The Dictionary of Human Geography (12 page)

authenticity
The genuineness, trustworthi ness and accuracy of an object or an account. Human geographers have addressed the issue of authenticity in relation to a whole raft of questions from identity politics (e.g. the gendered self) to our understanding of and relationship with nature. In all cases there has been a shift away from an essentialist concept of the authentic (cf. essentiALism) to a more partial, constructed and situated no tion of what passes as authentic (Whatmore, 2002a). Rather than presenting a foundation alist account of authenticity, human geograph ers are tracing how particular versions of (NEW PARAGRAPH) authenticity get played out in the knowledge making practices of specific times and places (Livingstone, 2003c). nj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Livingstone (2003c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
azimuth
The azimuth is the horizontal (?on the ground?) angle between a given direction and some line of reference (a meridian). Imagine that you stand looking northwards along the Grand Meridian (zero degrees lon gitude) at Greenwich, England the official starting point for each new day. A bird flies nearby and you turn your feet towards its shadow on the ground. The angle you have rotated defines the azimuth. Because that angle usually is measured with a compass, azimuth is synonymous with bearing. But be warned if travelling to the North Pole the azimuth you should follow is not magnetic north! rh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Robinson, Morrison, Muehrcke, Guptill and Kimerling (1993)
back-to-the-city movement
A term usually indicating repopulation of cities by former suburban residents. The perception of a back to the city movement has, since the 1990s, been influenced by media reports and some research studies that indicate, advocate, and/or celebrate the return of mostly affluent class fractions to some inner city neighbour hoods (Florida, 2002). The term is, then, closely associated with discussions of gentrifi cation Recent research in the USA cautions that most residential migration still involves suburbanization or counter urbanization and notes that we are far from seeing a wide spread back to the city movement (Kasarda, Appold, Sweeney and Sieff, 1997). em (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kasarda, Appold, Sweeney and Sieff (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
balkanization
The fragmentation of a larger political entity into smaller, mutually hostile units. The term originates from the geopolit ics of national self determination in a con text of continental power rivalries in the Balkans at the end of the nineteenth century. The term returned to prominence with the break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and was brought to bear upon other states, especially Russia. Balkanization has been used as a meta phor for immigration patterns into the USA producing a spatial and social segmentation of the population (Frey, 1996: see segregation). Such usage has been contested for its negative connotations (Ellis and Wright, 1998). cf (NEW PARAGRAPH)
bare life ('naked life')
Life that is excluded from political participation, and so can be abandoned to violence and death without recrimination or penalty. The emphasis on exclusion and abandonment is vital: ?bare life? is not a given but is socially produced. Agamben (1998) claims that classical Greek philosophy made a vital distinction between political life (bios) and merely existent, bio logical life (zoe): and, as he uses the term, bare life is actively poised between the two. To show how vulnerable such a position is, Agamben locates the production of bare life at the intersection oftwo distinctive modalities of power: sovereign power and biopower. (NEW PARAGRAPH) His thesis is a double critique of Michel (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault?s theses on biopolitics, disciplinary (NEW PARAGRAPH) power and governmentality. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agamben refuses Foucault?s historical trajectory. Foucault (1981a[1976], p. 141) argued that a crucial junction between modernity and capitalism was the novel ?entry of life into history? that took place in eighteenth century Europe, whereas Agamben insists that ?the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original if con cealed nucleus of sovereign power?: in other words, for Agamben this is a pro cess with a much longer history (which is why he returns to classical philosophy). What characterizes political modernity for Agamben is then the ?coincidence? of bare life with the political realm, but a coincidence that is profoundly contra dictory: bare life is no longer at the margins of the political order, in fact it becomes a central object of political calculation, but it is also excluded from its deliberations (Mills, 2004, p. 46). It is by no means clear that Foucault and Agamben mean the same thing by ?life?, but the bearers of Agamben?s ?bare life? are political objects not political subjects: they are wilfully exposed to violence and death because they are treated as though they do not matter so that, col lectively, they become so many versions of homo sacer. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agamben twists Foucault?s spatial tem plate. His account turns not on strategies through which the normal order contains and confines its ?outside? the sick, the mad, the criminal, the deviant but on strategies through which the ?outside? is included ?by the suspension of the jurid ical order?s validity by letting the jurid ical order withdraw from the exception and abandon it?. Agamben argues that this space of exception (see exception, space of) is typically produced through martial law and a state of emergency, which then become the ground through which sovereign power constitutes and extends itself. