The Dictionary of Human Geography (203 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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thick description
A term coined by the phil osopher Gilbert Ryle (1971) and introduced into the humanities and social sciences by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973b), ?thick description? refers to rich ethnographic de scriptions based on intensive investigations of informants? actions and their interpretations of their own practices placed within their cul tural context. It is an intrinsically hermen eutic method that recovers and represents the researcher?s interpretation of informants? interpretations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Thick description is contrasted with ?thin description? based on the tenets of behaviour ism, where a detailed description of the in formants? contextualized meaning systems is considered unnecessary (cf. behavioural geography). Thick description is usually pro duced through grounded, long term ethno graphic research, based on (principally) qualitative methods applied to small scale settings (see ethnography), but it has also been used in intimate, archive based historical research with considerable success (Darnton, 1985). Thick description is not simply about collecting details: it is about uncovering the depth of multiple, intersecting webs of mean ing within which individual actors understand their own actions. Geertz conceives of individ ual behaviour as informed by complex, situ ated conceptual structures that are culturally and historically produced. As such, behavior is best interrogated contextually to reveal the sys tematic quality of?cultural patternings? that are ?extra personal institutionalized guides for be havior?. These are emphatically not ?essences? of broader cultures studied in a microcosm, the ?Jonesville is America writ small? model that Geertz dismisses as ?palpable nonsense?. An important implication of this cultural pattern ing is that social life has a public, text like quality to which all who share in a culture interpret, negotiate and contribute. It then fol lows that ethnographers and other like minded scholars must ?read over the shoulder? of those whose culture they study. Cultures as meaning systems intertextually infuse all forms of social practice, and Geertz also saw cultural texts as literary texts to be looked at critically and not just through. Such a textual orientation (see textuality) made him an important early figure in the cultural turn across the social sciences, and in opening up conversations between the social sciences and the human ities. Geertz?s influence spread well beyond anthropology into the work of the New Historicists in literary studies and the work of the New Cultural Historians (see histori cism). In cultural geography, his writings influenced Duncan?s (2004) interpretation of the symbolic/political system of the Kandyan kingdom in Sri Lanka. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geertz?s ?cultural patterning? perspective has been critiqued in anthropology for allow ing little space for the inner, private, non cultural components of the self. Thus while Geertz was instrumental in shifting anthropol ogy from a focus on social structure to the interpretation of meanings, his analysis re mains somewhat structural. However, this is not to say his approach is at all reductionist or determinist. He rejects tight arguments and conceptualizations ?purified of the mater ial complexity in which they are located?. He sees structures of meaning as historically specific, fluid, fragmentary, negotiated and situational. The researcher?s interpretations are interpretations of the interpretations of others and thus are always open to contest ation and deeper grounding in ongoing, chan ging cultural meanings systems. That said, among human geographers the textual con ception of culture that underpins Geertz?s pro ject has been critiqued by Gregory (1994, pp. 148 8) for its structural stasis and by Rose (2006) for its emphasis on representa tion, meanings and consciousness (cf. non representational theory). jsd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geertz (1973a,b); Rose (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
third space
A space produced by processes that exceed the forms of knowledge that divide the world into binary oppositions. Bhabha (1990b) argues that third space is a conse quence of hybridity, suggesting that certain forms of post colonial knowledges challenge the division of the world into ?the west and the rest? by producing third spaces in which new identities can be enacted (see post colonialism). For Bhabha, third space is a position from which it may be possible ?to elude the politics of polarity and emerge as others of ourselves? (1994, p. 39). Some geographers have used the term to displace oppositional categories in geographical analy sis, such as the opposition between academic theorizing and political activism (Routledge, 1996b; see also Pile, 1994; and see activism). Hyndman (2003) argues that feminist geo poLitics represents a third space in the con text of the war on terrorism, beyond the binaries of either/or, here/there and us/them (see feminist geographies). Rather than pro mote an oppositional stance in relation to par ticular political principles or acts, the third space attempts to map the silences of the dom inant geopolitical positions and undo these by invoking multiple scaLes of enquiry and knowledge production. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third spaces also challenge conventional understandings of the world by reconceptualiz ing ways of thinking about space. For Soja (1996b), drawing on Lefebvre (1991b), the notion of third space disrupts many of the binaries through which geographers have often conceptualized space itself (see also produc tion of space). The third space is simul taneously material and symbolic, and also eludes the distinction Soja detects in much Western phiLosophy between dynamic time and static space. For Soja (1996b, p. 11), third space is ?simultaneously real and imagined and more?. This ?more? is where Soja locates the critical potential of third space: it is more because it both contains bin ary ways of thinking about space but also exceeds them with a lived intractability to interpretative schemas that allows for poten tially emancipatory practices. However, third spaces are not always emancipatory forma tions: Gregory (2004b) argues that detention camps such as Camp X ray at Guantanamo Bay are extraterritorial liminal places that are within sovereign states yet outside of those states? judicial norms. pr (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Third World
