‘That’s the way to do it!’: establishing the peculiar geographies of puppetry

Abstract

This paper initiates a new area of cultural geography – the geographies of puppets and puppetry – and makes both empirical and conceptual contributions by presenting an initial analysis of puppets in popular culture. The paper begins by highlighting the paucity of disciplinary interest in puppets and the productive potential of puppets and puppetry for a range of sub-disciplines within human geography. A content analysis of 50 films, television programmes and fictional texts is presented, through which a dimensional model of puppets in popular culture is developed to stimulate further work in this area. Utilitarian (role and extent), relational (individual and social) and qualitative (puppetness and ontology) dimensions describe the many and varied ways in which puppets are used in popular culture. The diverse spaces that are created in such works through the interrogation of the human-puppet relationship are explored, with more extreme interpretations of puppetness generating the most peculiar – unique and strange – geographies. Subsequently, the cultural analysis is related to conceptual developments from geographical work on comics and cartoons to advance a conceptual contribution. Integrating and inverting notions of borderscape and topological gulf accommodates the simultaneous maintenance and elimination of human-puppet distinctiveness found to be essential to the peculiar geographies of puppetry.