The Dictionary of Human Geography (60 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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stratification, notably class and gender (e.g. Anthias, 2001). Here, emphasis is placed in which each dimension of identity affects all others; for example, masculinity and femininity may well be defined and lived differently in different ethnic groups (cf. feminist geographies). This type of investi gation is both conceptually difficult, since researchers must study many facets of experi ence and social structure simultaneously, and controversial, since it destabilizes traditional definitions of class and gender. dh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Amin (2004a); Banton (1983); Mason (1995); Pincus and Ehrlich (1994); Smaje (1997); Smith (1989); Sollors (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ethnoburb
A term popularized by Li (1998) to describe the residential patterns of Asian migrants to Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and US cities in recent decades. Traditional models of ethnic residential pat terns (following the chicago school) link them to processes of economic, social and cultural assimilation, whereby over time eth nic groups lose their separate identity and merge into the wider population, at the same time becoming dispersed through the urban fabric away from their original concentrations in ghetto like areas. Contemporary multi culturalism policies, on the other hand, pro mote economic integration alongside cultural difference, so that ethnic group members retain their separateness. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ethnoburbs reflect this changed situation, involving migrant groups comprising more skilled and wealthier populations than was the case in the first half of the twentieth (NEW PARAGRAPH) century alongside continued streams of low status immigrants (such as Hispanics to the USA and Pacific Islanders to New Zealand). These new predominantly Asian groups tend to cluster in suburban areas, but rarely dominate the local population, although perhaps being more visible in the Landscape (because of their housing and retail busi nesses) than their numbers suggest. And, Li argues, such concentrations may be much more permanent elements of the residential matrix than the enclaves associated with earlier migrant streams. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Li (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ethnocentrism
Most cultures and peoples have historically inscribed themselves at the centre of the world. ?Ethnocentrism? refers to the practice of taking one?s own subject pos ition as the central reference point in relation to which all others can be arrayed with regard to their difference (see also others/othering). Like anthropologists and sociologists, geog raphers have worked to uncover and counter the ethnocentric universaLism implicit within much geographical practice and analysis (Godlewska and Smith, 1994; Agnew, 1998) (cf. A^Locem'rism; eurocentrism). as (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Robinson (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ethnocracy
A type of regime conceptualized by geographer Oren Yiftachel during the mid 1990s, in which a dominant ethno national group appropriates the state apparatus to expand and deepen its control over contested territory and power structures (Yiftachel and Ghanem, 2004). Ethnocracies typically repre sent themselves as democracies (see ethnic democracy), but are characterized by high levels of unequal segregation between rival eth nic nations and by structural inequalities between ethno classes within each nation. Driven by a hegemonic project of ethnicization and internal colonization, ethnocracies are nei ther democratic nor authoritarian. They can be found in states such as Sri Lanka, Latvia, Israel and Sudan. Ethnocracies typically lack equal citizenship, separation of religion and state, or proportional minority representation and rights, and have suffered chronic political instability (Kedar, 2003). oy (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ethnography
From the Greek ethnos (the nation) and graphe (writing), ethnography is most closely associated with the discipline of sociocultural anthropology, and with par ticipant observation and long term, in depth engagement with specific communities or societies. It refers to both a set of research methods and to the written product. