The Dictionary of Human Geography (69 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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to non humans and what is conceived as nature. The lessons from the debates about difference in the 1990s have been learnt, and a defining characteristic of feminist animal rights analyses (as compared to those of ?mainstream? animal rights advo cates) is the tendency to theorize an ethics of care without erasing the differences between humans and non humans. Feminist geograph ers continue to focus on the body, but are possibly more effective in theorizing the body at a multiplicity of ?scales? and institutional sites, especially in relation to the economy (Wright, 1999a) and the state. Feminist geographers are tending more and more to develop their analyses beyond their national boundaries, to understand the connections between processes and lives in the global North and global South (Katz, 2001a; Nagar, Lawson, McDowell and Hanson, 2002; Pratt, 2004). As part of this, feminist geographers are re inventing critical geopolitics to develop a politics of security that includes the civilian body and decentres a focus on state security (Hyndman, 2005). State violence; the rape and torture of men and civilian women as technologies of war; the production of ?the monster?, ?the fag? and ?the terrorist? as figures of surveillance and criminalization (Puar and Rai, 2002); the re masculinization and militarization of daily life; the impact of neo liberal policies on the global gender division of labour these are themes that press for attention in our contemporary world. gp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Domosh and Seager (2001); Moss (2002); Nelson and Seager (2005); Pratt (2004); Rose (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Sharp, Browne and Thien (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
fertility
Reproductive performance, or the number of live births. Along with mortaLity and migration, it is one of the three compon ents of the balancing equation and, as such, an important influence upon the growth, compos ition and distribution of populations (see dem ography). Unlike mortality and morbidity, which have been the subject of long standing interest in medicaL geography and geograph ies ofheaLth and heaLth care, and migration, similarly investigated in popuLation geog raphy, fertility (and fecundity) continues to receive scant attention within geography (Boyle, 2003), despite such trends as the emer gence of negative population growth rates fuelled by low fertility, increasingly complex househoLd forms and a growing emphasis upon social reproduction in the discipline. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Research on geographical variations in fertility makes use of two types of measures. Period measures focus on events that occur between a starting and ending date, and include the crude birth rate (the number of births in a year for every 1,000 persons in a population). cohort measures focus on events that occur to a particular group of indi viduals, such as those born or married in the same year, and include the total fertility rate, which represents the number of live births that a woman currently aged 15 would expect by the time she reaches age 49 and assuming that current age specific fertility rates remain con stant. The fact that a large number of coun tries exhibit total fertility rates well below the replacement level of 2.1 has stimulated debate on the fertility and demographic transition in particular, and the changing role of chiLdren and adults in society more generally (Greenhalgh, 1995; Waldorf and Franklin, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Research on the politics of reproduction explores discourses surrounding family plan ning, reproductive health and reproductive rights movements, particularly as they impacted upon policy recommendations from successive meetings of the International Conference for Population and Development, and the geogra phical nature of sociaL constructions sur rounding, for example, teen pregnancy, child birth and maternal mortality (Fernandez Kelly, 1994;Grimes, 1999;Underhill Sem,2001). ab (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bongaarts (2002); Boyle (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
feudalism
A term used in the analysis of pre capitalist societies, especially those of medieval Europe, but also Japan under the rule of warlords from the twelfth to the nine teenth centuries. Feudalism has a wide range of meanings, from a legal focus on the military obligations imposed through the concept of a fief (see below) to a more comprehensive, quintessentially political and economic char acterization of feudalism as a specific mode of production or sociaL formation. The increasing scope of the definition owes much to a growing interest in comparative history and, in particular, to studies of the geograph ically variable relationships between the decline of feudalism and the rise of agrarian capitalism (Hilton, 1976; Kula, 1976; Martin, 1983; Dodgshon, 1987; Glennie, 1987). But this has also prompted a fear that, outside history and historicaL geography, ? ??feudalism?? seems to have become a general catch all term denoting almost anything in the pre modern period; it is as though all societal relationships, economies and politics of the medieval