The “Fin du Globe?”: Rites of Space at a Shrine of Geography

Recent studies have demonstrated the perceived agency of geographical instruments in creating spatio-temporally particular ideas, images, and models. Connecting histories of scientific instruments with those of popular science and literature, the paper considers how instruments and images, including cosmograms, shaped the ontological and epistemological dimensions of knowledge-making and -presenting practices that were favoured by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and how they transformed both fin-de siècle environments and landscapes of knowledge by fostering exploration, imperialism, and geography's academic professionalization. In examining decadent planetarity at the RGS, this article connects these changes to the fetishization of maps, photos, globes, and magic lanterns. The uses of these instruments excited publics and prompted the RGS's engagement with anthropogeography and anthropology. The lantern's sleights of hand in the name of science up to, and during, the notionally modern era of special relativity and cinema engendered visions of the world whilst sparking the extermination of others' worlds which complicated understandings of Anthropocenic planetarity.