Yearnings for Guácharo Cave: affect, absence, and science in Venezuelan speleology

Abstract

As a member of Venezuela's first national society of cave exploration and science (speleology), Ramón Alberto Hernández participated in the exploration and survey of Venezuela's famous Guácharo Cave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite his key contributions to the knowledge of this cave and many others in the country, his contributions have received little attention. With an ethnographic account of his last visit to Guácharo Cave in 2008 as focus, this article offers a glimpse into Venezuela's geographies of science at an important historical moment in the relation among individuals, the nation, science, and modernity. It does so from Hernández's vantage point, as he yearns to reach a particular point inside of the cavern, a point where his life and the lives of other cave explorers who overshadowed his speleological contributions, the cavern, and my own history become entangled. Building on scholarship that emphasizes absence and hope as important aspects of experience, I focus on this yearning, this emergent, relational, and transformative capacity that animates and constitutes not just these entangled histories and identities but also beings and the cave itself. In the process, I illustrate the ways scientific knowledge and national modernity are co-produced. Beyond Hernández, beyond caves, this exploration reminds us of the need to (1) examine the ways affective attachments are formed in/with extraordinary places and (2) widen our understanding of materiality and presence to encompass absence. Finally, this work illustrates the centrality of yearnings in fieldwork and writing.

Filling the hole? On new geographies of the subsurface

“…This is particularly true when we add a variety of cultural formations to the realms of the political and economic outlined above. María Alejandra Pérez (2013Pérez ( , 2015Pérez ( , 2016Pérez ( , 2021 describes a variety of scientific endeavors, geopolitical relations, and mapping exercises emerging from caving societies and expeditions in Latin America. What makes this work especially compelling is an emphasis on attending to the social thickness or complexity of relations, which extends well beyond the surface/ subsurface distinction.…”

Cultural geographies II: In the critical zone? – Environments, landscapes and life

“…Nigel Clark (2018), for example, has written of 'an Earth turned inside out', less an assertion of a gaze turned downward, than a volumetric reimagining of the world. This resonates with the litany of subsurface spaces drawing cultural geographers' attention, from caves and bunkers, to magma chambers, volcanoes and active faults (Clark, 2019;Clark et al, 2018;Jaramillo, 2016;Pérez, 2016Pérez, , 2021. Key to cultural geography's orientation toward the subsurface has been the place of the geological imagination within the Anthropocene, not least Kathryn Yusoff's (2019) attention to geology's extractive and racialised grammars.…”

Richwood, West Virginia after the 2016 Flood: Place, Devastation, and Hope in an Appalachian Community

“…She specifically studies "content oriented" hopes as "hopes for particular things" and how hope "express anticipations and aspirations that actively infuse peoples' conduct" (Sliwinski 2016, 432). She discusses hope in the context of different possible futures that people place value on and also in terms of how hope itself can change a space or the actions of people (Pérez 2016;Sliwinski 2016). This theoretical approach concerning the role of hope is valuable because it links individual action, hopes for the future, and the anticipation of places that will address people's precarity.…”

“…"The disposition of hope is best defined as a relation of suspension that discloses the future as open whilst enabling a seemingly paradoxical capacity to dwell more intensely in points of divergence within encounters that diminish" (Anderson 2006, 747). Another example within the geographic literature that addresses emotion is María Pérez's work in discussing yearning and its connection to hope and the future (Pérez 2016). "Yearning is about being alive in this world, a world that includes absences, remembrances of the past, and hopes for the future" (Pérez 2016, 13).…”

“…They are moved to make things better. This is a hope based on action, a yearning (Pérez 2016). People from the town have fought and even hired lawyers to work towards the future they hope to see for their children.…”