period can be defined simply by this legal term that describes the action of lords collecting a surplus through a sort of military protection racket? (Harvey, 2003b, p. 152). Such a prospect has been complicated by more recent analyses that claim to identify a resurgent feudalism within late modernity, a sort of ?medieval modernity? predicated on a particular combination of fiefdom and freedom and the production of fractured and competing sovereignties associated with the aggressive advance of neo LiberaLism in both the global north (alSayyad and Roy, 2006; Zafirokski, 2007) and the south (cf. Murray, 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In its classical sense, feudalism comprises two distinct social groups. The first is a group of direct producers (broadly peasants) who maintain direct, which is to say non market, access to the means of production (land, tools, seed corn and livestock) even though they may not own them (especially land). This group is subject to politico legal domination by a second group of social superiors, who form a status hierarchy headed by a monarch or sovereign (see sovereign power). The sover eign ultimately owns all the land, but land tenure is effectively decentralized through grants of land to feudal lords in return for their political and military support. In such a sys tem, social relations of production are thus not defined primarily through markets, as in capitalism, and the means by which a surplus is extracted from the direct producers is differ ent from systems like sLavery. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The key social relationships in European feudalism were vassalage and serfdom. Vassalage was an intra elite relationship by which a subordinate (vassal) held rather than owned landed property, the ?fief? (Latin feo dum, feudum, hence feudalism) from a lord, ultimately the sovereign, in return for military service required by the sovereign. The sover eign?s vassals were tenants in chief, who in turn ?subinfeudated? their estates to raise their own military service. Thus a hierarchy of feudal tenants came to hold estates of vari ous sizes, composed of territorial jurisdictions called manors, in what Anderson (1974, pp. 148 9) described as a complex ?parcelliza tion? of sovereignty. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Serfdom was the legal subjection of peasant tenants to lords through the latter?s manorial jurisdictions, of which unfree tenants were legally held to be part. Dependent peasant ten ants held land from their lord in return for vary ing combinations of services in kind, especially labour services on the lord?s own land within the manor (the demesne) and money rents. The legal dependence of peasant tenants enabled feudal lords both to extract higher than market rents from their tenants and also to impose a range of other dues and exactions, including duties on death and licenses to marry, to migrate or to brew ale. Peasant tenants were fined at a manorial court if these activities were under taken without appropriate licenses, and courts also exercised a degree of moral regulation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The level of rents and dues was set more by lords? income requirements than by market forces, although lords gained from the latter as population growth made land scarce relative to labour. Seigneurial income requirements progressively increased as lords competed for political status through conspicuous con sumption. Moreover, since feudal lords could raise income from intensified surplus extraction, they were comparatively indifferent to innovations to raise agricultural productiv ity. These claims have important implications for the explanatory value of the geography of manorialism (estate size and fragmentation, seigneurial character) and of the lord tenant struggle in accounting for geographical vari ations in population density, agricultural systems and productivity, and standards of living (Hilton, 1973; Hallam, 1989; Campbell, 1990, 1991; Dyer, 1993). As lordly extraction intensified, and medieval European populations grew (for reasons as yet imper fectly understood), feudal society exhibited certain crisis tendencies, because the surplus removal process failed to generate any signifi cant feedback into the productive capacity of agriculture through investment. A crisis of social reproduction was inevitable since: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Production for the market and the stimu lus of competition only affected a very narrow sector of the economy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agricultural and industrial production were based on the household unit, and the profits of small peasant and small artisan enterprises were taken by land owners and usurers. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The social structure and the habits of the landed nobility did not permit accumu lation for investment for the extension for production (Hilton, 1985). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hilton?s work remains an important demon stration that towns and trade were integral to feudal economies, not ?non feudal islands in feudal seas?, exogenous factors that under mined feudal social relations (cf. pirenne thesis). But recent studies have paid more attention to the extent of commercialization within medieval agrarian economies and its impact on geographies of manorialism (Power and Campbell, 1992; Campbell, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) While debate continues on the importance to medieval agrarian contraction of excessive surplus extraction (see brenner thesis) and ecological frailties (see postan thesis), there has been a general move towards more sophisti cated theorizations that broaden analysis of feudal society beyond property relations. Greater attention has been paid to accumula tion and differentiation within the class of direct producers (Poos, 1991; Razi and Smith, 1996a). Important developments in social technologies changed the geographical structuring of feudal society. Over time, status came to be increasingly embodied in property rather than interpersonal relations. Notable geographical components stemmed from this shift, including new legal, fiscal and administrative technologies to control time and space (Bean, 1989; Biddick, 1990; Clanchy, 1993). Finally, certain social continuities across the feudalism capitalism transition, especially in the functioning of geo demographic and cultural systems, have received serious attention (Poos, 1991; McIntosh, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . pg/dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Brown (1974); Dodgshon (1987); Reynolds (NEW PARAGRAPH) (1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
field system
The fields and other agricul tural resource elements, such as wastes and commons, of a community or communities that may be regarded as functioning as an agrarian and social system (Gray, 1915; Dodgshon, 1980). In a more specific sense, (NEW PARAGRAPH) the term can be applied to early patterns of landholding and husbandry that entwined groups of cultivators into communities of mutual or common interests through their use of landed resources. In studies of the historicaL geography of europe, particular attention has focused on the manner in which the intermixture of land between landholders has taken the form of strips or parcels. Other themes that loom large in defining such systems are the extent to which the system possessed a communally regulated system of cropping, or the degree to which arable cultiv ators possessed rights in common over the cultivated area after harvest. Analysis of such systems has also been linked to the nature of Land tenure and the extent to which individ ual ownership of land prevailed. Debates sur round the extent to which communal systems of tenure and their associated field systems are seen invariably to predate those based upon enclosed fields held in severalty. In consider ing open field systems, emphasis might be placed on the way in which individual?s hold ings or strips of land were distributed over larger fields subject to rule based cropping practices that were generated internally by the cultivators themselves or imposed by out side agencies such as landlords, or formed a means of risk minimization to ensure that cultivators had lands under different crops on variable soil types, or whether they were incompatible with effective and efficient agrar ian management. Such systems have formed the basis of debates in poLiticaL economy about the benefits of individual over commu nal tenure. The debate over the encLosure of open field systems into enclosed fields and associated scattered free standing farms man aged without reference to communal rules and regulations has played a prominent place in the timing of the agricuLturaL revoLution (Allen, 1992). Other scholars have focused on the supposed social consequences that may have flowed from enclosure and how the removal of access to communal grazing, post harvest gleaning and the right to collect fuel and other food resources from commons turned smallholder peasants into rural prole tarians (Neeson, 1993). rms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Neeson (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
fieldwork
A means of gathering data that involves the researcher in direct engagement with the material world. Once based in the enLightenment assumption that ?reality? was out there available for straightforward appre hension, fieldwork is now recognized as a more complicated mode of learning that pro duces situated knowLedge about people, processes and pLaces. While this perspective may be seen as a hindrance in positivist approaches to human geographical research that seek to neutralize the researcher and aspire to statistical generalizations, many now recognize the strength of self refLexivity and the necessarily partial nature of the informa tion collected. The two modes of scholarship endure in fieldwork, and the epistemological tensions between them can be daunting (e.g. Sundberg, 2003: see also epistemology). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Field research has a long history in human geography. Since antiquity, much of it has been associated with imperial projects, and thus involved expLoration, mapping and the taxonomic categorization of resources ani mal, plant, mineral and human. But fieldwork is also a means to examine the relationships between people and their environments, the material social practices of place making, the productions of nature and the sedimenta tions of these relationships in diverse historical geographies. Fieldwork in this regard has had a more ambiguous and contested relationship with the discipline pitting observational against theoretical knowledge and sometimes challenging received ways of knowing (cf. Driver, 2000). Its multiple strands include the ?stout boots? tradition of British geography and Sauerian cultural geography in the USA (Delyser and Starrs, 2001; cf. Withers and Finnegan, 2003). Evolving from a natural history tradition, wherein physical evidence was collected in and from the environment, fieldwork of this nature focuses on Landscapes as evidence of differentiated, sequential and uneven human occupance; seeking relation ships and patterns in their production and persistence. Many of the field methods associ ated with these traditions are rooted in obser vation. The taken for grantedness of seeing as well as its reliance on unmarked ?vantage points? has been subjected to a thorough critique as mascuLinist, because its claims to objectivity rest on unstated hierarchies, detached observers and distancing assumed adequate to reveal hidden dimensions of the scene (Barnes and Gregory, 1997b; Rose, 1997b; Sundberg, 2003). Given these con cerns and other limits of traditional (NEW PARAGRAPH) approaches to fieldwork, including its inter ested nature, unsustainable assumptions regarding the distinction between nature and cuLture, and the tendency to focus on visual rather than more dynamic, relational and con tested forms of evidence, many fieldwork prac titioners developed a more critical stance to their work. Feminist geographers (see femi nist geographies) were key in this interven tion, examining the politics of representation that percolate through fieldwork, scrutinizing the uneven power relations that propel it and calling its epistemological claims into question (Rose, 1993; Professional Geographer, 1994; Sundberg, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Engaging in fieldwork of this kind raises the question of what constitutes the field. The field, as Felix Driver (2000, p. 267) reminds us, ?is not just ??there??; it is produced and re produced through both physical movement across a landscape and other sorts of cultural work in a variety of sites?. It is also the effect of discursive and spatial practices that mark it as a site of enquiry ?that is necessarily artificial in its separations from geographical space and the flow of time? (Katz, 1994, p. 67). These distinctions and the sorts of knowledge derived from them are constituted through embodied practices such as travel, residence, visiting, conversation, observing, eating, smelling, listening and various (re)presenta tions of self. The field and the fieldworker are co constructions, and the knowledge pro duced between them reflects the materiality and mutability of this relationship. Scholars have addressed the various and multiple con notations of movement among fields the constitution of a field site, the way in which the site and the sorts of knowledge produced there are constructed in one?s disciplinary field, and the uneven valences of power that energize and can confound the multiple trans lations spatial, linguistic, and practical of fieldwork (e.g. Professional Geographer, 1994; Pluciennik and Drew, 2000; Saunders, 2001). Questions of power affect such things as nego tiating access, whether and how to conduct research in areas of confLict and vioLence, determining what kinds of knowledge can be shared and with whom, figuring out what can not be said and making sense of the silences, and representing oneself in ?the field? and the field to one?s audience. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The methodoLogy of fieldwork is cap acious and eclectic, encompassing quantitative and qualitative strategies of data collection. While fieldwork is commonly associated with case study methodologies and ethnographic research, it also includes survey research, broad observational studies, mapping and measurement techniques. Among the research methods associated with fieldwork in human (NEW PARAGRAPH) geography are all manner of field observation, including participant observation, land scape assessment and site observation; oral techniques such as casual conversation, unstructured and structured interviews, focus group interviews, oral histories and environ mental autobiographies; survey and census techniques (see survey anaLysis); digging through, collecting, sorting, classifying and interpreting records, whether in the ground, in place or in archives; measurement and map ping activities; and documenting what is observed and experienced in a variety of ways, including written, photographic, cartographic, aural and artistic means. Recent investigations of fieldwork have addressed issues such as the embodiment of the fieldworker (see body), bringing companions to the field, sexual rela tions in the field, and the ethics and implica tions of dishonesty and misrepresentation in fieldwork. As these concerns suggest, field work produces knowledge that is avowedly situated, and its validity resides both in that recognition and in the disciplined refLexivity that enables researchers to expose their prac tices and question their findings. ck (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographical Review (2001); The Professional Geographer (1994); Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (2003); Wolf (1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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