Geografía de los animales: construcción filosófica de una subdisciplina científica a través de su historia

Animal geography, a subdiscipline that cuts across different specialties of human geography, reflects on spatiality in the interactions between human and non-human  animals. However, the understanding of these interactions depends on whether humanism or post-humanism serves as the philosophical basis for analysis. In humanism, zoogeography and cultural geography observe “animals” from an anthropocentric perspective, to the point of considering them “natural resources”. In post-humanism, the “new geography of animals” and the “critical geography of animals” study the spatial relation between human and non-human animals, assuming that neither is essentially superior. This leads to the aspiration for different relations of interaction within a new ethics of environmental responsibility that asserts the capacities of “sentience” and self-awareness of the animal world as a whole. On the basis of a hermeneutic methodology, the article analyzes the discursive transformations that have led to the constitution of animal geography from both the humanist and the posthumanist perspectives. It concludes that animal geography is already consolidated academically and that there is an increasing tendency to include non-anthropocentric ethical aspects in its analyses. Main Ideas: Review paper based on diatopic hermeneutics that discusses the discourses that make up animal geography: “zoogeography” and “cultural geography”, both based on humanist philosophy, and the “new geography of animals” and the “critical geography of animals”, grounded in post-humanist philosophy.