where victims face multiple stressors due to the difficulties involved in managing to escape. This heightened vulnerability at home can lead to a cycle of escalating violence.

As an existentially significant experience that lies within this complex spectrum of topophobia and topophilia, at-homeness can lead to an unfolding of both virtuous cycles and vicious spirals of the relationality of places. In short, as a place, a home cannot be reduced to an extensively defined location or a point on the map any more than it should be conceived as something positive to be celebrated.

In the phenomenological conception, homes are embodied connections built on a connection with the world (Trigg, 2018). The topological principle of home-place reveals relational webs of embodied interactions through which spatial-sensory significance designs houses and constructions that represent an ideal of stability. However, this idealized representation is transcended by the transformative practices that render place more complex.

In agreement with what Lang (1985) proposed, dwelling co-constitutes the primal situation of being-in-the-world through lived bodies. Coming-to-dwell stands as an unfolding of embodied intentionality that constitutes geographic reality in reverse. Each place, whether domestic or not, topophilic and/or topophobic, is open to the (mis)matches that occur there because living on Earth implies being reciprocally vulnerable to it.

By inhabiting a place, not only do I become a part of it, but it also becomes part of who I am. Each entity carries its home(s) with it through its lived body that has the scars, marks and memories of housing experiences. The different places seeded between the fissures of the geographic reality where we live are permeated by affective complexities that involve ambiguities, mixtures and intertwining. It is for this reason that the ideas of topophilia and topophobia rarely fit perfectly into the places in which we constitute our existences, and which also applies to the home.

Homes highlight that there is a certain ambivalence in experiencing places because they shape contradictory affects that cannot be separated from the inhabited place. It is possible to highlight an inhabitant-inhabited reversibility that converges as an unfolding of being-in-the-world as a condition permeated by complex links that go beyond simplification in the form of duality between positive and negative or “philia” and “phobia”.

As phenomenologists have indicated, place-making is a phenomenon that involves experiential ambiguities. They are intensive experiences that bring together ways of coming-into-being between geographies of intersubjective affects that range from suffering to passions, usually involving contradictory emotions with a variety of nuances. Therefore, the meaning of dwelling is a weaving together of experiential and bodily flows of places, thereby implying that they are as complex as the meanings that permeate them.

Tessituras of more-than-human co-dwelling

As presented in the previous section, the senses of home and dwelling permeate the geographic-phenomenological concept of place. This notion may be open to a plurality of entities that involve and surpass human beings. By ranging across multiple intentions, involvements, experiences, there is a universe of possibilities that provides a glimpse of an expanded analytical field of geographic understanding regarding the meanings of housing that make up geographic reality.

According to Lussault (2005, p. 19) “dwelling positions space, in all its biophysical and social dimensions, and its actors on an equal ontological level”. In agreement with what he argues, this makes it possible to situate other forms of coming-into-being on a plane of shared epistemological legitimacy in which non-human forms of consciousness are recognized as holders of autonomous intentionalities. Just like human beings, other terrestrial emergences also reveal networks of place-making through their housing dynamics.

Efforts in this direction may be viewed within the scope of studies of more-than-human geographies highlighted by Greenhough (2014). This field of growing importance among English-speaking cultural geographers has aimed to highlight the co-production of places through the affects of human and non-human entities that are associated in the geographical experiences of various contexts.

It is possible to list a significant number of examples from research into more-than-human geographies, as in the case of investigations by Alam, McGregor and Houston (2020), who discussed the relationship between human and non-human bodies in helping to construct senses of place for climate refugees in Bangladesh. Similarly, Barua and Sinha (2017) engaged in an ethological and geographic dialogue to address micropolitics and cultural practices regarding urban animals in which the guiding thread of the analysis is the tense, controversial interactions of rhesus monkeys in everyday life in Indian cities.