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ethnography has often come under attack for its role in British colonial efforts to produce detailed knowledges about native populations in order to govern and control them. Yet the meanings, practices and uses of ethno graphy are multiple and contentious, and have shifted radically over time. In recent years, sociologists, historians and geographers have joined with anthropologists to focus on how ethnography can be used to forge politi cally enabling understandings of processes glossed by the term ?globalization? and to illuminate the possibilities for social change. Relational conceptions of the production of space and scale associated with Henri Lefebvre (1991b) are becoming increasingly important in efforts to construct a project of critical ethnography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) During the 1980s, ethnography came under sharp attack from within anthropology. In Writing culture (1986), Clifford, Marcus and others challenged presumptions of ?ethno graphic authority?, and propelled what has been termed the reflexive turn (see reflexi vity). Instead of simply discovering or reflect ing culture, they argued, ethnographers actually write or produce it. Since the 1980s there have also been a number of feminist critiques of ethnography, some of them simul taneously critical of the sort of experimental writing and textual strategies promoted by authors of the reflexive turn (e.g. Behar and Gordon, 1995). In another set of anthropo logical critiques, Appadurai (1988) and others condemned traditional ethnographies through which mobile anthropologists produce know ledge that incarcerates ?natives? in bounded localities, and map essentialized cultures on to bounded territories. He insisted on eth nography that is not so resolutely localizing, while others proposed the metaphor of travel as a means of escape for the ethnographer from the ?incarceration of the local? and the supposed stasis of space. (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the 1990s, growing numbers of anthro pologists were calling for critical understand ings of space, place and culture that went beyond metaphors of travel, flows and deter ritorialization. In Culture, power, place: exp lorations in critical anthropology, Gupta and Ferguson pointed to the necessity of ?explor ing the processes of production of difference in a world of culturally, socially and economically interconnected and interdependent spaces? (1997, p. 43), and the ethnographic essays in their volume exemplify that argument. In Ethnography through thick and thin (1998), Marcus sought to update his earlier critique of cultural anthropology with a call for multi sited ethnography. The bringing together of ethnography and history by the Comaroffs (1992), Cooper and Stoler (1997b) and others was also an important development in the 1990s. Relational understandings of space and place are implicit in some of this work. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From within sociology, a significant strand of scholarship that is moving towards critical understandings of spatiality is the project of global ethnography spearheaded by Michael Burawoy and his students (2000). While eth nography has generally occupied a marginal position in sociology, it formed the basis of the chicago school of urban sociology that goes back to the 1920s. A partial descendant of the Chicago School, Burawoy has shifted sociological deployments of ethnography in radically new directions. In their ?Manifesto? that launched the journal Ethnography, Willis and Trondman (2000) echo Burawoy?s emphasis on theory as a ?precursor, medium and outcome of ethnographic study and writing?. They propose time (theoretically informed methodology for ethnography) as an appropriate acronym, as well as being relevant in a non acronym sense. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These moves to redefine ethnography are further enriched by more explicit attention to a conception of space (or space time) and scale as actively produced through situated, embodied material practices and their associ ated discourses and power relations (Lefebvre, 1991b). For example, there remains a widespread tendency to conceive of ?place? as concrete, and ?space? as abstract in other words, a notion of place as space made mean ingful. A Lefebvrian understanding of the pro duction of space decisively rejects this distinction. Instead, space and place are both conceived in terms of embodied practices and processes of production that are simultan eously material and discursive. From this per spective, place is most usefully understood as nodal points of connection in wider networks of socially produced space what Massey (1994b) calls an extroverted sense of place. If spatiality is conceived in terms of space time and formed through social relations and inter actions at all scales, then place can be seen as neither a bounded enclosure nor the site of meaning making, but rather as ?a subset of the interactions which constitute [social] space, a local articulation within a wider whole? (Massey, 1994b, p. 4). Places are always formed through relations with wider arenas and other places; bouNdaries are always socially constructed and contested; and the specificity of a place however defined (NEW PARAGRAPH) arises from the particularity of interrelations with what lies beyond it, that come into con juncture in specific ways. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A conception of place as nodal points of connection in socially produced space enables a non positivist (see positivism) understanding of generality. In this conception, particularities or specificities arise through interrelations between objects, events, places and ideNtities; and it is through clarifying how these relations are produced and changed in practice that close study of a particular part can generate broader claims and understandings. Such an approach underscores the fallacies inherent in notions that concrete studies deal with what is local and particular, whereas abstract theory encompasses general (or global) processes that transcend particular places. This conflation of ?the local? with ?the concrete? and ?the global? with ?the abstract? (see LocaL gLobaL reLa tioNs) confuses geographical scale with pro cesses of AbstractioN in thought (Sayer, 1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Critical conceptions of spatiality are central to relational comparison a strategy that differs fundamentally from one that deploys ideaL types, or that posits different ?cases? as local variants of a more general phenomenon (Hart, 2006). Instead of comparing pre existing objects, events, places or identities, the focus is on how they are constituted in relation to one another through power laden practices in the multiple, interconnected arenas of everyday life. Ethnographic studies that clarify these connections and mutual pro cesses of constitution as well as slippages, openings and contradictions help to generate new understandings of the possibilities for social change. gHa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Chari (2004); Katz (2004); Mitchell (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ethnomethodology
An approach to study ing social order and practical reason that discloses how people or ?members? produce everyday situations, deploying concepts that neither ironicize nor stipulate those found in situ. The concern is the routine practices through which situations ?occasion? said members, and vice versa, thus catching the self rendering and self describing of these situations as exactly what they are in the imme diate flow of their conduct. Attention alights on the ?how? of this conduct just how the people involved do what they do and on recovering both the ?skills? exhibited by members and the situated, local, changeable ?orders? whose ?rules? they knowingly follow. Ethnomethodologists resist importing theoretical constructs that derive from ?elsewhere? or are specified at a level of abstractioN removed from the situation in question. They retain a sustained commitment to the empirical, but reject the taken for grant edness of ?social facts? typifying empiricist or positivist social science, preferring instead to ascertain how a supposed ?social fact? has come about, become recognized and then entered the situated practical knowledge of people in the grain of their everyday lives. Central here is the reFLexivity of the researcher, not so much through continually interrogating their own positioNaLity, but through gauging the ?how? of their own conduct; that is, how they do what they do themselves when researching as a prac tical activity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ethnomethodology has intellectual roots in Alfred Schutz?s constitutive pHENomeNoLogy and Erving Goffman?s micro sociology of the everyday, both of which have figured in ver sions of human geograpHy post 1970. The key figures here, though, are: Harold (NEW PARAGRAPH) Garfinkel (e.g. 1967), who declared that the researcher must learn from members ?what their affairs consist of as locally produced, locally occasioned, and locally ordered, locally described, locally questionable, counted, recorded, observable phenomena of order? (Garfinkel and Weider, 1992, p. 186); and Harvey Sacks (e.g. 1992), who developed con versation analysis (CA), taking seriously the ?analysis? that we all do while conversing as well as the timing, spacing and ?indexicality? (the significance of immediate contexts to the progress) of any conversation. There has been no concerted attempt to create an ethnometh odological geography, although ethnomethodo logical ?policies? have filtered into the discipline through EtHNograpHy and also brushes with the likes of symboLic iNteractioNism, actor NETwork THEory (ant) and non represeNta tional THEory (nrt). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In various studies on mobile phone use in cars, everyday LiFe in coffee houses, practices with pets Laurier (1998, 2004) has worked between geography and ethnomethodology, highlighting how such a position differs from ?the requirements of the perFormaNce of ??doing competent cultural geograpHy??? (Laurier, 2001, p. 486). Unlike NRT?s (NEW PARAGRAPH) wariness of spoken communication, he follows the impetus of CA in foregrounding ?talk? as social action, within which members under take ?representational work? as it occurs in the immediacy of the here and now. He rec ognizes the objection that ethnomethodology appears not to tackle what theorists take as larger, more enduring ?social structures?, responding on the one hand (with ANT) that such structures cannot just be the fragile accomplishment of countless interlinking peoples, conducts and situations, and on the other by seeking commonalities with the ?archaeological? method pioneered by Michel Foucault when dealing with the (seemingly grander) operations of discourse and power (Laurier and Philo, 2004). cp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Laurier (2001, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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