Elemental lives

This chapter explores cultural geographical scholarship on elemental materials, forces, and particles in the making and unmaking of life. The chapter begins by examining the proposition that the elements are alive. As cultural geographers investigate the liveliness of elements, what are they revealing about their own elemental ontologies – which ‘ways of being’ are they recognising as elemental? In this chapter, I follow the guidance of Indigenous scholars who warn against the capture and erasure of Indigenous ontologies in Euro-American, anglophone scholarship, including in scholarship on the liveliness and animacy of the elements. I turn to linguistic, queer and disability rights scholar Mel Chen in approaching cultural geographies of the elements through a critical framework of ‘differential animacies’. The latter half of the chapter follows this framework to examine permutations of elemental life in cultural geography: how cultural geographers are engaging the elements as forces; as uncontainable, mobile, leaky matters; and as surprising, uncanny modes of transmutation and transformation.