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pot, others were sold on for a living, and others died just for the fun of their killers,
landing dead on the marsh and staying there. And still others ended up in the Castle
Museum, Norwich, to be kept by keeper Ted Ellis and installed in diaromas of the
Norfolk landscape created between 1931 and 1936 under his direction (Stone 1988:
52). I remember being taken as a child to this 'Norfolk Room', with its scenes of
coast and marsh populated by local birds I had neither seen nor looked for; Ellis had
set up the displays as a site for the education of young and old local citizens about
their local nature.
These differential fates of dead birds, migrating even after death through space
and time, reflect and reproduce different human cultures, different versions of the
animal—human. If one does not fundamentally object to the killing of animals,
then such reflections might form part of an animal geography which does not
necessarily begin with matters of rights or welfare. The latter are important driving
forces for much work in this field, but they do not exhaust the motivation or
ambition of such inquiry. This chapter has taken one regional culture of the animal,
where regional nature is formed in relation to other scales of being and authority;
different forms of and claims to national and local expertise. Different versions of the
animal—human reflect and shape contesting cultures of nature and region, with
specific animals taking particular symbolic roles, their nativeness or alienness
refracting different normative senses of cultural ecology. Subject and object are
enfolded here in ways which make it impossible to figure ways of being human
outside of relations to the non-human environment. This may be an obvious point
to make from the Broadland material in this chapter, where human conduct is a
matter of self-conscious self-formation through relations with environment, but one
could extend this general argument to anyone and anywhere, including situations
where human self-formation claims a subjectivity formed outside of or despite
environment. Such claims remain a matter of relational geosubjectivity, even if the
relation is that of rejection or retreat. In Broadland, though, we have found figures
such as Day and Ellis consciously and enthusiastically making themselves, and the
nature—culture of the region, through their relation to the non-human, especially
the non-human animal but also the vegetable and mineral; looking, touching,
testing, killing, stuffing, listening, tasting, via various technologies and techniques, all
operating through and Producing claims to authority within and over the region. If
the Norfolk Broads are a site where such matters have been especially acute given
the tight interweaving of local ecology and economy, parallel stories might be found
in any region, with different animals and different humans in conjunction, making
for different versions of animal—human.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the annual Institute of British
Geographers conference at Exeter in January 1997, and to a workshop in the School
of Geography at the University of Nottingham. Thanks to all those who provided
comments on each occasion. I would also like to thank the extremely helpful staff of
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