The Dictionary of Human Geography (133 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
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nationalism
A name for the modern social and political formations that draw together feelings of belonging, solidarity and identification between national citizens and the territory imagined as their collective na tional homeland. The existence and coherence of a particular nation is in this sense best understood as an ongoing product and not the primordial precursor of nationalism. But while nationalism can therefore be said to make nations, they are neither illusions nor invented like works of fiction. Although Benedict Anderson's phrase ?imagined com munities' has sometimes been misinterpreted as suggesting such an inventive account, in fact, his emphasis on the politically and socially constructive work of nationalism in producing nations is the heart of his much reprinted book (2006). Nations are imagined, he argues, because nationalism mobilizes a strong but abstract sense of community between distant strangers in a way that consolidates their identification with both a common historical inheritance and a shared national space. This is also why nationalism is more social than the personal passions of patriotism and less legal than the regulative norms of citizenship, even though as femi nist and queer geographers in particular have underlined it is clearly interwoven with each (see Bell and Binnie, 2000; Marston, 1990: see also feminist geographies). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the most recent edition of his book, Anderson reviews its many translations and globe trotting travels, further documenting how nationalism clearly fosters distinct national cultures of reading, writing, teaching and communication. He underlines too that one of his initial intentions in the book (and one that he thinks accounts for much of its global popularity) is that it shifted the geogra phical focus of the study of nationalism away from europe (and the eurocentrism that traditional Marxist accounts shared with trad itional liberal accounts) and towards various post colonial nationalisms of the global south, including not least of all what he calls the ?creole nationalisms' of the Americas (a formulation that itself also usefully under mines exceptionalist American arguments about US republicanism as the uniquely pioneering prototype ofpost colonial national ism). In making this case, however, Anderson does not directly address the many ways in which his arguments have both resonated with and been advanced by various versions of post colonial theory (see post colonialism). His own attention to the role of maps and other geographical depictions in imagining the communities of nationalism clearly resonates, for example, with Edward Said's theoretical concerns with the imaginative geographies of orientaLism; one connection being the ways in which the cultures of imperiaLism worked contrapuntaLLy to construct the modernity of Euro American nationalism by constantly contrasting the supposedly pre modern human geographies of their colonies with the ordered and enframed Landscapes of metro politan museums, exhibitions and textbook cartographies (Said, 1993, 2003 [1978]; cf. Mitchell, 1988; Gregory, 1994). Other post colonial studies of nationalism have advanced these ideas by problematizing the diverse geographical arguments and assumptions that continue to create hierarchies of national belonging, national achievement and national blame in the course of imagining community. Whether it is concerned with the fate ofwomen on the margins of the post colonial nation (Spivak, 1992), or interest in the necessarily extra territorial affiliations of anti racist and anti colonial activists (Gilroy, 1993; Singh, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , or reflection on the historical tragedies that have led to geographies of blame for the so called failure of post colonial nationalism in countries such as Haiti (Scott, 2004; see also Farmer, 1992), scholarship addressing the imagined communities of nationalism has inc reasingly also complicated pre emptive epi stemoLogicaL assumptions that limit national history to national geography. At the same time, work on the ways in which national geog raphy is taught and learned in nationalist teach ings themselves has also increasingly sought to unpack how the performance of nationalism can both close down and open up opportunities for imagining territory anew (compare Bhabha, 1994 with Bruckner, 1999; Schulten, 2001; Sparke, 2005). All these post colonial questions indicate how nationalism can be implicated in racialized imaginings of space and pLace in both dominative and resistant ways, an ambivalence that has historically been one of the reasons why defining national ism has been so vexing for critical theorists. As Etienne Balibar puts it, with both a question and an answer of his own: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Why does it prove to be so difficult to define nationalism? First, because the concept never functions alone, but is always part of a chain in which it is both a central and weak link. This chain is constantly being enriched... with new intermediate or extreme terms: civic spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnicism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, chauvinism, imperialism, jingoism... (1991, p. 46) (NEW PARAGRAPH) ms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
nation-state