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agamben treats the camp as the exemplary locus of the production of bare life. He does not confine the camp to particular locations, but other writers have seen the production of bare life in the plight of refugees in Kosovo (Edkins, 2003), in the contemporary ?war on terror? in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq and its global war prison (Gregory, 2004b, 2006b), in post colonial violence in Rwanda and Zimbabwe (Sylvester, 2006), and in post Katrina New Orleans (Braun and McCarthy, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . The disposition to abandon people in this way, visible in early and late capitalism, has economic and well as political coordinates, and these imperatives have been vigorously reasserted under the sign of neo liberalism (cf. Bauman, 2004). dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sylvester (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) barrio A Spanish word meaning ?neighbour hood?. The term?s various significations in the Americas are rooted in Spanish colonialism. Colonial cities were laid out in a grid pattern radiating out from a central plaza, church and government buildings (Bakewell, 2004). Residence near the plaza was reserved for the city?s principal vecinos, or citizens. Poorer resi dents, with varying citizenship status, lived in barrios on the outskirts of the town. Thus, urban location signified social, political, economic and racial status. In latin america today, ?barrio? may signify a neighbourhood or a squatter settlement (see squatting); the actual cultural signification assigned to the term varies widely (Clawson, 1997, p. 319). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the Mexican states annexed by the USA in 1848 after the Mexican American War, the term referred to the neighbourhoods inhabited by Mexican Americans. Raul Homero Villa (2000, pp. 4, 7) proposes the terms barrioization to refer to the external legal and ideological structures that contribute to the formation of segregated barrios and barriology to describe the internal processes of place making that facilitate the creation of Mexican American communities. For Mexican Americans, ?barrio? is associated with both the poverty resulting from dispos session and the ?feeling of being at home? (Griswold del Castillo, 1979, p. 150). jsu (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Villa (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
base and superstructure
The metaphor that Marx uses to express the idea that the economic structure of society (its ?base?) conditions corresponding legal and political superstructures and forms of consciousness. As Marx succinctly puts it in the Preface to his 1859 work A contribution to the critique of political economy, ?The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general? (see marxism; mode of production). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The relationship is more complicated than it appears. Marx and Engels subsequently denied that this formulation implied a simple eco nomic determinism, and insisted that there were many forms of reciprocal effect between base and superstructure. This did not prevent the hardening of the distinction in the often mechanical interpretations that were system atized in textbooks by Marx?s immediate fol lowers (such as Plekhanov). The tendency amongst Marxists in the more recent past has been to downplay the metaphor as too crude to capture the complexity of interrelationships that Marx was trying to encapsulate (inter actions between base and superstructure are more evident in some of his historical analyses, such as ?The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon?). It has also proved difficult to main tain a simple base/superstructure distinction when many superstructural elements such as legal conceptions and scientific knowledges clearly enter into the economic base. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cohen (1978) has provided a sophisticated, modern restatement in functionalist terms that tries to clarify these issues (see functionalism). On his reading, the economic base comprises relations of production (but not forces of pro duction), and the superstructure is much smal ler than is often supposed, comprising only those non economic institutions, such as legal systems and the state, that are functionally ne cessary to the reproduction of the economic base (art, for example, is thus largely excluded). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Althusser (see Althusser and Balibar, 1970) tried to resolve the problem in a different way by developing a further distinction that Marx made between ?determination? and ?domination? in his claim that politics played the dominant role in the ancient world and religion in the Middle Ages. Althusser inter prets this to mean that the economic structure is only ?determinant in the last instance?, and may not itself play the dominant role in many social formations, although it determines which of the other levels assumes that dominant role. For Althusser, therefore, the social sys tem is thus a complex totality ?structured in dominance?. Following Althusser, ?anti essentialist? Marxists such as Resnick and (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wolff (1987) and Gibson Graham (2006b (NEW PARAGRAPH) ) have gone further in dissolving the very notion of the economy as a separate space with deterministic effects, replacing base and superstructure with the notion of a decentred, over determined totality with no essential, determining structure (cf. essentialism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Harvey (1999 [1982]), on the other hand, continues to emphasize the classical role of the economy and the dynamics of capital accumu lation in shaping social (and, crucially, class) structures under capitalism, but avoids simple base/superstructure distinctions by conceptu alizing economic and superstructural elements as ?moments? in the total circulation process of capital. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In summary, although the base/superstructure distinction is too crude to provide an answer, it does point towards the key question of the nature of ?the economy? in capitalist systems and its influence on, and interaction with, wider social, cultural and political structures. kb (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Bayesian analysis
