Cultural geography III: Objects of culture and humanity, or, re-"thinging' the Anthropocene landscape

Unless they are to suddenly evaporate, material objects, endowed with varying capacities to move through the ages, are matters of time as well as of space. Long-term perspectives - from the historical to the geological - have been engaged by cultural geographers as a means of shedding light on linked discursive and material transformations, offering useful vantage points on the temporalities of human (and inhuman) existence through the existence of things'. In this third and final report, I identify confluences of research taking shape around two distinct kinds of scenes' which embody a range of approaches to problems of culture and materialism: the naming of the Anthropocene; and the persistence of landscape as a spatial model for holding things together'. Calling attention to the intermingled quality of materiality with immaterial things' and temporal dynamics, the review highlights the persistent need for cultural analysis of complex and contested social worlds, and emphasizes the value of cultural geographic research in addressing problems of human subjectivity at a moment when the distinctly human can no longer be taken for granted.