The Dictionary of Human Geography (91 page)

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heterotopia
Literally ?another place? or ?place of otherness?, a term introduced into the humanities and social sciences by French thinker Michel Foucault (1926 84). Foucault borrowed the term from medicine, and uses it in opposition to utopia. While utopias ideal ized happy places do not really exist, but function as fantasies or spaces of hope, hetero topias for Foucault are places that do exist. But in their existing they radically undermine or challenge existing spatial orderings, they disturb, they are places of transgression or otherness. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault initially uses the term to describe linguistic or visual challenges, such as the writ ings of Jose Luis Borges or the paintings of Rene Magritte (Foucault, 1970 [1966], 1983). For Foucault these examples destroy ?syntax? not just the syntax we use to make sentences, but also the syntax that constructs relations between words and things and allows classifi cation and order. Borges? fictional Chinese En cyclopaedia, with its outlandish categories, and Magritte?s shoes with toes, paintings that are part of the landscape that they portray and mirrors that reflect what they conceal, all dis rupt and upset the commonplace. In a 1967 lecture, only published in French in 1984, shortly before his death (in English, see Fou cault, 1986), Foucault broadened the analysis to include places he described as ?counter sites, kinds of effectively enacted utopias?. Although Foucault suggests that in the modern period space is characterized by the relation between sites generally, he concentrates on those sites that link with and contradict other sites. His examples include the boarding school or the honeymoon hotel, where transitions between stages of life are managed; care homes, hos pitals and prisons, where deviation is placed; and a wealth of other examples, such as travel ling fairgrounds, hammams, saunas, brothels, boats and colonies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term has been developed in a number of English language writings in human geog raphy and related fields (e.g. Marks, 1995; Soja 1996b). One of the most important and original analyses is found in the work of Hetherington (1997b), who understands het erotopias as ?spaces of an alternative ordering? that must be seen in relation to the sites they differ from. He uses this understanding, to gether with a number of historical readings of the Palais Royal, Masonic lodges and factor ies, to illustrate how modernity is constituted through resistance and DlffERENCE as much as through the process of ordering. (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?Heterotopia? was also used by the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre (1901 91), but the meanings are not entirely congruent with Fou cault (see, e.g., Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]). Lefebvre understood the city through the three terms of utopia, isotopia (the same place) and heterotopia (places that are other, other places, or places of the other). He uses these terms to understand the uniformity, dif ference, contradictions and dialectical rela tions of urban space. Indeed, Lefebvre thinks that urban space in the singular is restrictive, and needs to be understood as urban spaces, as the differentiated spaces and the spaces of difference found in the city (see also produc tion Of space). se (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault (1986); Hetherington (1997b, Ch. 3). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
heuristic
A problem solving procedure, which may be a set of formal rules (such as an algorithm) but more likely a pragmatic or ?short cut? approach, such as drawing a dia gram or reducing the set of all possible solu tions to those that seem most probable. Many heuristics involve ?intelligent guesswork? based on experience (as in games of chess) and can involve trial and error procedures, moving towards a ?better? solution (as with neuraL networks). Heuristics are often deployed in optimization studies as with the travelling salesman problem and in various forms of cLassification (as in remote sensing). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gigerenzer and Todd (1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hindutva This concept encapsulates the cultural justification for Hindu nationaLism, a ?Hinduness? allegedly shared by all Hindus. Its first full articulation as a Hindu nationalist manifesto was made by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 work Hindutva/Who is a Hindu? For Savarkar, Hindutva was the life of a great race; it signified the religious, cultural and racial (?blood?) identity of Hindus. He claimed that the membership of the Hindu nation depended upon an acceptance of India as both fatherland and holy land. The spatial strategies of Hindutva, aimed at rear ticulating the link between the imagined com munity of Hindus and the sacred geography of its territorial domain (the nation space), have had a significant impact on contemporary Indian society and politics. sch (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sharma (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
hinterland
