The Dictionary of Human Geography (63 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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exchange
As an activity, exchange has played a more or less critical role in virtually all societies. It has allowed them to exceed the constraints of subsistence, intensify produc tion and diversify patterns of consumption (although by no means equitably), form social alliances and spatial networks of association, organize and reproduce social hierarchies by expanding the reservoir of material surpluses, and generate new layers of social communica tion through the symbolic dimensions of exchange. Exchange is a precursor to com merce and therefore to a market economy involving transactions of goods and services between buyers and sellers (see capitalism). Hence the central claim of Adam Smith?s influential 1776 treatise, The wealth of nations that a growing social division of labour and specialized production of goods generates eco nomic prosperity without causing society itself to disintegrate is premised on the possibility of ubiquitous exchange; in other words, mar kets. But this is hardly a given. Some things (use values) may never enter the realm of exchange, because society considers it profane to sell them. Additionally, some exchanges may remain individualized and sporadic, and not result in a market (new institutional economics has shown, for example, how pro hibitive transactions costs can hinder indi vidualized exchange from expanding into a market). Contrarily, exchange may not occur as a commodity transaction, or it may occur, as in situations of barter, as a commodity transaction not mediated by the money form. Finally, the good or service purveyed may take the social form of a gift, with or without expectation of reciprocity. The writings of the Hungarian anthropologist Karl Polanyi (1972) are particularly illuminating in these matters. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wherever reciprocity is assumed or implied commercial, barter or gift there is the further issue of value. In one sense, the issue is straight forward: it seems reasonable to assume that in a dyadic transaction where individuals A and B exchange a good or service, they do so because A has something B wants and vice versa. In short, both A and B have something that the other values. At least two complications arise here. First, there can be no presumption of a transaction of equivalent value without refer ence to a third, transcendent standard or meas ure whether this takes the guise of: (a) a subjective marginal utility principle (hence A and B transact if at least one of them is better off from the transaction in terms of marginal utility and neither is worse off the so called Pareto principle of neo classical economics); or (b) a principle of equilibration of labour time (A and B transact goods containing equal amounts of socially necessary labour time the historically grounded Marxist scenario of non exploitation: see labour theory of value; Marxian economics). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This already hints at the second complica tion; namely, that exchange can occur despite the absence of equivalence because of the unequal circumstances of transactors. Take the case of distress sales of crop in a drought year by a cash strapped farmer. Given the choice between not selling and starving and selling at a loss, the second option is Pareto superior in terms of marginal utility for both the farmer who sells and the merchant who buys. But it appears to pervert any notion of equivalence. Similarly, take two other examples: the unemployed person who sells plasma to a for profit corporation or the run away boy who performs sexual favours in return for money. It is possible to argue in either instance (and economists do) that the transact ors are better off in terms of their respective marginal utilities (in the corporation?s case, its marginal utility ofprofit) but only, it seems, by compromising on a notion of equivalence that enjoins some sense of symmetry. In short, the mediation that is required to explain why exchange occurs yields equivocal answers: all we can categorically say is that finite availability of a thing in time and space and actual or anticipated social use value are general under lying conditions for exchange. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gifts are a subset of exchange. They involve neither mediation by money nor barter. But like these more conventional forms of transac tions, they supply individuals with incentives to collaborate in a pattern of exchanges that performatively reproduce society and validate the status of participants as social beings. In The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (1990 [1925]), the French scholar Marcel Mauss built on the ideas of Emile Durkheim to show how gifts function as a mechanism by which individual interests combine to make a social system a ?gift economy? in the absence ofmarket exchange. Because the gift is embedded in the economic, moral, religious, political and aesthetic dimen sions, Mauss termed it a ?Total social phe nomenon?. Mauss? essay has been extended in generative ways by social anthropologists such as Claude Levi Strauss, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu and Marilyn Strathern in their efforts to identify non market logics that cement society. It goes without saying that the gift economy, far from being an archaic social mechanism, remains a constitutive force in contemporary market societies. vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Appadurai (1986); Bourdieu (1990); Davis (1992); Mauss (1990 [1925]); Polanyi (1972). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