This is also the situation in an analysis carried out by Raven, Robinson and Hunter (2021), on the multiple socio-spatial representations of the Australian rhea in the tension between territorial identity and Aboriginal knowledge. Another case from Oceania may be observed in Berger's (2023) intervention research on how rivers articulate affects in homes in New Zealand, in which the geographer built an art installation using domestic plumbing to demonstrate the more-than-human dynamics often invisible in homes. In the United Kingdom, Pitt (2017) contributed by assessing the agency of plants as active beings in the relationality of places, especially in the case of gardens and urban afforestation efforts, as well as the people involved in these processes.

The aforementioned examples demonstrate how cultural geographers have promoted the progressive change in the notion of “place as the result of only human meaning thrown out into space to create 'place', to focusing on the affectivities of place experience” (Robertson, 2018, p. 7). By weaving networks of sentience that intertwine existences that surpass human beings, it becomes possible to recognize the polyphony of resulting geographies that demonstrate how more-than-human worlds are essential in order to understand the geographic experiences of dwelling.

Ingold (2014, p. 216) complies with this question by highlighting that a house is never finished because it “calls for unremitting effort to shore it up in the face of the comings and goings of its human and non-human inhabitants”. As those who embark on this field of studies have proposed, it is central to understand that even the human way of building homes and places is neither alienated nor split from the multiple other-than-human agencies that intervene in it. Geographic reality is permeated by reciprocities and tensions between these varied terrestrial entities that co-constitute places.

The principles of analyzing more-than-human entities suggest that the condition of dwelling in a place is a continuous interweaving of affective tessituras that transcend the culture-nature divide. Indeed, the housing processes of place-making involve times and spaces in dynamic mixtures. The affectivities from the experiences of place reverberate as experiential ambiguities where multiple human and non-human entities become entangled. This problem converges with what Ingold (2000, p.348) indicated when describing that:

Where making (like building) comes to an end with the completion of a work in its final form, weaving (like dwelling) continues for as long as life goes on – punctuated but not terminated by the appearance of the pieces that it successively brings into being. Dwelling in the world, in short, is tantamount to the ongoing, temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the manifold constituents of our environment.

Based on Ingold's reflection, it may therefore be considered that place-making involves weaving relationships into the emergence of woven-together dwellings that impede the existences in and of places. Housing horizons entwine flows of different beings that compose ways of being-in-the-world in articulations woven by and in the succession of affective interactions that are successively articulated. In this condition of porosity and openness, place-making is a symphony of voices, practices, meanings, and emergences of and in the world that emerge as continuous processes of geographic intertwining.

The opening of housing contributes to the constitution of places in reciprocal associations with their inhabitants, which are not restricted to human beings. Other developments of being-in-the-world, such as plants, fungi, birds or rocks, may be understood as protagonists of place-making, multiplying the relational meanings that give birth to places. This implies that these entities also constitute homes that permeate the Earth, weaving together the meanings and experiences that define places.

Differently to the way in which inhabited spaces are stitched into individual seedings, places are shared efforts between ecologies of practices in which intentionalities are added in the polyphony of multiple species and living kingdoms. Because of this, I echo Despret’s (2019, p. 41) provocation that “I should say co-dwelling, since there is no way of living that is not, first and foremost, ‘co-dwelling’.” This turn constitutes a path to pluralize the entities covered and demonstrates how dwelling does not occur in isolation, since it is a relational condition that involves multiple entities.

In addition to inhabiting, co-dwelling expresses the multiplicities of heterogeneous arrangements resulting from the infinite variations of beings-of-the-Earth. By pluralizing and highlighting convivialities between entities entwined in inter-corporeal and intersubjective networks, co-dwelling implies that places are populated by inexorably intertwined presences. Visible or invisible, the associative pollinations of more-than-human worlds call for place-making to be an inherently existential expression of co-dwelling.

There are entwinements that converge with terrestrial organisms: these are the connections between soils, oceans, glaciers, the troposphere and the living beings that connect in visceral ways, as exemplified by respiration when making the atmosphere travel through all the cited entities (Abram; Milstein; Castro-Sotomayor, 2020). It is an intercorporeality of imperceptible amalgams in which each being is (co)constituted in connection with other infinities of more-than-human beings and intentionalities.

