The Dictionary of Human Geography (81 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
2.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
from the global south (cf. Slater, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is true that conferences under the auspi ces of the International Geographical Union and major national geographical societies (especially the Association of American Geog raphers and also the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers) attract participants from all over the world, but being together is not the same as talking together. Smaller, more focused meetings have usually been more successful at encouraging dialogue, and the activities of the International Critical Human Geography Group, the Ae gean Seminars and international conferences in historicaL geography and economic geography have all helped to dissolve these parochialisms. But it has proved remarkably difficult to facilitate a less episodic, global exchange of ideas, and concern continues to be expressed about the hegemony of English language geography in nominally ?international? meetings and journals (Garcia Ramon, 2003; Paasi, 2005). It may be that physical geographers have been more success ful in resolving these issues, and that their ideas travel through more effective and multi directional channels. Their main journals attract contributions from authors in many countries, and the International Association of Geomorphologists has promoted a series of international and regional conferences. But this apparent success may also reflect a problematic conviction that ?science? is itself an international and ?interest free? language (cf. Peters, 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) To make ?space? focal to geographical en quiry is not to marginalize pLace, region or Landscape. These constructs have often been opposed in geography?s theory wars, but while they are certainly different concepts with dif ferent entailments, genealogies and implica tions (all of which need to be respected) they all also register modes of producing space as a field of differentiation and integration. To say this is to recognize geography?s depend ence on a series of technical and theoretical devices. This was so even when geography was conducted under the sign of a supposedly na?ve empiricism, what William Bunge and William Warntz once called ?the innocent sci ence?, because the production and certifica tion of its knowledges involved a series of calculative and conceptual templates. Tech nically, the ongoing formation of geography has been intimately involved with the chan ging capacity to conceive of the Earth as a whole (Cosgrove, 2001) and to fix and dis criminate between positions on its surface (in geodesy, navigation and the like), and thus with the development of cartography and geographic information systems (gis) that provide compelling demonstrations of the relevance of ?location, location, location? to more than real estate sales (Pickles, 2004; Short, 2004). The history of these procedu res is closely associated with that of expLor ation, the politico economic adventures of capitaLism, the occupations and disposses sions of coLoniaLism and imperiaLism, mod ern war and the deep interest of the modern state in the calculation and imagination of territory. To list these entanglements is not to imply a simple history of complicity, but this in its turn is not a plea for exculpation of ?Geography Militant? (Driver, 2001a): it is merely to note that many of these technical devices can be (and have been) turned to crit ical account, as the development of critical or radical cartographies and critical GIS attests (Harvey, Kwan and Pavovska, 2005; Cramp ton and Krygier, 2006), and to underscore that the ?technical? is never far from the polit ical. These means of knowing and rendering the world have been reinforced by formal the ories about location, spatialization and inter dependence that have offered an increasingly sophisticated purchase on geographies of uneven deveLopment and the variable inter sections between capitalism, war and gLobaL ization (Smith, 2008 [1984]; Harvey, 2003b; Sparke, 2005). These formulations are them selves marked by their origins, and the privil eges of location that they address and incorporate (Slater, 1992) have been under written by less formal but no less rhetorically powerful imaginative geographies that not only inculcate a ?sense of place? that is central to identity formation and the conduct of everyday Life, but also work to normalize particular ways of knowing the world and to produce allegiances, connections and divisions within it (Gregory, 2004b: see also geograph ical imaginaries). (NEW PARAGRAPH) By these various means, ?space? has been produced, at once materially and discursively, through a series of what are profoundly polit ical technologies. Hence, for example, Pickles? (2004, p. 93) pithy sense of the performativ ity of cartography: ?Mapping, even as it claims to be reproducing the world, produces it.? Attempts to understand these processes of production have involved historical accounts of the development of concepts and the systems of practice in which they have been embedded, in both physical and human geography (see, e.g., Beckinsale, Chorley and Dunn, 1964/1973/1991; Gregory, 2008). They have involved explorations of other ver sions of those spatializations too: experiments with different concepts of Landscape, pLace, region and space itself (see, e.g., Holloway, Rice and Valentine, 2003). In the same vein, there have been repeated forays into the vexed question of scaLe, which most physical geog raphers in the wake of Schumm and Lichty?s (1965) classic essay seem to regard as the very skeleton of their subject (Church and Mark, 1980), while at least some human geog raphers see it as the disarticulation of theirs (cf. Sheppard and McMaster, 2004; Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005). The interroga tion of these concepts has been an increasingly interdisciplinary project none of them is the peculiar possession of geography, even if geog raphers have done their most characteristic work with the tools they provide: ?Space is the everywhere of modern thought? (Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 1) and some commen tators have identified a ?spatial turn? across the whole field of the humanities and the social sciences (Thrift, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This turn has been sustained, in part, by a recognition that the outcome of processes differs from place to place. The variable char acter of the Earth?s surface has long driven enquiries into areaL differentiation in both physical and human geography, and contrary to the predictions of prophets and critics of modernity, the transformations brought about by globalization have not planed away differences: instead, they have produced new distinctions and juxtapositions. Physical geog raphy has always been acutely sensitive to macro and meso variations in landforms and processes, particularly those related to climate and geology. But we now have a clearer sense of the ways in which those variations have been culturally coded and constructed: W.M. Davis? once canonical (1899a) description of fluvial erosion in temperate regions as the ?normal? cycle of erosion (which would startle people living in other regions), for example, and the vast discursive apparatus of tropicaL ity that yoked land to life in low latitudes. Spurred on by the rapid rise of Earth Systems Science, we also have a much surer under standing of the global regimes and interde pendencies in which environmental variations are enmeshed (Slaymaker and Spencer, 1998). In much the same way, human geography retains its interest in the particularity of pLace, but now usually works with a ?global