Dans la dernière livraison des articles à paraître dans l'excellente revue Environment and Planning A (voir lien à droite), soulignons celui de Ben Anderson et John Wylie, "On Geography and Materiality" qui insiste sur le pluralisme de la matérialité pour réagir aux différents appels pour une rematérialisation de la géographie qui dérivent trop souvent, selon les auteurs d'une conception réductrice de la matérialité. Je vais citer un extrait de la conclusion pour clarifier la chose :
"it is apparent from the very word `rematerialise' that notions of a return, a turning away, and a recoiling from a scarily immaterial cultural spectre, a shade too clever by half, are at work here. Once upon a time, the phrase rematerialise suggests, human geography had its feet more firmly on the ground. It is important to note, then, that in one sense matter and materiality are not really at issue here, that these terms remain untheorised, or invoke but a rhetoric of physicality (Kearnes, 2003). Ironically, therefore, matter and materiality are in fact being used to represent or signify something else 'raw' corporeality, for instance, or a vogue for notions of performance and embodiment, or an object fetishism, or in extremis, a belief that social rather than cultural geography should be paramount, and that human geography must be an empirical social science. (...) materiality is never apprehensible in just one state, nor is it static or inert. Materiality is not glue, binding and holding other, less material, things (social relations, cultural meanings) together. Informing this paper is a more complex and positive decree that materiality is always already scored across states (solid, liquid, gaseous) and elements (air, fire, water, earth). As such, as variously turbulent, interrogative, and excessive, materiality is perpetually beyond itself."
Je renverrais également au débat sur la matérialité dans Archeological Dialogues (2007, vol. 14, no. 1) entre Tim Ingold, Daniel Miller, Christopher Tilley, Carl Knappett, Björn Nilsson.