Each with its own bodily potential, the different entities that co-dwell geographic reality radiate meanings arising from the possibilities of being-at-home. Whether fungi, plants or animals, living beings summon polyphonic dimensions of geographic experience that plant the seeds of homes, which overlap one another. Their places influence networks of meanings that feed back into articulations of intercrossed intentionalities.

This plurivocal structuring suggests that the link established with home can rarely be understood as a “relationship between a pure subject and a pure object—between an active intelligence, or mind, and a purely passive chunk of matter” (Abram, 2010, p .32, emphasis in original). From the perspective of ecophenomenology, more than just a construction erected on the earth's soil, homes are loci of multi-species encounters in which horizons of heterogeneous worlds meet. There is a latent intersubjectivity to the place that reflects the meeting of ambiguous forms of coming-together in the shared geographic reality.

If, as Ingold (2014, p. 216) writes, “to inhabit it [a house] is to join in the gathering”, this coming-together-with in conviviality is the emergence of more-than-human co-dwelling. With the unfolding of being-of-the-Earth and being-in-the-Earth, being-at-home becomes an epiphenomenon of the geographies traced in the metamorphic lines between the bodily variants of humans and non-humans, living and non-living, dynamic and inert. It is the pluritopic arrangements of forms of partnerships, of feeling-with others that give rise to the telluric anima mundi whereby places are inscribed into co-dwellings.

Imagining and becoming immersed in homes, as Alam, McGregor and Houston (2020, p. 17) urged, “involves interactions with a range of non-human leafy, furry, living and non-living bodies co-habiting fringe ecologies”. Intertwining junctions between more-than-human multiplicities permeate the emergences of co-living and of dwelling that erupts between the fissures of dialogues that go beyond the barriers of species. As the study by Pitt (2017) exemplified, it is impossible to think about the homes of human beings without considering co-dwelling with vegetable gardens, gardens and various other human-plant reciprocities. Similarly, as prompted by Van Patter (2023), we cannot consider urbanism and ignore the rhythms and corporeality of the various other species of non-human animals that cohabit cities.

Overcoming speciesism in the conception of place involves repositioning our gaze toward these forms of co-dwelling that involve and go beyond human homes. Given that dwelling is of experiential significance on a foundational level of phenomenal situationality, as confirmed by Marratto (2012), co-dwelling is its radicalized extension to indistinguishing between the singular and plural experienced at the very heart of places. The geographical consequence of experiencing intersubjective intersections arising from the intertwining of more-than-human worlds emerges in the weaving of bodily variations shrouded in networks of shared affectivities at the core of places.

This occurs because intercorporeality is the basic nexus of dwelling, whether in the imaginative or material forms of home-place. The affective ecologies involved in this dynamic deposit meanings through the encounters and flows between human and non-human bodies (Alam; Mcgregor; Houston, 2020). Places of co-dwelling become mixed within intercorporeal forms of co-dwelling that arrange symphonies of being-in-the-world in which the most diverse entities are brought into interactions.

Highlighting co-dwelling is a way of bringing to light the housing entanglements that demonstrate the points of contact of shared consciousness between the bodily schemes of various entities. As Toadvine (2013) revealed, understood from the ecophenomenological perspective, intentionality itself is an expression of the body (whether human or not) and of nature in its most comprehensive existential cohesion and transcendent to the hegemonic mechanism of modern sciences.

It is in this sense that I consider it fundamental to reiterate that, in symmetry to the physical-chemical intertwining of life, “man must also be taken in the Ineinander [interlocking] with animality and Nature”, as described by Merleau-Ponty (2000, p. 335). This signifies that it is essential to go beyond human exceptionalism and consider its reciprocities, similarities and convergences with the non-human worlds with which it interacts.

Thus, there is a differentiated identity concomitant with an identification difference that enfolds the co-inhabitants of places into heterogeneous arrangements. In this interlocked co-dwelling, the animality of human beings – i.e., the primal condition of interembodied, intersubjective nature – positions the lived worlds in relational horizontalities of other-than-human experiences of the entities that share the places in links of affective reciprocities. In the face of anthropocentric Cartesianism, this animal principle situates the reality of human beings as just one among infinite other possible and effective variations of sentient emergences of being-in-Earth.