A term first used by French economist Alfred Sauvy in 1952 to locate a group of countries not formally aligned with the USA or the Soviet Union in the coLd war, and not always attached to capitaLism or so ciaLism as defining economic models. The first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a key figure in both these projects. He played a leading role in the Non Aligned Movement, whose inaugural meetings were held at Bandung in Indonesia in 1955. He also called for a ?third way? of promoting economic deveLopment that of planning under a system of democratic social ism long before ideas of a Third Way were popularized by US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The initial concept of a Third World as a new Third Estate has been consistently reworked since its introduction into public dis course (Mintz, 1976; Pletsch, 1981). Many of its initially positive connotations were dimin ished in the 1960s. They were replaced by an idea of the Third World that located a group of countries in asia, africa and Latin america in terms of certain presumed absences. These countries were lacking in infrastructure, lacking in education and healthcare systems, lacking in fiscal resources or foreign exchange, lacking in skills and so on. As such, they needed to be mended, both by their own gov ernments and by donor agencies and military personnel from the First and Second Worlds. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This conception of the Third World has fallen from favour over the past thirty years. Peter Bauer, an economist associated with the counter revolution in development theory and policy, argued consistently in the 1970s that the giving and receiving of foreign aid invented the Third World. Worse, in his view, it turned the Third World into a supplicant (Bauer, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . It deprived African and Asian countries of the motivation to pull their own peoples out of poverty by means of market led economic growTh. In the 1990s this argument was given fresh legs by Arturo Escobar, one of the lead ing theorists of post deveLopment. Escobar (1995) argued that the Third World had been invented by American aid programmes and Cold War geopoLitics. It had been infan tilized and pathologized by a ?discourse of development? that ?discovered mass poverty? throughout this apparently uniform geograph ical and social space. Large parts of it had also been turned into battlegrounds in the struggle between the USA and the Soviet Union (liter ally so in various proxy wars). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Escobar recognizes that some Third World countries have turned this form of identifica tion to their own advantage, not least through the politics of Third Worldism. This is a com mon strategy of subaltern social groups and it found expression in the 1970s in Southern demands for a New International Economic Order. Escobar, however, is more inclined to think outside the confines of the ?Third World/ Third Worldism? categories. In his view, it is important to create new spaces for social and economic action in what he calls ?the less economically accomplished countries?. Others have suggested that the Third World should be renamed as the Two Thirds World, and that it should not be restricted to the ex colonial (NEW PARAGRAPH) world. If poverty is a defining feature of the (Two )Third(s) or ?majority? World, it is to be found in countries across the globe and not just in the global south. sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gilman (2003); Power (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Tiebout model
An argument for dividing an area among local government units that compete for land users through the range of ?service taxation packages? offered (see competitive advantage). Charles Tiebout (1924 68: see Tiebout, 1956) argued that inability to respond to the diversity of de mands for public goods and services (and differing willingness to pay for them) gener ated by a heterogeneous population makes large local governments inefficient. Fragmentation of local government within urban areas is more efficient: each unit tailors the services offered and its taxation demands to a particular population sector and people choose which they prefer (cf. fiscal migra tion). The model assumes full information about the range of ?packages? on offer and no mobility constraints which considerably limit its empirical applicability. Fragmented local government systems are frequently ma nipulated by the affluent and powerful to cre ate ?tax havens? from which, however, the less well off are excluded (cf. zoning). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) See http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/VIP/ Tiebout.html and http://www.csiss.org/classics/ content/43. (NEW PARAGRAPH)
time
The concept of time has been relegated to an implied and secondary status in dis courses about the philosophy of geography ever since the path breaking work of Immanuel Kant in the second half of the eighteenth cen tury. Arguing that both time and space are distinct and necessary a priori notions, rather than substances, for any understanding of human experience, Kant paved the way for the creation of separate academic disciplines addressing spatial rather than temporal ques tions in the nineteenth century. Advances in many of the sciences during the twentieth century questioned both the validity and the wisdom of a categorical distinction between space and time, however, notably the work on ?spacetime? by Hermann Minkowski (1864 1909) and Albert Einstein (1879 1955), and on ?lived time? by Jean Piaget (1896 1980), and paved the way for more relativist and relational accounts. Although in practice the Kantian separation between time and space advocated by Hartshorne (1939) never hin dered concrete geographical research (see his torical geography), a theoretical attempt to reconcile both was not launched until the 1970s and early 1980s as ?time geography?. Emanating chiefly from Sweden but gaining wide acceptance especially in Anglophone human geography (Carlstein, Parkes and Thrift, 1978), time geography originated in the work of Torsten Hagerstrand (1970). At its roots is the realization that the spatio temporal choreography of individual paths through everyday life is constrained in a var iety of forms; their visualization becomes a first heuristic step towards dissecting concrete power relations operating within society. The broad appeal of time geography can be meas ured by its incorporation into the framework of structuration theory (Pred, 1984). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The interrelationship between space and time can be seen in many cultural practices. It was clearly demonstrated by the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in 1675, which set a marker for many subsequent geo graphical designations and culminated in the binding arbitration of global time zones in 1884. The fact that such a system, which was both locally and globally applicable, was cen trally involved in colonial conquests, the rise of caprraLism or in the gendering of social rela tions, is now well documented (Adam, 2006). Knowing where one was at any one given time was a prerequisite to ordering, hierarchically structuring and eventually commodifying daily routines, flows of goods and capital and some thing as mundane as travelling from A to B. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The standardization of time is connected with the rise of railroad technologies in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of that century time was still measured locally, and thus more accurately, but by the beginning of the twentieth century most nations had adopted some national time or time zones (al though calendars remain mired in cultural tra ditions to this day). Structurally akin to similar attempts to de localize or de nationalize spa tial measurements to wit, the standardization of the metre in 1889 such developments ultimately paved the way for the all but uni versal adoption of ?clocked time?, which has since held sway over modern experiences, and has perhaps most poignantly been criticized by Charlie Chaplin in his 1936 film Modern times (Glennie and Thrift, 2005, 2009: see also modernity). However, gLoBaLization, and the changing geographies brought about by (NEW PARAGRAPH) the spread of the Internet, have both altered the geographical experience of time and argu ably led to new geographical realities. To some extent irrespective of geographical location, the experience of simultaneity may be shared by people living in most ?core? urban areas of the world and is used by stock market traders on a 24/7 basis to further their eco nomic gains. us (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Adam (2006); May and Thrift (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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