Hybrid Geographies

Geography has long been characterized as an integrative field—a hybrid discipline that combines elements of the natural and social sciences. With contributions from the humanities and social theory, more explicit considerations of hybrid geographies have attracted increasing critical attention. This trend represents both a new set of concepts in response to new technologies and conditions as well as a renewed embrace of one of the oldest ideas in geography—that simultaneous inquiry of social and natural elements can provide important insights.

At their most basic, hybrid geographies are places, organisms, or other entities that cannot or should not be readily characterized by any single category. As the term hybrid denotes, these places or things feature elements from multiple origins to the extent that they can only properly be considered as new and often rather fluid kinds. In this respect, the study of hybrid geographies represents an effort to depart from common dualisms found in geography and other fields.

In fact, hybrid geographies signify new kinds of places or entities, new ontologies, as well as new ways of generating knowledge to conceptualize these new kinds. This epistemological turn presents something of a conundrum: In its deepest form, the study of hybrid geographies calls for the obliteration of prior categories such as nature/society, local/global, inside/outside, or natural/artifactual to instead recognize associations, networks, or mixed qualities that resist traditional dualisms. While this effort to find alternative frameworks appeals to geographers who oppose labels such as “physical” or “human” to delimit their field's principal perspectives, a determined effort to defy categorization can also lead to problems of linguistic or conceptual clarity. Hybrid geographies therefore can seem rather elusive or even provide ironic reminders that categories and dualisms are often created for the very practical purpose of simplifying complex ideas.

Describing places as hybrid geographies is, at least initially, the most obvious and intuitive aspect of a much broader project. Relating to critical studies of landscape, a number of scholars emphasize that cities, farmlands, wildlife refuges, and even wilderness areas are not only natural or social spaces but that these can all be considered sites of synthesis where human and nonhuman agency conspire and coalesce. In this view, landscapes are not merely an array of physical objects but rather dynamic places built through social activities, economies, and values as well as environmental conditions.

This integration across potentially disparate categories may be very apparent or quite subtle, but in either case, such blending can be seen as a form of hybridization. Cities may seem at a glance to consist purely of human elements: asphalt and concrete, glass, steel, and mechanization; but a closer look, inevitably, also reveals nonhuman elements such as terrain, watercourses, plants, wildlife, or weather. Similarly, on careful inspection, “natural” places such as wildlife refuges or wilderness areas reveal complex generative histories of human use, management, regulation, and mapping.

If pursued vigorously, this integrative consideration of landscapes can be extended to virtually any setting to make a case for hybridity. After all, with advances in technology, we can [Page 1503]now detect industrial residues in the most remote icefields on the planet and synthetic chemicals in the cord blood of newborn babies. In the face of retreating glaciers or the early onset of puberty in children, it may be only appropriate to reconsider these and many other disparate contexts as hybrid geographies of inseparable natural and social production.

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