The tributary (or catchment) area of a port, from which materials for export are collected and across which imports are distributed: its complementary area the des tination for the exports and source of the im ports is the foreland. In more general usage, hinterland is deployed to describe a settle ment?s catchment area (or that of an establish ment within the settlement): it is the area for which the settlement acts as a trading nexus (as in the hexagonal hinterlands of centraL pLace theory). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
historical demography
The application of demographic methods (see demography) to data sets from the past that are sufficiently ac curate for formal analysis. Such data sets may take the form of vital records and censuses, but most frequently, and particularly if produced before the nineteenth century, would not have been created for the purposes of demographic enquiry. Parish registers, militia and tax lists, testamentary records and genealogies have been the most prominent among the great variety of documentary sources used by histor ical demographers (see Hollingsworth, 1969). Demographic history may subsume historical demography as a field of enquiry, but it is more wide ranging in its subject matter, being just as concerned with charting the impact of demographic change on society and economy as with the measurement and explanation of demographic change (see Wrigley, 1969). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Historical demography first secured a formal status in France at the Institut National d?Etudes Demographique (INED), where Louis Henry had begun research after the Sec ond World War on contemporary fertiLity and fecundity. His investigations were handi capped because those states that produced the most accurate demographic statistics were by then all controlling their fertility by family limi tation, and so he was drawn to the historical study of European populations to unravel ?nat ural fertility?. Henry (1956) devised the tech nique of famiLy reconstitution for exploiting genealogies of the Genevan bourgeoisie, and then developed detailed rules offamily reconsti tution using parish registers. The first published study concerned the Normandy parish of Crulai (Gautier and Henry, 1958), but the method was quickly adapted and modified for work on English parish registers by historical geographer and economic historian E.A. Wrigley (1966a). Wrigley (1966b) undertook a reconstitution of the East Devon parish of Colyton, where the population appeared to have been limiting its fertility in the late seventeenth century. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the past thirty years, a large number of reconstitution studies have been completed and they have shown little, if any, evidence of parity dependent fertility control, although the levels of fertility within marriage have var ied enormously by region. For instance, mari tal fertility in Belgian Flanders was 40 per cent higher than that of eighteenth century Eng land, although the two regions were separated by only a few miles across the English Channel. Likewise, marital fertility was almost 50 per cent higher in Bavaria than in East Friesland. By measuring birth intervals and relating infant deaths to the time elapsed to new conceptions, family reconstitution has enabled historical demographers to show that breastfeeding prac tices varied greatly and thereby influenced the tempo of conceptions (see Wilson, 1982). Breastfeeding also correlated closely with in fant mortality rates, which were also revealed by family reconstitutions to be very frequently in excess of 300 per 1,000 in non breastfeeding areas and as modest, by pre industrial stand ards, as 150 per 1,000 or lower in areas where women breast fed well into the second year of the child?s life (see Knodel, 1988). Such techniques have also made it possible to cast light on the geography of marriage and to test an important thesis about the distinctive ness of marriage patterns in north west Europe proposed by Hajnal (1965), who ar gued that females married uniquely late in life and that a large proportion remained entirely out of marriage. Hajnal discovered this pattern from census data of the nineteenth century, and family reconstitutions of France and England, southern Scandinavia and much of the German speaking areas of Western and Central Europe showed this marital geography to have been firmly embedded before 1600 and hence not derived from urbaNizatioN or iNdustriaLizatioN, and common to both Protestant and Catholic areas (Smith, 1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The Cambridge Group for the History of Population was the first centre of research exclusively devoted to historical demography, and it developed techniques for the study of early censuses and aggregative counts of bap tisms, burials and marriages to recreate demo graphic processes without employing the time consuming method of family reconstitution. One such technique generalized inverse pro jection is a technique that projects back from a census providing accurate data on age struc tures and so making it possible to obtain age structures, population sizes, eMigratioN rates, and measurements of fertility and life expect ancy. This technique was first applied to English data and showed that fertility changes were considerably more important in deter mining demographic growth rates from c.1600, and to some extent endorsed the more optimistic view of Malthus as presented in the second edition of his Essay (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989 [1981]; see MalthusiaN ModeL). As research by historical demograph ers accumulated, it became apparent that eighteenth and nineteenth century European demographic patterns, even in the area of the so called north west European marriage and household formation systems, varied greatly (see Wrigley, 1981). Furthermore the exten sion of formal historical demographic enquiry to asia, utilizing early listings of inhabitants and population registers, has cast doubt on the assumed uniqueness of certain features frequently supposed to be peculiar to historic europe (Lee and Feng, 1999). rMs (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hajnal (1965); Smith (1990); Wrigley and Schofield (1989 [1981]). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
historical geography
A sub discipline of huMaN geography concerned with the geog raphies of the past and with the influence of the past in shaping the geographies of the pre sent and the future. Before the twentieth cen tury, the term ?historical geography? was used to describe at least three distinct intellectual endeavours: the recreation of the geographies described in the Bible and in ?classical? Greek and Roman narratives; the ?geography behind history? as revealed by the changing froNtiers and borders of states and eMpires; and the history of expLoratioN and discovery (Butlin, 1993, pp. 1 23). Fragmented and incoherent, these early writings had little impact on contem porary historical geography, whose intellectual roots can be traced to the late nineteenth century writings on regional landscape forma tion by French geographers such as Paul Vidal de la Blache (whose influence spread into Britain through the work of H.J. Fleure and A.J. Herbertson) and by the German school of aNthropogeography led by Friedrich Ratzel (a perspective successfully promoted in the USA by Ellen Semple). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Historical research on LaNdscape change received a powerful stimulus after the First World War, when the reorganization of na tional boundaries in europe and the creation of new ones in the MiddLe east re focused attention on regional landscapes as products of long term economic, social and political evolution that could be analysed by the scien tific interrogation of archaeological and histor ical evidence. The study of landscape change varied in different national contexts and was by no means always described by the term ?historical geography?. Continental European research on regional, especially rural, land scape change continued without embracing a new disciplinary terminology. In inter war France, the aNNaLes schooL produced a body of interdisciplinary research that might reasonably be described as historical geog raphy, but that is more usually regarded as a distinctively French style of History. Likewise, in Germany, historical research on rural settle ment change was generally seen as continuing an existing tradition of research on the cuL turaL LaNdscape rather than blazing a new trail in historical geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The situation was different in the UK, where the term ?historical geography? was deployed more frequently under the charis matic influence of H.C. Darby. Darby?s vision of historical geography exhibited many simi larities with research carried out simultan eously on the history of the English landscape by social and economic historians W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford, but it was distinguished by its emphasis on cartog raphy as a means to both interrogate and display the archive: by the use of historical sources to construct visually impressive and typically thematic maps. According to Darby, historical geography was a fundamentally geo graphical endeavour, one of the ?twin pillars? of the larger discipline, alongside geomorph ology (Darby, 2002). Geomorphology and historical geography were both concerned with landscape formation and evolution, Darby argued, the former based primarily on field evidence derived directly from the natural environment and the latter on historical evidence gleaned indirectly from archival sources. Darby placed a special emphasis on the reconstruction of geographical patterns as cartographic cross sections, exemplified by his seven volume reconstruction of the human geography of medieval England, published with a series of collaborators and based on tabulations in the Domesday Book (Darby, 1977). He sought to link such cross sections into larger sequences of landscape change (vertical themes), encapsulated in his work on the changing fenland landscapes of eastern England (Darby, 1940). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Darby?s version of historical geography spread to other parts of the English speaking world, but the study of regional landscape change in the USA developed along distinctive lines under the influence of Carl Ortwin Sauer, doyen of the Berkeley school of cul tural geography. Sauer wrote enthusiastic ally about historical geography, but his own work is more commonly described as cultural or cultural historical geography, in accord ance with his interest in anthropological and archaeological evidence, following in some part the German tradition of Landschaft research. In Sauer?s view, this was a more appropriate model for the study of long term landscape change in the New World, where the scale of analysis was necessarily larger (so he claimed) and where written evidence was non existent before European colonization. It is important to note, however, that some of the most successful ?big picture? accounts of US history since Columbus have been written by American historical geographers working out side the Sauerian tradition (notably Earle, 2003; Meinig, 1986 2004), and that a number of historical geographers studying the interrela tions between European conquest and native peoples have excavated archaeological and palaeo environmental records and attended to oral traditions in ways that could not have been anticipated by Sauer. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The diffusion of spatial science in the 1960s and 1970s challenged many of the assumptions and practices of traditional his torical geography, particularly the source determined, cross sectional studies that, through their disregard of social theory and their inattention to social process, seemed to have little purchase on the analysis of subse quent geographical structures. A lively debate ensued, some of it conducted in the pages of the Journal of Historical Geography, which was established in 1975. Several different kinds of historical enquiry emerged within human geography as a consequence of this period of rethinking and reformulation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first was advocated by those historical geographers who had become critical of their field?s source bound empiricism, and who now welcomed a methodology that allowed historical data to be incorporated into more complex models of geographical change (Baker, 2003, pp. 37 71). The result was a more quantitative historical geography that had been anticipated by Torsten Hagerstrand?s early studies of DlffUSlON and of ?population archaeology? that issued in his time geography; both left enduring legacies (Pred, 1973; Dodgshon, 1998). Statistically minded historical geographers also became centrally involved in the field of historical demography, particularly in Britain, where E.A. Wrigley was a dominant influence (Wrig ley and Schofield, 1989 [1981]). In Wrigley?s case, this involved an institutional move from geography to economic and social history, a well trodden and often two way career path. These interdisciplinary exchanges explain why some of the most important research on Brit ain?s agricultural history has been published by scholars trained as historical geographers (Campbell and Bartley, 2006; Overton, 1996: see also agricultural revolution; held sys tems). The significance of quantitative histor ical research within human geography is also attested by highly sophisticated studies of his torical epidemiology and disease diffusion, consistently identified by their authors as his torical geography (e.g. Smallman Raynor and Cliff, 2004). The emerging field of historical geographical iNfORMATiON science confirms the continuing strength of the enumerative tendency within historical geography (Gregory and Ell, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Other historical geographers, particularly those who had familiarized themselves with previously unexplored literatures in critical theory and sociaL theory, were less con vinced by the claims made by spatial science. Some of the original advocates of a quantita tive approach also shifted their position and ultimately rejected the philosophical assump tions derived from positivism that underwrote spatial science. From their perspective, statis tical explanation lacked the capacity for ethical or political critique and failed to acknowledge human agency, intentionality and emotion (Harris, 1971; Gregory, 1981). Traditional forms of historical geography could scarcely claim a better track record, of course, so the solution was not to defend existing methods but, rather, to create a critical, theoretically informed historical geography within a new, historically sensitive human geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For some, this demanded a more direct en gagement with historicaL materiaLism and a sustained analysis of the deeper economic, so cial and political forces determining geograph ical change, an approach that was strongly influenced by developments in social and eco nomic history in general and the work of E.P. Thompson in particular (e.g. Gregory, 1982). The same concerns can be detected in other work on urbanization and the industriaL revoLution in Britain (Langton, 1979, 1984; Gregory, 1982; Dennis, 1984) and in more synoptic works such as Harvey?s extended (1985) essay on nineteenth century Paris (see also Harvey, 2003a). Since the mid 1980s, new historical geographies of space, power and the social order have extended this style of historical research, inspired by other devel opments in social theory more critical of his toricaL materiaLism, notably structuration theory, and a series of formulations that are conventionally identified as post structuraL ism, notably the work of Michel Foucault (Driver, 1993; Ogborn, 1998; Hannah, 2000; Philo, 2004). Perhaps the most ambitious at tempt to connect these diverse post positivist thematics into an agenda for historical geog raphy was Harris? programmatic essay on mod emity (Harris, 1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A somewhat different style of historical investigation arose from a second attack on