The combination of national governance and national governmentaLity that emerged as the norm of European state making in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen turies, and that spread across the world in the twentieth century as a basis for post colonial state making in the former colonies of the global south. In all these contexts, the hyphen in nation state has traditionally symbolized the articulation of nationaLism with the development of the modern state, its sover eignty over territory, and its capacity to police and administer the spaces contained by national borders (Giddens, 1985; Sparke, 2005). None of these articulations have ever been comprehensive and complete, and while most nation states presume to govern all inhabitants as if they were a single nation, in practice they often also dominate and marginalize populations who speak minority languages, identify with minority ethnic com munities and/or who live in borderlands (Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]). Thus while the hyphen in nation state is considered a con ventional and quite unremarkable linguistic convention, it points to social and political practices that often put an oppressive line through the possibility of statehood for ?sub national? nations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The volatile and often violent two way geo graphical dynamic between state making and nationhood only really became stabilized in the mid twentieth century, at the same time as it was extended through anti imperial independence movements across much of the world (Blaut, 1987). At this point, Fordist regimes of accumuLation in core countries of the world economy tended to systematize ?official nationalism? as a basis for managing cLass divisions through redistributive taxation, state education and welfare administration (see fordism). And in the global south, nationalism meanwhile served to rally popular support for new post colonial deveLopment initiatives based on import substitution albeit ironically also sometimes being twisted into neo imperial projects of quelling the resistance of unofficial nationalism (Trouil lot, 1990). But even at this high point of the nation state as a container of politics, the hyphenated hybrid was wracked by the geopolitical tensions of the coLd war and global uneven deveLopment (Taylor, 1994a). Even the institutions of internationaL reLations where nation states were sup posedly represented in their full normative and sovereign roles simultaneously revealed their precariousness: the United Nations was famously described in 1977, for example, as ?little more than the meeting place for repre sentatives of disunited states' (Seton Watson, 1977). It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that today, while we have by no means arrived at the end of the nation state, as business class globalists advertise (e.g. Ohmae, 1995), we are seeing nation and state being pulled apart in the context of recent rounds of GLOBaLization. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Macro forms of state making are increasingly becoming transnational in their scale of organ ization in concert with the entrenchment of NEO LiBerALiSM as the dominant free market model of governance (Peet, 2003; Harvey, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Meanwhile, micro models of neo liberal GOVEEnMENTaLitY that promote entrepreneur ial forms of subjectivity and benchmarking approaches to place making come together in context contingent ways with global market forces to create new assemblages of identity, affiliation and citizenship that are no longer so clearly bound up in the nation state (Mitchell, 2004a; Ong and Collier, 2005). If the nation state is not dead, it is clear that it is being remade in different ways in different places by both roll out and roll back forms of neo liber alism; it is becoming redefined as the managed mediator of neo liberal hegemony (Peck and Tickell, 2002): on the one hand, a relentless enforcer of free trade rules and neo liberal governance in arenas ranging from land man agement to regional development to workfare to the warfare of the coalition of the billing; and, on the other hand, a bulwark of the status quo and an excuse for business as usual when non neo liberal visions of development, debt relief, women?s eights and environmental protection are proposed at transnational and subnational scaLEs (Public Citizen, 2007). Meanwhile, social relations and identifications are themselves also becoming remade and re territorialized by the globalizing forces. The accelerated fLows of tourists, migrants, money, information, movies, sports and news pro grammes are challenging the old print media of national consciousness, and turning the hyphen in nation state into more of an index of disjunc ture (Appadurai, 1996). All these changes have not (notwithstanding Hardt and Negri, 2000) led to the complete eclipse ofthe nation state by a new global empire, but they have led to the withering of the national state as an institutional enabler of national democracy, and they have therefore made the search for new transnational convergence spaces for of democracy all the more urgent (Routledge, 2003: see also Trans nationalism). ms
natural resources
Conventionally, this term refers to biophysical materials that satisfy human wants and provide direct inputs to human well being. The term may, however, be defined more broadly to include any com ponent of the non human world that performs a socially valuable function. Natural resources are the product of geological, hydrological and biological processes: the adjective ?natural' denotes this location anterior to human labour. It is for this reason that classical political economy described as ?gifts of nature? the raw materials and productive energies of the non human world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A distinctive vocabulary is available for dif ferentiating the qualities and properties of a vast range of natural resources. A primary dis tinction is between exhaustible (stock) and renewable (flow) resources, based on the potential of different biophysical materials to regenerate (see figure). For stock resources, a secondary distinction is between materials that are consumed by use and cannot be recovered (such as fuels) and those that may be recycled (most applications of metals). Flow resources may be subdivided according to whether use of the resource subtracts from the amount and/or quality of the resource base: for so called ambient resources, use of the resource degrades neither the amount nor quality (e.g. solar radiation, wind, waves). For other flow resources, there is a threshold beyond which further consumption exceeds the capacity of the resource to regenerate: these ?critical zone' resources can be ?mined' to depletion/extinc tion (e.g. ground water, fish, game species). Basic distinctions such as these have under pinned the development of different models for managing renewable and non renewable re sources (see resource management). Recent developments