Psychogeography came to exist because you can live in a city and still go searching for it. Nearly seventy-five years ago, Guy Debord and the Situationists defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” It was an avant-garde practice, notably employing dérive (drift), whose goal was to liberate city-dwellers from the forms of alienation imposed by urban planning and spectacle. Today, the term “psychogeography” continues to pop up in contemporary literature and art, where fieldwork-inspired essays, art installations, and performances have taken particular interest in the question of everyday spaces and rhythms in the city. This chapter traces the roots of this radical, topo-analytical tradition from the nineteenth-century flâneur, up through contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists such as Iain Sinclair, Philippe Vasset, Patrick Keiller, and Sophie Calle. Psychogeography remains appealing today because of its intransigent, topophilic wager that alienation from one’s built environment can be dispelled if only one can re-envision or recreate one’s relationship to space and place.

Seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias exemplified the multiracial life of imperial Iberian port cities. Few European doctors served the newly cosmopolitan areas of the empire that fostered alarming new experiences of climate, disease, and injury. Surgeons and herbalists of African descent competed for Iberian clients and played significant roles in defining the spaces of a port city vulnerable to all sorts of invasion. Europeans entrusted their ill bodies to casta healers while fearing death at the hands of those healers’ colleagues, who might be motivated to revenge by the slave system or by the internal tensions of European politics or marriages. This essay teases out the gendered competition among casta surgeons and herbalists who told stories with their words and movements through hospitals, jails, city walls, neighborhoods, churches, and homes of the port city. It draws especially on the trials of herbalist Paula de Eguiluz and surgeon Diego Lopez whose stories allay and arouse the fears of the Iberians they lived with and treated.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.