Guided by Merleau-Pontian incitements, Dufourcq (2014, p. 73) explained that “animality, or, better yet, animals, play, a key role in the fundamental structures of the world, of any world and of all thought”. In other words, echoes from the reversibility of animality are intrinsic to the condition of being-in-the-world, and there is no way for the authority of a solipsistic logos to disincarnate this primal relationship. As a result of the inseparability of the more-than-human dimension present in humans themselves, animal reversibility is located in places, being positioned as intercorporeal and intersubjective expressions of Earthly co-dwelling.

Merleau-Ponty (2000, p.3 08) explains that “what exists are not separate animals but an interanimality” that includes and exceeds our sociocultural dynamics. As the ecophenomenological interpretation of this Merleau-Pontian conception clarifies, non-human animals are integrated and have connections with the places they inhabit (James, 2009). Indeed, they are often more familiar with the environment than human beings. The bonds of these non-human animals should not be reduced to an instinctive or biological action, since, as discussed by Abram (1996), they also involve intentionalities and affective associations arising from their sentience. More than a habitat or environment, this connection resounds in the emergence of places infused with definitions, meanings and affects resulting from the housing portrayal of these embodied beings.

More-than-human insurgencies are participants in the arrangements of meanings permeated by the primal reversibility of the heterogeneous life-worlds of places. This may be evidenced by the way in which even the human imagination tends to be “first provoked and infused by the earthly place where we dwell, or by the wider terrain wherein we circulate” (Abram, 2010, p. 268, emphasis in original). More than an inspiration, more-than-human co-dwellings flow between sociocultural imaginaries as ways of evoking the interanimality to which they are inherent.

Through this ecophenomenological principle, the unfolding of place-making, as an opening of co-dwelling, is a multi-species practice and shared by infinite combinations of terrestrial variations. Reversibilities, especially those converging on interanimality, make up the homes seeded by and within geographic reality. These articulations weave the intertwining (in)visibilities in which the convivialities of more-than-human co-dwelling affect places, depend on places and emerge in places. Decerning the seams of more-than-human worlds involves recognizing the impossibility of extensively discerning what would be the primal where of beings-on-and-of-the-Earth as well as the places they have composed.

Weaving together geographies of more-than-human intentionalities of co-dwelling makes it possible to understand that, in accordance with Abram’s ecophenomenological provocation (Abram, 2010, p. 132), “each place has its rhythms of change and metamorphosis, its specific style of expanding and contracting in response to the turning seasons, and this, too, shapes—and is shaped by—the sentiment of that land”. The irradiations of meanings from the untamed phenomenality of places are resonances arising from feeling-with more-than-human affects.

By weaving forms of coming-together, places of co-dwelling express webs of (in)visible interdependencies in which geographic reality is experienced. At the untamed core of the emplaced situation, living in the place implies being in contact with the more-than-human temporalities of circadian cycles, tidal rhythms, moon phases and the translation motion of the planet, among many others, which dynamize intercorporeal languages that directly influence the emergence of place-making phenomena.

By relegating these links to a secondary level as being “irrational”, “beliefs” or “common sense”, Western mechanisms have individualized living and transformed the Earth into a dead, frozen whole so that it could be segmented in order to be appropriated. This process has created splits in the sensitive fabric of the more-than-human geographies that shape the directions and destinies of being-in-and-of-the-Earth: the intercorporeities and intersubjectivities that weave the conditions together for our coming-together.

Encircling geographies of terrestrial co-dwelling

In the flow of terrestrial co-dwelling and in the construction of ways of co-living that face the hegemonic anthropocentrism imposed by Western civilizations, it is essential to be willing to (re)learn how to co-dwell in places. It is essential to pay heed to the call of Krenak's philosophy from indigenous peoples (Krenak, 2022, p.101) when stating that “our sociability needs to be rethought beyond human beings, it has to include bees, armadillos, whales, dolphins. My great teachers in life are a constellation of beings – human and non-human.”