A type of statistical mod elling and estimation deriving from the early ideas of the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who developed his ?doctrine of chances? in 1763 (Bayes, 1763 [1958]). The Bayesian perspec tive differs from traditional or ?orthodox? stat istical inference in giving explicit recognition to the role of prior ideas and probabilities and so is sometimes labelled as a ?subjective? ap proach to probability and statistics. Much of the probability theory was developed by 1939, when Jeffreys wrote his classic text (Jeffreys, 1998 [1939]), but the implementation of Bayesian methods as a practical statistical technique is much more recent, and had to await modern computer technology and the invention of some very clever new devices. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bayes? central idea is that prior probabilities are updated by confrontation with data to pro vide posterior probabilities. For example, sup pose we want to make inferences about a parameter U (which might be a mean or a regression coefficient). Our prior probability distribution for U is p(U). The observed data are represented by the likelihood function P (y\U). Using Bayes? rule on conditional prob abilities gives us the posterior density or distri bution p(U\y) as follows: (NEW PARAGRAPH) P(U\y) = P(U)P( y\0)/p( y), (NEW PARAGRAPH) where p(y) ? ^2gp(0)p(y\0), the sum over all possible values of 0, which acts as a normalizing constant. This term may be ignored in many instances (though not in model comparison) to give the unnormalized posterior density: (NEW PARAGRAPH) p(0\y) / p(8)p(y\e). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This expression defines the core of Bayesian inference. Note that this method derives a posterior probability distribution for 0, whereas classical (or standard) inference uses the sample data to make inferences about the unknown, but assumed fixed, parameter value of 0. Where there are several parameters in question, such as 01 and 02, then p(0\_y) is a joint distribution, and the Bayesian statistician converts this to two marginal posterior distri butions by integrating across the range of the other 0: (NEW PARAGRAPH) P(Ui\y) / P(U)P(y\d)d02. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In this framework, inferences about 01 are made taking account of the full distribution of 02, whereas classical inference is based just on the optimal point estimates and local curvature around that location. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Opinions about the potential of Bayesian methods have differed sharply. Some have seen them as a way of broadening the scope of quantitative analysis, whilst others have rejected the notion of bringing subjectivity into statistical inference. In practice, Bayesian methods were little used except for circum stances under which they were equivalent to classical results and so there was no computa tional difference, only one of interpretation. More direct implementation depended on the facility to do the numerical integrations required to get the marginal distributions, and modern computing provided this. In the social sciences, the work of the Chicago econometrician Arnold Zellner was very important in this process (Zellner, 1971). Modern Bayesian analysis is usually based on ?uninformative? or ?diffuse? prior information, reflecting prior ignorance or a determination not to introduce subjective prior inform ation into the analysis; Bayesian estimation is then used very much as a technical device to estimate posterior distributions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bayesian methods have taken a further leap forward in the past decade with the construc tion of Markov Chain Monte Carlo, or ?MCMC?, techniques (Gilks, Richardson and Spiegelhalter, 1996). It has been shown that complete sets of joint and marginal posterior distributions may be constructed by this simu Lation method. Starting from the (diffuse) prior distributions, the conditional distribu tions of the U parameters are sampled using random sampling (hence the ?Monte Carlo? part of the name) and these sampled U values are then brought together with the data to estimate the likelihood. This information is then used to update the conditional distri butions, and the process is repeated many hundreds or thousands of times, gradually building up samples representing the posterior distribution. The sampling at any stage t is based on updating from the conditionals at time t 1, and hence it is a (first order) mar kov chain process. This remarkable method can be developed for very complicated models with many parameters and difficult structures, and is being used in many disciplines. Models in both spatiaL econometrics and muLti LeveL modeLLing may now be estimated by these Bayesian methods. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bayesian methods have been applied in several areas of geographical and spatiaL an alysis. The specific version of ?empirical Bayes? estimation is widely used in spatial interpolation and in disease mapping and spa tial epidemiology. Other applications include population and economic forecasting, crime ?hotspot? modelling, and hierarchical Bayes estimation to lend insight into the problem of ecological inference. Brunsdon (2001) provides a case study using MCMC in a Baye sian model predicting school performance fig ures for pupil tests. In spatiaL econometrics, Bayesian methods, both numerical integration and MCMC, have been used to estimate models with spatial endogeneity and more complicated forms (Hepple, 1995; LeSage, 1997). The geographer Peter Congdon has written two major statistical texts on Bayesian statistical modelling (Congdon, 2001). Opin ions still differ about the role of subjective prior information, but modern Bayesian methods are one of the fastest developing areas of quantitative analysis. Lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Withers (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)