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Performing Place in Nature Reserves

The concept of place has had a difficult time over the last two decades. In previous incarnations, it has been a defining concept in traditions of geography. Conventional academic conceptualizations of place, however, have become moribund, tending to be blind to trans-local processes and the inequalities that result from them. Place as it has been dominantly formulated in academic discourse has recently been judged as too sedentary, static and parochial for social sciences that are increasingly concerned with tracing the flows, processes and hybridity of subjects, identities and spaces (see, for example, Doel, 1999). This chapter grapples with changing notions of place, arguing that place, if it is seen as relationally performed, can enjoy a revitalization that incorporates suggestions of flows, mobility, and hybridity of meaning. Using the vocabulary of performance enables an alternative notion of place—as an emergent effect of a complex mix of relations incorporating human subjects and agential nonhuman nature. There have been various attempts to revive place as an analytical approach. Doreen Massey (1991; 1993) made an influential contribution, through her articulation of an outward looking ‘progressive sense of place’, which recognizes the contingency and porosity of the boundaries of places, and the networks of social relations in which they exist. From perspectives focusing more upon the hybridity and relationality of place, theorists including Nigel Thrift (1999) and Kevin Hetherington (1997) have made their own contributions to re-invigorated discussion of place. My engagement with the process of revitalizing the concept is through an exploration of place as an emergent effect of heterogeneous relationships, distributed across conventional boundaries between entities as well as through space and time. I develop this account through an exploration of some of the diverse ways in which place is performed in the distinctive context of nature reserves. Nature reserves can appear as very ‘local’ spaces. The particular mix of animals and plants that characterize a reserve are a specific effect of the interplay of complex physical processes in a locality. These of course include ecological processes such as climate, soils and topography, but these are also intertwined with the local practices of humans as they have worked the land over generations. In an overcrowded land like the UK, many nature reserves also