Being open to the intersections of places cohabited by more-than-human worlds in compositions that converge through their porosities involves recognizing their intentions and, over and above, their rights to exist and to have their subjectivities considered. By transcending to anthropomorphize the variations of coming-together as beings-of-and-on-the Earth, it is essential to horizontalize the coexistences, reversibilities and insensitivities of geographic experiences in all their untamed scopes of intersubjectivities, intercorporeities and interanimalities.

Lorimer explained (Lorimer, 2010) that ensuring a voice and an ear for the relationships that flow between humans and non-humans, requires recalibrating interactions when seeking new levels of intimacy, acceptance and connectivity with the forces of nature in which we are immersed. Geographies of co-dwelling may weave plurivalent trails with shared understandings of existential meanings in which the geographic reality of places emerges with all its more-than-human powers.

Co-dwelling in a place is to entwine the flow of geographies that are woven together by the webs of presences and temporalities, which bring together the intersubjectivities of multiple forms of coming-to-be. Vegetation, rocks, animals, fungi, bacteria, atmospheric phenomena and many other interembodied emergences merge as forces that resignify and compose shared geographic experiences.

This situation may be exemplified in the studies by Silva and Vargas (2023), which have revealed the sense of place and more-than-human care of farmers who are guardians of Creole seeds in the semi-arid region of the Brazilian state of Alagoas. It may also be evidenced in the multi-species relationships between traditional French winemakers and the “yeast symphonies” interpreted by Chartier (2021). In both examples, the authors highlight multi-species cohabitational relationships in which fungi, plants, atmospheric and plant phenomena are integral parts of the more-than-human places analyzed.

As the aforementioned studies suggest, weaving pathways toward geographies of co-dwelling involves recognizing that homes are not limited to domestic spaces, since their borders and scales cross-pollinate toward the originating arc of the Earth. It is through interactions with this originating telluric space that relationships of care, exchange, and negotiations with entities other than human converge in places taken over by co-dwelling nexuses.

Soil and primordial habitation, the Earth is the primal where through which the typographies of existence are woven together with the ontogenesis of the concreteness of the worlds that emerge from within it. Being-with in the terrestrial sensory world “is a condition of possibility for inhabiting any given region, any particular place, of that earth or world” (Casey, 2005, p. xxi). Each phenomenon derives from the veins of this geographic reality cohabited in shared sentience, demonstrating that more-than-human worlds are expressions of these fundamental relationships with telluric space.

Dardel (2011, p. 43) highlights this foundational dimension by highlighting that “it is the Earth, we may say, that stabilizes existence”. The terrestrial typographies, which make up the core of geographicity, are a result of the coming-together that arises from sharing the basal soil that founds and buries the phenomena. According to Cavalcante (2021), experiences of place can emerge in sensitive expressions of geographic insurgencies. Human and non-human existences gravitate toward the untamed telluric space that allows them to emerge in weaves of being-with, of exchanges, sharing and tensions intrinsic to terrestrial co-dwelling.

Dufourcq (2012, p. 292) explained that by understanding the Earth as an ontological arc of experience, it is possible to envision “a game of metamorphoses open to infinity, which encompasses all things in advance without leaving them absolutely predictable and transparent”. Telluric ontogenesis implies resistance and dehiscence, which make every dwelling a co-dwelling of (in)visibilities, (in)tangibilities and the (un)sayability of a flow of intentionalities, in which a certain original ambiguity makes it impossible to decide how each sentient emergence is distinguished from one another.

In its primal dimension, Earth's anima mundi unfolds the founding virtuality of the sense of coming-to-inhabit. As Echeverri and Muños (2014, p. 22) revealed “it is the rootedness of the land, in the land and on the land that enables poetic inhabitation”. Realizing co-dwelling geographies involves explaining the pathways along which the potential of shared places in more-than-human worlds may flourish.

By expanding the being-at-home to the Earth as a particular blossoming of the geographical condition of being-in-and-of-the-Earth, it may be concluded that to co-dwell and be co-dwelled by the terrestrial anima mundi is to be taken over by the pluritopic polyphonies of its entanglements. Terrestrial gravitation attracts entities in woven textures of sentience intertwined in conviviality. It is through this experiential base that it becomes possible to envision a stitchwork of sharing that enables reciprocal dynamics of being-with to flourish in more-than-human worlds.

