Abstract

Few things are, at first glance, as present as the weather. Our everyday lives are inescapably shaped by the daily weather and its changes. Extreme weather events—heatwaves, floods, storms, etc.—bring everyday life to a halt and feature prominently in news reports as part of the narrative arc of the climate crisis. Inspired in part by work in phenomenological anthropology (Ingold; Vannini), cultural geographers have recently turned to weather as a medium of everyday lived experience; as a paradigmatic example of the more-than-representational; as a site where the elements, affect, and meaning are entangled with one another (Edensor et al.; Endfield; Engelmann; Hulme; McCormack). Historical geographers have further interrogated the history of meteorology and other weather knowledges as tied up with the projects of colonialism and imperialism (Adamson; Grossman; Mahony; Naylor).

In this talk, I interrogate the nature of weather’s presence in these accounts. My starting point is weather’s relation to health—how changes in weather influence both our physical and mental states. As the historical examples I discuss will show, the nature of this influence was and remains contested. Attuning to its historical and cultural specificity reveals that the nature of weather, body, and mind changes over time and in relation to each other. In other words, there is no stable, ahistorical reference point or medium called “weather” that influences “the body” or “the mind.” Instead, I argue, weather and the body/mind become differentially legible in relation to each other through distinct meteorological assemblages that sustain them as well as wider social and moral orders.

Drawing briefly on the theoretical work of Michel Serres and Jacques Derrida, I explore these assemblages through the different scales (and volumes) at which they operate, namely the celestial, synoptic, and spectral/subcutaneous. Each assemblage, featuring examples ranging from early medical astrology to twentieth-century German medical meteorology, testifies to the impossibility of rendering weather fully present.