The Dictionary of Human Geography (62 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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everyday life
A realm associated with ordin ary, routine and repetitive aspects of social life that are pervasive and yet frequently overlooked and taken for granted. For many commenta tors, the everyday is inherently ambiguous and indeterminate, something that is both every where yet nowhere, familiar at the same time as it escapes (Blanchot, 1993 [1969]). The term ?everyday life? is often used to evoke the lived qualities of a range of activities such as cooking, eating, drinking, shopping, playing, walking, commuting, nurturing children, working for wages and so on, through which people experience and interact with the world and with others. Henri Lefebvre (1991b, p. 97) suggests that it may be defined negatively as ? ??what is left over?? after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis?. Yet he insists that it is related to all activities as their common ground or bond, and he likens it to a ?fertile soil? that ?has a secret life and a richness of its own? (p. 87). (NEW PARAGRAPH) From the perspective of everyday life, ?geog raphy is everywhere? (Cosgrove, 1989), its subject matter found in even the most seem ingly ordinary streets, homes, malls, offices, factories, parks, playgrounds and the like. As a distinct formulation, ?everyday life? has been widely referenced and problematized in recent years within geograpHy and many of the social sciences and humanities, where it has been seen as offering an important perspective on social, cultural, political and economic processes and practices, one whose proven ance lies between structuralism and phe nomenology, and one that raises lived experience to the level of a critical concept (Kaplan and Ross, 1987). The subject crosses disciplinary boundaries and indeed brings them into question, as suggested by references to an emerging ?everyday life studies? (Highmore, 2002). It has also found promin ence in recent arts and cultural practice. Important for understanding the spaces and places of everyday life have been theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and Lefebvre, whose belated translation into English has been a significant spur to Anglophone scholarship. But geographical interest in the subject is long standing, and other significant approaches in recent decades are associated with humanistic geography and feminist geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recovering everyday geographical experi ences against their erasure within spatial science concerned many humanistic geog raphers who, influenced by phenomenology and writings by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau Ponty, turned attention to the lifeworld and to emotional and subject ive encounters with and attachments to places, often privileging notions of home. In the process, they stressed the work involved in interpreting geographies of the everyday, including the need for self reflexivity. But while humanistic geographers debated the necessity for philosophical rigour, with some preferring a looser constitutive phenomen ology derived from Alfred Schutz to concen trate on how the lifeworlds of ordinary social groups are intersubjectively constituted in par ticular places, and with others distancing themselves from theory to embrace ?experi ence? as such, feminists and Marxists criticized their neglect of the power relations that struc ture everyday experiences of places, including within the home, and hence their inability to advance deeper critiques of exploitation and oppression. It is with that in mind that many feminist geographers have focused on ordinary activities and repetitive social interactions, con sidering how they are bound into structures that discriminate against women and reinforce gen der hierarchies (cf. structuration theory). (NEW PARAGRAPH) According to Susan Hanson (1992), finding significance in the everyday is a core analytic tradition shared by feminism and geography. She shows how this focus can undermine the common opposition between home and work, for example, by demonstrating their inter connections at the level of everyday lives and practices with important implications for understanding local labour markets and gen der divisions of work in both. To bring daily activities into focus, many feminists have employed time geography, which was devel oped by Torsten Hagerstrand and colleagues at the University of Lund during the 1960s and 1970s, in a context in which ideas about everyday life had been central to Swedish wel fare and urban planning. Plotting women?s daily space time paths enabled insights into the role of gender relations in the temporal and spatial structuring of social action, and hence into ?the reproduction of patriarchy in the banal activities of everyday life? (Rose, 1993, p. 25). Gillian Rose nevertheless criti cizes time geography?s universal depiction of space and its claim to exhaustiveness, which she depicts as masculinist, along with its inability to address differential embodiment, emotion and passion. Her concerns relate to those frequently raised more generally about the appropriateness or otherwise of different ways of apprehending the everyday, the actual ity of which always exceeds attempts at capture. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Feminist interest in the geographies of the everyday is also often connected with debates about social reproduction, which for Cindi Katz (2004, p. x) is ?as much the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life as it is a set of structured practices that unfold in dia lectical relation to production, with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension?. Yet she insists that social reproduction must be under stood as a critical practice marked by the refusal to see the process as inevitable or natural, and by attentiveness to resilience as well as to pos sibilities of reworking, resistance and even revo lution. In that sense, Katz likens it to Lefebvre?s influential double sided concept of everyday life, which he developed over many decades and which is central to his writings on urban ism and the production of space. On the one hand, Lefebvre used the terms ?the everyday? and ?everydayness? critically as referring to the entry of daily life into modernity, as he devel oped Marx?s account of alienation to address how everyday life has been colonized by the commodity and the state through the impos ition of an abstract space. But he also sought redemptive possibilities within the everyday, arguing that it harbours traces of more authen tic living as well as the potential for radical change and for the production of other differ ential spaces. It is therefore a key terrain of struggle. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Challenges to characterizations of everyday life as self evident, immutable and universal (NEW PARAGRAPH) have also come through place specific studies of changing everyday worlds and Language under conditions of modernity that are atten tive to multiple practices and power relations (Pred, 1990), and cross cultural enquiries into everydayness and its conceptualization as a means of figuring cultural experiences of modernity and capitalist modernisation (Harootunian, 2000). Lefebvre?s own critique needs situating within a French tradition of everyday life theorizing that developed espe cially during the 1960s and 1970s in the con text of rapid modernization and processes of decolonization, and that included de Certeau, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec and the situ ationists, as well as the surrealists before them. This tradition?s influence is apparent in much current human geography, where it has been taken up alongside phenomenological and feminist writings to inform studies of prac tice, performance and embodiment as well as narrative and rhythm in the construction of space and time (Simonsen, 2004; see also body). A concern with drawing out the extra ordinary within the ordinary and what Lefebvre called ?the minor magic in everyday life? has also occupied many geographers, including those influenced by non representationaL theory, who have sought new means of noticing the practical knowledge, skilled improvisation and intuition involved in ?the elusive, phantasmic, emergent and often only just there fabric of everyday life? (Thrift, 2000d, p. 407). While much work on everyday life has emphasized the resistant and subversive tactics of ordinary people, drawing especially on de Certeau (1984) in the process, some writers are seeking to re evaluate repetition, habit, familiarity and the non intentional aspects of the corporeal as demanding fuller attention in their own right. For others, it is the utopian impulse concerned not simply with describing everyday life but also with trans forming it for the better that remains so com pelling (see also utopia). dp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Highmore (2002); Katz (2004); Lefebvre (2008 [1947, 1961, 1981]); Sheringham (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
evidence-based policy
Evidence based pol icy has been developed in reaction to interven tions based on inertia, expediency, opinion, subjectivity and short term political pressures. The term refers to an approach to policy devel opment and implementation that uses rigorous techniques to develop and maintain a robust, high quality, valid and reliable evidence base. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The approach began in heaLth care (the term ?evidence based medicine? first appeared in 1992) and has become a world wide movement in the Cochrane Collaboration (http://www. cochrane.org/index0.htm), which aims to pro vide ?the reliable source of information in health care?. Particular emphasis is placed on random ized trials in which the recipient is randomized to the new intervention (cf. sampLing): the epi demiologist Archie Cochrane had famously argued that researchers should ?randomise until it hurts?. The approach has been extended into the social arena with the Campbell Collaboration (http ://www. campb ellcollab ora tion.org/), named after the distinguished social science methodologist Donald T. Campbell. This aims to answer the question ?What harms, what helps, based on what evidence?? and a Centre for Neighbourhood Research was created as part of the UK Network for Evidence based Policy and Practice (http:// www.evidencenetwork.org/). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The orthodox approach to evidence based policy is based on a systematic review finding all the relevant studies including grey litera ture, weeding these for methodological flaws and inconsistencies, ranking the evidence so that the greatest reliance is placed on well designed randomized trials, and then combin ing valid evidence quantitatively in a meta analysis to provide the ?weight of evidence? supporting best practice. A heterodox view is provided by Ray Pawson (2006), who argues for what he terms ?realist synthesis? that stresses generative mechanisms and causal contingency, so that data analysis aims to find ?what works for whom in what circumstances? (cf. pragmatism). Consequently, there is not a single ?best buy? for all situations, but a tailored, ?transferable theory? that works in these respects, for these subjects, in these kinds of contexts. kj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Davies, Nutley and Smith (2000); Torgerson (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
exception, space of