At the core of the telluric place, exteriority or interiority are not separate items, but rather a symphonic existential intertwining that emerges in the shared phenomenon of being-in-a terrestrial home. Galvani (2005, p. 69) insisted that “dreaming of the earth as a home is to recover your interior in what was previously perceived as an exterior”, in order to blur the boundaries between inside and outside. More than interior or exterior, the sense of co-dwelling clearly discloses the inescapable character of the multi-species conditions of the more-than-human worlds.

This may be evidenced in the epistemology of the Yanomami people who consider that, in the words of Kopenawa (2021, p. 11), “Dreaming about the earth... when you dream, your thoughts are good. When we have good thoughts, clean thoughts, dreams comes.” Being-at-home terrestrially is to allow oneself to dream of co-dwelling in order to reveal sharing as the foundational locus of place. Weaving together geographies that highlight the co-dwelling dynamics of places is a way of explaining how homes unite these meanings that originate from the terrestrial soil.

As the home and founding place of the ontogenesis of co-dwelling, the Earth threads together resonances of human and non-human affects. The intentionalities intersected by the native terrestrial soil evoke the plurality of experiential sharing that “provokes us to find new ways of feeling, thinking, and speaking about the kinship among earthly denizens of all sorts beyond the fence of anthropocentrism and speciesism” (Murata-Soraci, 2018, p. 236). Architecting empathetic reciprocities with ways of being-at-home with our telluric neighbors expands the situationality of places toward the intersubjective shuffling of indirect and (in)tangible languages of co-dwelling.

This condition may be exemplified by investigating what Lima-Payayá (2023) highlighted when explaining the ways in which the geographies of the Payayá indigenous people conceive the Caatinga as a large, shared home. She argues that they conceive it as Yby, earth and ground, based on a radical alterity of collective kinship that welcomes the various non-human entities, such as rivers, trees, fish, the sun, the moon, the summer rains as founding elements of the place.

Thinking about geographies of co-dwelling is to dialogue with the provocations of Lima-Payayá (2023), Krenak (2022) and Kopenawa (2021) in order to highlight the affective capacities of different corporeities, whether they are equipped with antlers or claws, wings or paws, that express the heterogeneous flourishing of being-of-the-Earth. As Abram (2010) exemplified, although the existence of a rock may seem impervious to tropospheric phenomena, its configuration results from the creative flows of the wind, the atmosphere and the mountains that dialogue through implicit languages of cycles and resistance.

As Krenak (2022, p. 103) proposes, “beyond where each of us is born – a place, a village, a community, a city –, we are all installed in a larger organism, which is the Earth”. Recognizing the polyphony of being-in-Earth is to be open to the intersubjective (mis)encounters with non-human entities that enable us to suture the Cartesian wound that separates human beings from the relationship with Nature that nourishes us.

The lands that include us as one of their articulations have their own rhythms, logics and contours that must be duly respected so that places may emerge in their full potential (Abram, 1996). Thus, Echeverri and Muñoz (2014, p. 24) urge us to observe “every stone, every plant, every animal, every word, every thought, its body made of earth, by the earth, on the earth and beneath the earth.” Places emerge between the fissures of resistance from the original terrestrial arc, creating plural graphics of the Earth continually reconstituted by more-than-human co-dwellings.

Although each entity discovers only a part of the infinite terrestrial geographic reality, it is the same anima mundi that unties the Gordian knot of ecological fracture. It is this living Earth with which each being “engages with its fingers or its feathered wings, with its coiled antennae or its spreading roots” (Abram, 2010, p. 126) that enables the vulnerability that unites their corporeities in the co-dwelling dynamics of alterities that transcend human speciesism.