exclave
A small piece of a state that is phys ically separate from its main territorial body but remains within its political jurisdiction despite being surrounded by the territory of another state. Robinson (1959) identified five exclave types by degree of separation from the homeLand: normal, as per the definition above; pene, territories barely connected to the main state in such a way that access must occur via another state?s territory; quasi, tech nically disconnected but connected in prac tical terms; temporary, as the result of an armistice; and virtual, areas treated as exclaves without meeting the strict legal definition. (See also enclave.) cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Aalto (2002); Robinson (1959). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
existentialism
A phiLosophy that flour ished in the middle to late twentieth century as a radical defence of human freedom. It emerged partly in reaction to teLeoLogicaL and deterministic theories of human nature that saw human beings as determined by their biology, by the environments in which they found themselves, or by their social status or economic position. It also emerged in direct response to the racialized ideologies and geo poLitics of a colonial (see coLoniaLism) and coLd war world. Against notions of human subjects, peoples and cuLtures determined by their ?nature?, constrained by their ?essence? or being the mere ?bearers? of their class func tions, existentialism argued that human beings were free subjects, whose existence defined who and what they were. For Heidegger (1962 [1927]), the ?essence? of this finite subject, this ?being in the world?, was that it was thrown into a world not of its own making and radically oriented to this world through projects, mood, will and other dispositions. The ontoLogy of finitude was, for the existential subject, a life to be lived, with ?no exit? but death and along the way a profound anxiety and, at times, dread in the face of the individual?s immense responsi bility for his or her own life. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Existentialism emerged in human geog raphy in the 1970s, as part of a desire to re focus geographical enquiry away from the reductive abstractions of spatiaL anaLysis and structural marxism. It focused on the cap acities of human agency, and in so doing sought to be a corrective to the overly essen tialist arguments of much cuLturaL and his toricaL geography (see essentiaLism), to the structural arguments of poLiticaL economy and to the abstractions of spatial science. It focused on how human beings at once live in and make the spaces, places and Landscapes that they inhabit (Samuels, 1978, 1981). Far from being an abstract science of spatial rela tions, existential geographies were concrete descriptions of everyday LifeworLds, and were engaged with the ethics and values of what human beings understand to be the meaning of their lives and worlds (Entrikin, 1976; Tuan, 1976b; Relph, 1981, pp. 187 91). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Radical geographers have been sceptical of existentialism, tending to see it as overly focused on the subjective experiences of indi viduals; a kind of ideaLism that treated lived experience (with its anxieties and feelings of loss, uncertainty or dread) as indicative of a universal condition of existence instead of a concrete situation produced by a historical and oppressive society. In Marcuse?s (1972, p. 161) view, by hypothesizing determinate historical conditions of human existence as (NEW PARAGRAPH) ontological and metaphysical characteristics, existentialism became part of the ideoLogy it attacked: its radicalism was illusory (cf. critical THEory). jpi (NEW PARAGRAPH)
exit, voice and loyalty
A theory of consumer influence on the quality of pubLic goods developed by Hirschman (1970), who argued that service quality is likely to be lower in monopoly conditions than in situations where consumers have a choice. With the latter, the following options are available to consumers who consider a service either inefficient or ineffective: (NEW PARAGRAPH) exit consumers transfer to an alternative supplier; (NEW PARAGRAPH) voice consumers complain about the ser vice, threatening exit if they are not satisfied with the response; or (NEW PARAGRAPH) loyalty consumers remain with their cur rent supplier, without either exercising voice or threatening exit. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The higher the (exit) costs of switching sup pliers, the lower the potential impact of voice, because suppliers can assume loyalty; under monopolies, voice need have little impact on service quality. Although individual voice may be ineffective, however, collective voice through organized pressure groups may have more power over suppliers; such power may be unequally distributed, however, with wealth ier people better able to mobilize support and sustain their cause. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hirschman?s ideas have been developed by governments in recent decades by one or more of: privatizatioN policies, placing former pub Lic services in the private sector, believing that competition will lead to improved quality; creating quasi markets within public services (among health care providers, for example), with the same general expectation; or by pro moting choice, through providing information (as in school performance league tables), which consumers can use in considering exit strategies. (See also Neo LiberaLism; pubLic private partNErsHips; tiebout modEL.) rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