spatial science. This sought to reconnect geog raphy with a wider range of disciplines in the arts and humanities, based in part on her meneutics. While sympathetic to historical forms of geographical enquiry, the leading ad vocates of a broadly humanistic geography refused to privilege the past as arena of inves tigation and therefore tended to define their work as (new) cultural geography allied to (comparative) literature, cultural studies and the visual arts rather than history. The cuL turaL Landscape has been the central pre occupation of this form of historical enquiry, which has generated a rich geographical litera ture, including several theoretically ambitious attempts to uncover the origins and develop ment of landscape as social and political con struction and as a way of envisioning and representing space, a project far removed from the way in which landscape was appre hended in traditional historical geography (Cosgrove, 1993; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Duncan, 1990; Daniels, 1999). Investi gations into the relationship between land scape, heritage and tourism generate continuing interest (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000), as does the relationship between landscape and memory (Johnson, 2003b), while research on twentieth century debates about landscape, identity and social practice has been especially influential (Matless, 1998). There have also been import ant historical studies of cultures of travel and traveL writing that pay close attention to the texts and the images that accompanied them (Schwartz and Ryan, 2003) and, moving his torical geography still further from the seem ingly obdurate physicality of landscapes, studies of ways in which the very technologies of writing were caught up in the transmission of power (Ogborn, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These distinct forms ofhistorical research in geography, always closely related, have effect ively merged in the past two decades (Graham and Nash, 1999; Withers and Ogborn, 2004). The single, hybrid term ?cultural historical geography?, originating in North America and in some measure a legacy of the Berkeley School, is now widely deployed to describe a different style of research in which three closely related themes have animated recent discussions. The study of imperiaLism and coLoniaLism has grown steadily more impor tant. This has shifted the focus of historical research in geography away from the global north, although the constellations of Euro American empire, hegemony and power con tinue to cast long shadows over many of these studies, in both their theoretical form and his torical substance. This work has revealed how landscapes, identities and values in the core regions and in the colonized territories of africa, the americas and asia were fashioned by a process of imperial interaction and trans cuLturation involving the circulation of people and practices, objects and ideas on a global scale (Harris, 1997; Driver and Gilbert, 1999a; Clayton, 2000; Lester, 2001; Lambert, 2005; Legg, 2007b; Ogborn, 2007). These studies have involved a close and critical engage ment with various forms of post coLoNiaLisM. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The colonial project was largely concerned with the acquisition and exploitation of Nat uraL resources, and much of the new work on historical geographies of colonialism has focused on its environmental consequences. This is scarcely an unheralded development (Clark, 1949; Powell, 1988; Williams, 1989; Donkin, 1999), since the relationship between eNviroNMeNtaL history and historical geography has always been extremely close, particularly in the USA (Williams, 1994a). However, recent eNviroNMeNtaLisM has gen erated a more politically charged historical geography that has explored the impact of natural resource exploitation on regional and urban development (Cronon, 1991), and which includes explicitly Marxist historical geographies on the interactions of cLass, race and the physical environment in industrializing regions (Mitchell, 1996; Walker, 2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Western scieNce, including the science of geography, was directly implicated in the processes of agricultural and industrial trans formation, urbanization and imperial exp ansion that historical geographers have increasingly investigated. This has prompted a renewed interest in the critical history of post eNLighteNMeNt geographical and envir onmental thought (Livingstone, 1992; Grove, 1995). Inspired in part by the writings of the literary critic Edward Said, this work has em phasized the constitutive significance of geo graphical knowledge in the creation of national and imperial ideNtities (Smith and God lewska, 1994; Bell, Butlin and Heffernan, 1995; Driver, 2001a; Withers, 2001: see also orieNtaLisM). It has also reconnected histor ical geography with the history of cartography (see cartography, history of), particularly through the seminal work of historical geog rapher J. Brian Harley (Harley, 2001b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) No single methodological or philosophical orthodoxy has prevailed since the 1970s, and historical geography has become increasingly eclectic. This demonstrates the growing influ ence of perspectives from allied disciplines but is also evidence of a

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