| This dissertation addresses two conceptual problems in geographical study. The first and most overarching is the problem of describing the constitution of nature-society relations. The second is showing that to understand those relations it is helpful to think of them as existing spatially. Addressing these conceptual problems is achieved by analyzing the process of digestion as rendered at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan during the years 1890-1900. The sanitarium was a health resort directed by John Harvey Kellogg, older brother of the breakfast cereal magnate William Keith Kellogg. Here diagnosis and cure centered on the workings of the digestive system and eating the "proper" diet. To fully understand digestion in this period, however, it is best seen as a process that was technological as much as it was biological. The material connections between the bodies of sanitarium guests with various machines and infrastructures, therefore, are described throughout the chapters, offering a solution to how geographers might conceive of nature-society relations. To address the second theoretical geographical problem, the analysis (denotatively the "separation of a whole into its parts") of the digestive system means that the "parts" of the digestive system are categorized spatially. Accordingly, the story of digestion in Battle Creek begins at the sanitarium, then moves through the city itself, ending in the rural upper Midwest where the health food was produced. Machines including grain rollers, air vents, water works and sewerage systems, colonic machines, steam-powered threshers, and seed warehouses are mapped as necessary components of digestion in this time and place. This contributes to a methodology for writing an historical geography that is founded in spatial description as much if not more so than causal narrative. In this, it is an attempt to revitalize and renew the longstanding tradition of regional geography using current theories of "assemblages" and relational space. |