exopolis
A new city located beyond exist ing urban forms (see Edge city). Soja (1996a) defines it as representing a new form of urbAN ism. The exopolis turns ?the city inside out and outside in at the same time?, he suggests (p. 239). In this conception, functions for merly associated with ceNtraL busiNess dis tricts and commuter suburbs are not merely transposed, but their character and relation ships are reconfigured. ?Exopolis? and ?edge city? are terms that indicate attempts to under stand cities beyond the traditional framework of the cHicago school (cf. Los ANgeLes school) and to analyse urban processes at the city regional scale (Brenner, 2002). em (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Soja (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
explanation
A statement that identifies the essential reasons for the occurrence of a given event or phenomena. Reasons can be physical causes, mental states, contextual circumstan ces or even beneficial consequences. For each of these different kinds of reasons to count as an explanation, they must be linked to the event or phenomena by set of general rules (and at the extreme by universal laws). For example, to explain why my copy of the Dictionary of human geography just fell off the desk, I must connect that specific event to a wider set of laws governing motion and grav ity. Once the reasons behind the occurrence of a phenomenon or event are determined, the world is revealed as it really is. As Pierre Duhem (1962 [1906], p. 19) put it: ?To explain is to strip the reality of the appearances covering it like a veil, in order to see the bare reality itself.? (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers have been trying to discern ?bare reality? ever since the nineteenth century, when the discipline was first institutionalized. eNviroNmeNtaL determiNism was initially a favoured explanatory form in which variations in cLimate were posited as the reason for geo graphical variation in human behaviour, beliefs and institutions. Discussions of explanation as an idea, however, did not emerge until the quantitative revolution in the 1960s. In contrast to those who insisted that geograpHy, like history, had to be conducted under the sign of exceptioNaLism, the proponents of spatiaL science insisted that their ?new? geography was a science like any other, and thus had to meet the strictures of scientific explanation estab lished by pHiLosopHy. Those strictures were originally formalized by Hempel and Oppenheim in 1948, and known as the Deductive Nomological (D N) model. Scientific explanation rested on applying a deductive syl logism to a combination of general laws and initial empirical conditions. For example, explaining why the Dictionary just fell off my desk would involve linking by means of a deductive syllogism the particularities of that event to a scientific law (e.g. the law of gravity). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within the pHiLosopHy of science, the D N model provoked, and continues to (NEW PARAGRAPH) provoke, significant discussion, an there have been several refinements and alternatives (Salmon, 1990). Harvey (1969) made the D N model the gold standard for explanation in geography, but even at the time he recognized that few geographical events could be located within such a stringent framework, given the absence of geographical laws on which explan ation would have to depend. By the late 1970s there was a movement away from the D N model of explanation. Geographers were still concerned to explain events and phenomena, but they cast around for less narrowly con ceived approaches, ones that recognized that the discipline centred on specific and contin gent case studies rather than a larger statis tical universe of events. For many human geographers in the 1980s the philosophy of reaLism, with its conceptual vocabulary of causal powers and liabilities, and contingent and necessary relations, offered a consistent explanatory framework couched in terms of causation and contingency. While realism is still in use, there is a sense that even its definition of explanation remains too closely defined by a natural scientific sensibility. Consequently, it is inappropriate for those forms of human geography that draw upon interpretive, non essentiaList and even non representationaL theory. The task is to re conceive explanation in a form appropriate to human geography?s new guise. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Harvey (1969). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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