A topological space produced when a sovereign power invokes the Law in order to suspend the law. Its mod ern formulation is closely associated with right wing political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888 1985), who declared: ?Sovereign is he who decides the exception.? Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben radicalized Schmitt?s work to argue that it is the act of deciding the exception that defines the sover eign: that this is the ground and origin of sovereign power (rather than vice versa) (Agamben, 1998). This crucial decision in the original German sense of ?a cut in life? is at once performative and paradoxical. It is performative because it draws a boundary between politically qualified life and merely existent life wilfully exposed and abandoned to violence and death (?bare life?) that has the most acutely material consequences. And it is paradoxical, and all forms of life are thereby made precarious, because the boundary is mobile and indistinct (cf. zone of indistinction). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agamben writes about both a ?state? of exception and a ?space? of exception, and his argument bears on spatiality in at least three ways. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agamben uses Set Theory to argue that the exception from the Latin ex capere, which literally means that which is ?taken outside? is a paradoxical spacing be cause it ?cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and can not be a member of the whole in which it is always already included? (1998, p. 25). This limit figure must be captured topo logically (see topology), he concludes, because only a twisted cartography of power is capable of folding such propri ety (the invocation of the law) into such perversity (the suspension of the law). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Many analyses of the space of exception focus on enclosed sites (the Nazi concen tration camp at Auschwitz, immigration and refugee detention centres, and the US war prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: see, e.g., Gregory, 2006b) or ter ritorialized configurations of power (the shattered fragments of occupied Pales tine: see, e.g., Gregory, 2004b), but by their very nature, spaces of exception may be much more indeterminate than these exemplary spatial formations imply. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The state of exception is typically associ (NEW PARAGRAPH) ated with the declaration of a national emergency and the imposition of martial law by a state, and Agamben argues that the growth of a national security state and the intensification of its sovereign powers through the globalization of the ?war on terror? has turned the state of exception into a new paradigm of late modern government (Agamben, 2005, pp. 1 31: cf. governmentality). But these national framings are also affected by transnational geopolitics and geo economics, and by international law (Gregory, 2007). dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gregory (2006b); Mbembe (2003); Pratt (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
exceptionalism
The view that ?geography is quite different from all the other sciences, methodologically unique? (Schaefer, 1953, p. 231). The term was coined by Fred K. Schaefer to disparage this, the dominant con ception of American geograpHy codified by Hartshorne (1939) in his enormously influen tial prospectus for The nature of geography. Instead, Schaefer argued that geography was just like every other science, sharing a meth odology based on identifying and mobilizing universal laws (see law, scientific). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hartshorne?s position was based on the writ ings of nineteenth and early twentieth century German geographers. They did not merely influence Hartshorne?s interpretation: they were his interpretation. The nature of geography was determined ?in light of the past?. That past, or at least the past on which Hartshorne drew, was strongly influenced by neo kaNtiaNism that separated geography and history from other sci ences because they were concerned with the unique and non repeatable. Geography and history, Hartshorne argued, were ideo (NEW PARAGRAPH) grapHic, not nomothetic. While geography was a scieNce, in that it provided ?organized, objective knowledge? (Hartshorne 1939, (NEW PARAGRAPH) p. 130), the geographical units in which facts were organized, of which the most important were regioNs, were unique and non repeat able. Geography was ?the study of areal differ entiation? and was ?most clearly expressed in regioNAL geograpHy? (Hartshorne, 1939, (NEW PARAGRAPH) p. 468). Methodologically, what followed and marked geography as exceptionalist in Schaefer?s sense was an inability to deploy scientific laws, because laws were predicated on generalization and repetition of phenom ena. Hartshorne (1939, p. 446) wrote, ?We arrive, therefore, at a conclusion similar to that which Kroeber has stated for history: ??the uniqueness of all historical phenomena. . . . No laws or near laws are discovered.?? The same conclusion applies to the particular com bination of phenomena at a particular place.? Geographers, therefore, were not able scientif ically to explain, or predict or knowingly inter vene, but only describe: ?Regional geography, we conclude, is literally what its title expresses: ... [I]t is essentially a descriptive science con cerned with the description and interpretation of unique cases . . . ? (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 449). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In contrast, Schaefer, who was an economist and statistician before and during the Second (NEW PARAGRAPH) World War, and influenced during his tenure at the University of Iowa by the logical posi tivist and former Vienna Circle member, Gustav Bergmann, believed in the unity of science, and a single, common scientific methodology resting on law based explan ation. In his contrary view, geography was not exceptionalist, but a chip off a uniform scientific block: to explain phenomena within or beyond geography ?means always to recog nize them as instances of laws? (Schaefer, 1953, p. 227). Schaefer argued that geography should pay particular attention to morpho logical laws taking the form, ?If geographical pattern (morphology) A, then geographical pattern (morphology) B? (see morphology). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In his reply, Hartshorne (1955) pulverized Schaefer, even though Schaefer had been dead for two years. While Hartshorne (necessarily) won that battle, Schaefer won the war, as human geography increasingly rejected exceptionalism, first during the formalization of spatial science during the quantitative revolution and later through its embrace of social theory. Geography was to be ordin ary, not exceptional. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Barnes and Farish (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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