The Dictionary of Human Geography (124 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
12.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
metaphor
For Aristotle, a metaphor ?consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to some thing else?. Such practice is rampant in hUMAN GEOGRAPhy, as in other disciplines: cities are plant biomes (chiCAGO schOOL), cultural LANdSCAPES are texts, economic localities are geological strata ?layers of investment? and non renewable resources take on a LlfE cycLE. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While pervasive, some writers have criti cized metaphors for being ornamental and obfuscatory. Plato said that they make ?trifle points seem important, and important points trifles?, while Thomas Hobbes believed that they ?deceive others?, and in geography, Harvey (1967, p. 551) argued that they ?hinder objective judgment?. In each of these cases, metaphor was attacked because it resulted in ambiguity: it is ?a sort of extra happy trick with words?, as I.A. Richards (1936, p. 90) put it. More generally, such misgivings result from a particular view of language held by such critics: that language should be transparent, limpid and utterly dependable, all of which are undermined by metaphor. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Over the twentieth century there was an increasing recognition that language takes on none of those characteristics (see, in particu lar, dECONSTRUCTlON) and, concomitantly, that metaphors are an indispensable part of both writing and theorizing. Metaphorical use comes in two shapes and sizes (Barnes and Curry, 1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Small metaphors that pepper individual writ ing and research are part of the very infra structure of language construction, an ?omnipresent principle? (Richards, 1936, p. 92). Mobilizing them requires skill and sensitivity, forming an important component of RhETORic, the attempt to persuade others of the force of one?s argument by using tropes such as metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003 (NEW PARAGRAPH) ). Large metaphors, in contrast, struc ture entire research PARAdlGMS. Some, such as ?organism? or ?mechanism?, are so deeply ingrained that they become ?root metaphors? (Pepper, 1942), whereas others are only tem porary, mobilized for a particular use and then discarded. However long their durability, all large metaphors operate through a process of ?metaphorical re description? (Hesse, 1980); that is, transferring meanings and associations of one system in order to re describe the expla nandum (the part of the explanation that does the explaining) of another system. An example is Isaac Newton?s metaphorical re description of sound in terms of waves. Metaphorical re description is ubiquitous, as well as ?poten tially revolutionary? (Arib and Hesse, 1986). When Adam Smith coined the metaphor of the ?invisible hand? to describe the efficacy of the MARkET, or when Marx said ?workers have nothing to lose but their chains?, or when Bunge (1966, p. 27) asked, ?Why cannot . . . concepts dealing with exotic and dioric streams be applied to highways?? revolutions, albeit of different kinds, were set in motion. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There has been sporadic interest in metaphor in GEOGRAPhy since the 1960s, when the pro ponents of spatial science first discussed the linkages between MOdELS and metaphors (Hag gett and Chorley, 1967). Later, those who ad vocated a hUMANlSTic GEOGRAPhy, such as Tuan (1978) and Livingstone and Harrison (1981b), were drawn to metaphors because of resonances with human creativity and meaning, twin planks of the larger project (see also hUMANlTlEs). Most recently, critical attention has come from geographers interested in epis TEMOLOGy. Large metaphors sometimes carry unexamined intellectual freight, resulting in unintentional and sometimes contradictory meanings. They need to be unpacked, inspected critically for their coherence, consistency and compatibility. Doing so also means scrutinizing their historical and material origins. Metaphors require ?worlding? (Smith and Katz, 1993). tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lakoff and Johnson (1980); Smith and Katz (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
methodological individualism
The view that social events must be explained by redu cing them to individual actions, where, in turn, those actions are explained by reference to the intentions of individual actors. For the methodological individualist, all macro scale social entities are ultimately decomposable to the acts and underlying intentions of individ uals. sociETy, therefore, is a chimera, some thing that appears real, but which is not. As a perspective, methodological individualism is usefully contrasted with, on the one hand, approaches that accentuate the importance and reality of trans individual social structures (as found, for example, in structural Marxism, a form of marxism that trades on structural ism) and, on the other hand, approaches that deny the autonomy of individual human sub jects altogether (as found, for example, within post structuralism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term ?methodological individualism' was first systematically deployed by the German sociologist Max Weber, in his book Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). He was keen to argue that social collectivities such as firms or governments ?must be treated as solely the resultants . . . of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action' (Weber, 1968 [1922], p. 13). Weber's point was not to privilege individuals over social institutions, but to stress that understanding social phenomena should rest methodologically on action based theory; that is, theory providing motivations for agents to act (in Weber's theory, this turned on the methodological protocols of Verstehen (?understanding?) and ideal TyPEs). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In subsequent versions this point was lost, however, and methodological individualism was used to privilege the individual primarily for the purpose of disparaging especially Marx?s theory of historical materialism, which rested precisely on collective social entities. This impulse is found in Friedrich von Hayek's and Karl Popper's writings of the 1940s and 1950s, and then again in Jon Elster?s (1982b) work on ANALyTiCAL marxism in the 1980s and 1990s. While there are dif ferences among these three writers, they also have commonalities. First, Hayek and Elster, and perhaps Popper too through his model of psychological reductionism, adhered to a rational choice model of the individual derived from neo classical economics: rati onality was posited as the only action based motivation for agents. Second, all three accepted that rational individuals represented ?rock bottom explanations? of social phenomena (Watkins, 1957, p. 105). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Both the specific rational choice model and the more general notion of an individualist ?rock bottom' explanation have been criti cized: the underlying intentions of an act are not always known, and so it may be impossible to provide individual action based accounts; non individual based forms of explanation for example, aggregate statistical can in some cases provide better explanations than ones resting on individual motivations; indi viduals in interaction with one another pro duce emergent effects irreducible to individual acts; and individuals are the conse quence, not the cause, of social structures and institutions (?methodological holism?). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Because of the association with the ration ality postulate, in human GEOGRAPHy meth odological individualism was found most readily in economic GEOGRAPHy, since it was most influenced by neoclassical economics, and it also reappears in regional science and the NEw ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHy. But the cul (NEW PARAGRAPH) tural turn and the turn to institutional economics have resulted in the strong asser tion of the importance of social phenomena on their own terms, and hence a falling away of methodological individualism from the one sub discipline where it had gained a foothold (Lee and Wills, 1997). tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Heath (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
methodology
The principles and assump tions underlying the choice of techniques for constructing and analysing data. Methodology should not be confused with ?methods': it is the conceptual rationale for which methods are used, and how. Methodology brings together and links the underlying philosoph ical and conceptual bases of a study with appropriate techniques. Good methodologies thus align the ONTOLOGy of a study, how it conceives of the world, with its EPlSTEMOLOGy, how it claims to know things about the world. This is more than, though it includes, compe tently using one or more research ?techniques'. This Dictionary, for instance, lists at least 11 groups of techniques and many more analytical and representational procedures for the data thus created. Methodology is a meta level issue about fitting techniques to research questions, rather than simply learning a method. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A weak formulation of methodology as recounting how research was done was inspired by the sciences and is often a hall mark of social science perspectives. This recounting of procedures offers a methodo logical transparency that is the hallmark of scientific studies in that it allows readers the chance to ?disprove? a study?s conclusions. Even beyond formally scientific studies, trans parency is often still advocated as a way of ensuring rigour and validity across a variety of approaches. Baxter and Eyles (1997) sug gest adapting ideas from Lincoln and Guba so that for all methods, including quALlTATlVE methods, the following have to be shown: (NEW PARAGRAPH) credibility of the account (i.e. authenti cated representation of what actually occurred); (NEW PARAGRAPH) transferability of the material (i.e. making what occurred intelligible to the audience); (NEW PARAGRAPH) dependability of the interpretation (i.e. that it is not illogical, or how partisan it is); and (NEW PARAGRAPH) confirmability of the study (i.e. the ability to audit the process that made it through personal reflection, audit processes or opportunities for informants to reply). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The emphasis here is on the clear statement of procedures undertaken, the techniques and steps of analysis as a means to enable the rea der to examine the process leading to the results and conclusions. Traditions of transpa rency are variable across even sub disciplinary fields where, for instance, in a comparison of the Journal of International Business Studies and Economic Geography, around 80 per cent of articles in the former had formal sections on methodology and the collection of data, while in the latter only 30 per cent or less had such sections (Poon, 2007). A degree of transparency might also be intended to enable a REfLExiVE account that positions the research process, and allows the reader to see the contingent and situated production of knowledge. This may in fact be aimed at undercutting notions of authoritative social science by demonstrating fallibility and the limits to knowledge, and may be inspired by approaches to research ethics that fore ground the contributions of research partici pants. Thus fEMlNlST methodology stretches from design to dissemination of research, but must also consider the ?relationships among people involved in the research pro cess, the actual conduct of the research, and process through which the research comes to be undertaken and completed? (Moss, 2002, p. 12). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A stronger definition of methodology points out the different ways in which these criteria of reliability reflect theoretical approaches. For example, sampling within extensive research would have to meet criteria of representativeness to support statistical ana lysis of the data, while within quALlTATlVE methods it might aim to capture a particular group?s perspective, where its validity depends on the quality of material derived from their positionality. In this case, methodology is about joining the stages in the research from underlying philosophy to research questions to techniques generating data to forms of an alysis and presentation of the results. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A methodology thus involves considering how the specific techniques can be assembled and used to generate the sort of data that will enable an answer to the questions posed through a specific conceptual framework. There have been extensive arguments about whether specific conceptual frameworks dem and specific methodological linkages and pre clude some methods. For instance, fEMlNlST geography had a long debate over whether it required feminist methods, that sought to empower, give voice to women and treat them as ?subjects? who made knowledge, or whether it could use the quANTlTATlVE methods that feminist theorists had often critiqued for treating people as objects of knowledge and using a detached masculinism in its logics. This debate has seen special issues of journals, such as the Professional Geographer in 1995, assessing whether a feminist method ology can include various techniques such as GIS. (NEW PARAGRAPH) If methodology is about assessing how to create material that will answer the conceptual questions in a study, the answer may well be to use multiple methods. Thus some parts or issues might be addressed via one method while others could be addressed by another. This is often called triangulation, named metaphorically after the surveying practice of taking bearings from different landmarks. Here, methodology is about combining methods to help validate each others? findings and, optimistically, integrating different forms of data in the analysis (Knigge and Cope, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . On the other hand, it might be argued that the different techniques, with different ontologies, construct radically different ver sions of the world that cannot be brought into the same epistemological approach. How can, say, a social constructivist account be allied to modes of statistical inference that rely on realism or assumptions of OBjECTlviTY? In such a case, a methodology might be about holding tensions that show these gaps and differences to offer a ?transgressive validity? that problematizes or crystallizes the issues of reliability and truthfulness between methods, rather than integrating them or using one to corroborate the other (Guba and Lincoln, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . An exemplary account in geography is Nightingale (2003) on forest cover in Nepal, illustrating the partiality of and contradictions between both villagers' oral histories and aerial photography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Methodology is thus about organizing research practices in relation to concepts. There is no singular way of doing this; nor is methodology simply the application of methods. It involves thinking through the connections relating concepts, topics, information gathering and representation, which will inevitably vary from project to project. mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hoggart, Lees and Davies (2002); Limb and Dwyer (2001); Pryke, Rose and Whatmore (2003); Sharp (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

A Conflict of Interests by Clive Egleton
Banjo of Destiny by Cary Fagan
El difunto filántropo by Georges Simenon
My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley
Forever Entangled by Brooks, Kathleen
Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Game Changer by Marie Landry
The Crow King's Wife by Melissa Myers
Candy Licker by Noire