sense of place? (Massey, 1994a; cf. Cresswell, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Similarly, regions are now rarely seen as the independent building blocks of a global inventory; a revitalized regionaL geography focuses instead on the porosity of regions and on the intersecting processes through which their configurations are produced and trans formed (Amin, 2004b). Here too, geography is not alone in its interest: area studies, inter nationaL reLations and international studies have declared interests in these issues too, though where these interests have been wired to the conduct of foreign policy they have typically provided a narrower, more instru mental framing of interdependence than is now usual in geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) More fundamentally, however, the spatial turn has also been sustained through investi gations of the ways in which space affects the very operation of processes. It is now widely recognized that processes are not indifferent to the circumstances and configurations in which they operate, and it is this ?thrown togetherness? that has prompted a renewed interest in spatial ontoLogy (Massey, 2005). This was, in a way, precisely Hartshorne?s point and it is also the pivot around which so much of Torsten Hagerstrand?s extraor dinary experiments with time geography moved but it is now being sharpened in radically different ways. It is also why geog raphy has always placed such a premium on fiELdwork (which was focal to Stoddart?s account too). Unlike field sciences, laboratory sciences can, in some measure, control for disturbances and isolate parameters to create idealized states. In much the same way, spatial science was an attempt to prise apart different spatial structures the hexagonal lattices of centraL pLace systems, the wave forms of diffusion processes and then search for commonalities within these spatializations (market areas and drainage basins as hexa gons) or combine them in idealized modeLs (the diffusion of innovations through central place systems). These were all attempts to order what is now most often seen as a par tially ordered world to tidy it up. As the philosopher A.N. Whitehead warned, how ever, ?Nature doesn?t come as clean as you can think it?, and it is in this spirit that much of geography is increasingly exercised by the ways in which the coexistence of different spa tializations perturbs, disrupts and transforms the fields through which social and biophysical processes operate. Physical geography was in the vanguard of attempts to find the terms for what B.A. Kennedy (1979) memorably described as ?a naughty world?, and since then human geography has also recognized the non linearity, contingency and complexity of life on Earth. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The processes with which geography is concerned are conventionally and collectively identified as ?social? (economic, cultural, polit ical etc.) and ?biophysical? (biological, chem ical, geophysical etc.). These two realms have often been assigned to a separate human geography and physicaL geography, and the relations between the two have frequently prompted concern, on occasion even antagon ism. In some institutional systems the two are more or less completely separate in the Nordic countries, for example, there are usu ally separate university departments of human and physical geography while in others one more or less dominates to the virtual exclusion of the other (in India, human geography is considerably more prominent than physical geography, for example, while in the USA, until very recently, ?Geography? was over whelmingly human geography). Although most major geographical societies publish general journals that include papers in both physical and human geography in the English speaking world, these include the Annals of the Association of American Geogra phers, Canadian Geographer, Geographical Journal, Geographical Research, Geographical Review, South African Geographical Journal and the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in recent years many of them have found it difficult to attract physical geog raphers to their pages. (In Sweden, the English language Geografiska Annaler is pub lished as separate series in physical and human geography.) There are some newer, general journals produced by commercial publishers too, notably Geoforum, GeoJournal and Geog raphy Compass, and also technical journals such as Geographical Analysis and the Inter national Journal of Geographical Information Science. Publishing in the same journals does not imply a common discursive community, of course, and neither does it necessarily produce one: the sheer volume of academic publication makes most readers ever more selective (and perhaps idiosyncratic). But in any case the numbers of general journals have been dwar fed by the explosion of specialized, sub discip linary journals such as Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, The Journal of Biogeography, Physical Geography and Progress in Physical Geography on one side, and Antipode, Cultural Geographies, Economic Geography, the Environ ment and Planning journals, Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Historical Geography, Polit ical Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geographies on the other. Many of these journals advertise them selves as ?interdisciplinary?, but the two groups reach out in opposite directions to the at mospheric, biological and Earth sciences, or to the humanities and social sciences rather than to each other. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Openness to other disciplines is widely accepted as indispensable for intellectual vital ity, but there has also been a persistent anxiety that arrangements and practices such as these make a mockery of claims that geography studies the relations between the human and physical worlds, and at the limit threaten geo graphy?s institutional survival when ecological awareness and demands for sustainabLe de veLopment are being articulated by other dis ciplines and emerging interdisciplinary fields (cf. Turner, 2002). To be sure, human geog raphers have long had important things to say about nature it was only on the isotropic planes of spatial science that the biophysical environment was erased and a host of studies in cuLturaL ecoLogy, environmentaL history, hazarDs research and poLiticaL ecoLogy testify to the power of their contribu tions. Similarly, physical geographers have long been interested in the intersection of human and physical systems (cf. Bennett and Chorley, 1978). In geomorphology, many con sultative, geotechnical projects perhaps most obviously on flooding, soil erosion, slope sta bility and the like reveal the continuing vital ity of this stream of work, and the atmospheric sciences have placed considerable emphasis on their practical relevance. In the future, a revit alized biogeography (as a sort of ?living Earth science?) may well make some of the most direct connections to human geography and, indeed, to green politics, while pressing issues of global environmental change and gLobaL warming require a transdisciplinary approach that speaks across the sciences, social sciences and humanities (see also Turner, Clark, Kates, Richards and Mathews, 1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH) But to have important things to say and vital questions to address does not mean that human and physical geographers speak the same language, and translation has its own problems (Bracken and

Other books

Temptation to Submit by Jennifer Leeland
Very Wicked Beginnings by Ilsa Madden-Mills
White Lies by Evelyn Glass
Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) by Lene Kaaberbol, Agnete Friis
Southpaw by Rich Wallace
Her Lone Wolves by Diana Castle