This involves highlighting how the Earth's cycles resonate through human and non-human bodies, echoing more-than-human co-dwellings that intercross the emergences of coexistence. In agreement with what Ingold (2000) put forward, these resonances are (inter)embodied in that they express the passing through of forms of coming-to-be-with in which the biological, chemical and physical dimensions of bodies are not immune to terrestrial gravitation and the finiteness of matter, to the basal vulnerability of existence.

Tuan (2012, p. 146) reaffirmed this issue by writing that “on Earth we are exposed to the brute forces of nature and society”. In other words, it is impossible to reduce the meanings of co-dwelling places to “philia” or “phobia”, although their ambiguities and intersections may be considered. These associations permeate tensions, (mis)matches, sharing, violence, care and many other expressions of the dynamic heterogeneities of being-with the multi-species arrangements of geographic reality.

Although Western cognitive tools have fused a supposedly human-nature distinction, we continue to be the flesh of this same surrounding, dynamic world, vulnerable entities as beings-of-Earth. Our homes and lives are continually threatened by forces that exceed our bodily capabilities and conditions of control over the geographic experiences of co-dwelling.

The porosities of more-than-human places result from the fact that we co-dwell in webs of entities, which are placed in multiple relationships that position us in vulnerability. In the same way that this sharing of vulnerability is inherent to the risks of finitude, of ceasing to be, it is also what allows us to be open to co-dwelling and will be co-dwelled by the places seeded in the terrestrial tessituras.

It is in this layer of interembodied solidarity that we have the ability to feel what others, human and non-human, feel (Abram, 2007). Places bring together phenomena where co-dwelling forms associative links between entities, phenomenalities and experiences that share empathetic languages of dialogue implicit in intercorporeality, interanimality and more-than-human intersubjectivities. Placing co-dwelling at the heart of the place is, therefore, a way to highlight this multiplicity of affects that weave geographies together and that include and go beyond human beings.

Binding together and the finishing touches

Place is a result of terrestrial living in all its phenomenal amplitude. Understood through the porosities of the networks of more-than-human affects, places are the woven textures of ways of being-in-and-of-the-Earth. Transcending a geography of dwelling toward geographies of co-dwelling denotes giving voice to the plurality of entities that influence the Earth's emergences and compose places within it in order to suture the Cartesian wound or division.

The shared sentience of more-than-human places demonstrates the pluralities of pathways to a coming-together between arrangements of telluric polyphonies. By articulating tessituras of co-dwelling, co-living and of the conviviality of entities with radically different bodily variations, the rhythms and cycles of place-making become effervescently evident within the flow of geographical experiences.

In this ecophenomenological direction, places are body-sensorial windows through which the Earth presents the stitchwork that weaves horizons of space and time permeated by intentionalities. The housing openings flourish into seeded fields of mixed heterogeneous expressions of arrangements of being-in-the-world. In confluence with the virtuality of place, the reciprocity of the bodies that call upon the co-dwelling spaces entwines senses that go beyond human intentionalities, in order to encompass more-than-human worlds.

Terrestrial vulnerabilities and reciprocities weave together existential horizons composed of telluric anima mundi horizons in which the inhabited space emerges. Expanding being-at-home to heterogeneous intercorporeal variations constitutes an embroidery of sensibilities and affects between human and non-human animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, rocks, atmospheres and all other (in)visible presences that co-dwell on the Earth.

In the face of hegemonic divisions between culture and nature, extending the concept of place toward the experiences of more-than-human worlds may make it possible to decenter hegemonic anthropocentrism. There is an urgency to recognize the multiple other intentionalities that co-dwell on the Earth and their articulated ways of making-place so that we may weave geographies that bring forth the reciprocities of being-in-the-world in intercorporealities, intersubjectivities, and interanimalities.

• 1
  This and all other non-English citations hereafter, have been translated by the author.

• How to cite this article:

  SOUZA JÚNIOR, C. B. Toward geographies of co-dwelling: weaving more-than-human places. Geousp, v. 28, n. 2, e217863. 2024. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-0892.geousp.2024.217863en

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Edited by

Article editor

Rodrigo Ramos Hospodar Felippe Valverde

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Sept 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  24 Jan 2024
• Accepted
  11 May 2024