Rooted Networks, Webs of Relation, and the Power of Situated Science: Bringing the Models Back Down to Earth in Zambrana

Abstract

We all live in emergent ecologies-complex assemblages of plants, animals, people, physical landscape features, and technologies-created through the habit-forming practices of connection in everyday life. We both inhabit and co-create these ecologies of home, often without being able to "see" them clearly. We live in networks of the sort defined by Bruno Latour (2005) as in the assemblages above, yet we are also rooted in specific territories and geographic locations, often several simultaneously and in series. We are both denizens and artisans of the hybrid geographies described by Sarah Whatmore (2002). Human beings are likewise entangled in several related formulations of contemporary nature/culture (Braun and Castree 1998), described variously as meshworks