in the biological sciences and the so called ?new EcoLoGY', however, have thrown into question many of the assumptions that underlie these models, and have drawn attention to the non linear behaviour of many ecological sYsTEMs and their capacity for ?surprise? (Botkin, 1990). At the same time, environmental economics has re framed many of the questions surrounding natural resources in terms of the management of ?ecological capital,' a new vocabulary that facilitates the commensurability of the non human world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From both an historical and a philosophical perspective, ?natural resources' are a significant misnomer. First, the practices of exploration, surveying, measurement and experimentation by which natural resources come to be known (?discovered?) highlight their deeply social origins. Second, resources are a dynamic cat egory: different parts of the non human world slip into (uranium, coltan) and out of (alum, flint, osiers, guano) this category across time and place (see resources). The remarkable history of natural gas, for example, demon strates how a single substance may be consid ered as variously hazardous waste, ?neutral stuff? or a valuable natural resource, depending on knowledge, price, social norms and expectations (regarding pollution), and the availability of alternatives. gEogRAPhy continues to make contributions to the practical art and science of managing natural resources, but there is also a robust tradition of critical enquiry that acknow ledges how ?natural resources are not naturally resources? (Hudson, 2001). gB (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bakker and Bridge (2006); Rees (1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
naturalism
Apart from the denial of the exi stence of God or the rejection of the Cartesian dualism of mind andbody, the term ?naturalism? is nowadays commonly used to mark one?s acceptance of a scientific philosophy (see PhiL osoPhy; science). An overwhelming majority of Anglo American philosophers claim to sub scribe to some form of naturalism. From the vantage point of contemporary philosophy, nat uralism is the twofold view that: (1) everything is composed of natural entities those studied in science whose properties determine the prop erties of things, including persons and abstract mathematical objects; and (2) that science con sists essentially in the registration of (or refuta tion of claims about) empirical invariances between discrete events, states of affairs and the like. This view, which can be aptly termed ?scientific naturalism?, argues the strong claim that natural science provides a true or essential picture of nature. More contentious versions of scientific naturalism or scientism assert that it is the only true picture. Thus, in the words of Wilfred Sellars, ?science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, of what is not that it is not? (1963, p. 173). Scientific naturalism contends that the great successes of the modern natural sciences in predicting, controlling and explaining natural phenomena mathematical physics and Darwin?s theory of evolution are exemplars imply that the natural sciences? conception of nature is very likely to be true and, moreover, that this is our only bona fide or unproblematic conception of nature. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Importantly, scientific naturalism rejects any goal of First Philosophy which claims, as in Cartesian or Kantian thought, to provide the epistemological and metaphysical founda tions for the natural sciences. Instead, scien tific naturalism takes the resolutely Humean stance that the human is simply a part of nature, not set over against it. This in turn denies the possibility of a First Philosophy prior to the natural sciences, such that phil osophy can no longer claim to be the master discipline that sits in judgment over the claims of natural sciences or supplies the foundations for their operation. Instead, philosophy is rendered continuous with science: it is science in its general and abstract reaches. A further implication for the social sciences is an essen tial unity of method with the natural sciences and, in some formulations, an actual identity of subject matter as well. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The philosopher Roy Bhaskar, whose work has been influential for several radical geog raphers, counterposes ?critical naturalism? to scientific naturalism and its thesis of continu ity between the social and natural sciences. He instead asserts that ?ontoLogicaL, epistemo logical and relational considerations all place limits on the possibility of naturalism (or rather, qualify the form it must take); and that these considerations all carry methodo logical import? (1998 [1979], p. 3; author?s italics). Thus, Bhaskar denies that natural and social objects are alike in their make up; rejects empirical realism (Humean epistemol ogy) in favour of transcendental or critical realism as the protocol of knowledge more appropriate to the human sciences; and offers Marx?s analysis in Capital as paradigmatic of a substantive use of this transcendental procedure (see reaLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Baruch Spinoza?s naturalism is worth a men tion, given his current resurgence within human geography and allied fields. While the renewal proximately derives from studies on Spinoza by scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Genevieve Lloyd and Louis Althusser, their wide uptake by human geog raphers suggests a desire for an ethics and politics of interaction rooted in an immanentist ontology that is to say, an affirmative ontology of connections between human and non human entities that (a) denies any prior separation of nature and society, (b) rejects any form of transcendence (God or otherwise) as source of an authorizing design or telos for society, and (c) maintains that combinations of bodies are all there is, and our ethical political task is to dare to strive for sameness in ways unknown. vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bhaskar (1998); De Caro and Macarthur (2004); Lloyd and Gatens (1999); Negri (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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