Approaches to Human Geography · Approaches to Human Geography Edited by Stuart Aitken and Gill...

Approaches to Human Geography

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page i

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page ii

Approaches to Human Geography

Edited byStuart Aitken and Gill Valentine

● ●

SAGE PublicationsLondon Thousand Oaks New Delhi

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page iii

Editorial arrangement, part introductions, Chapters 1 and 29 © Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine 2006

Chapter 2 © Rob Kitchin 2006Chapter 3 © J. Nicholas Entrikin andJohn H.Tepple 2006Chapter 4 © Deborah P. Dixon andJohn Paul Jones III 2006Chapter 5 © George Henderson and EricSheppard 2006Chapter 6 © Reginald G. Golledge 2006Chapter 7 © Isabel Dyck andRobin A. Kearns 2006Chapter 8 © Andrew Sayer 2006Chapter 9 © David B. Clarke 2006Chapter 10 © Paul Harrison 2006Chapter 11 © Fernando J. Bosco 2006Chapter 12 © Clive Barnett 2006Chapter 13 © Gerard Rushton 2006

Chapter 14 © David Ley 2006Chapter 15 © David Harvey 2006Chapter 16 © Robin A. Kearns 2006Chapter 17 © Vera Chouinard 2006Chapter 18 © Linda McDowell 2006Chapter 19 © Richa Nagar 2006Chapter 20 © Lawrence Knopp 2006Chapter 21 © Janice Monk 2006Chapter 22 © A. Stewart Fotheringham 2006Chapter 23 © Michael F. Goodchild 2006Chapter 24 © Paul Rodaway 2006Chapter 25 © Michael Samers 2006Chapter 26 © Kim England 2006Chapter 27 © John W. Wylie 2006Chapter 28 © Paul Robbins 2006

First published 2006

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticismor review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, thispublication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means,only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case ofreprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by theCopyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those termsshould be sent to the publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd1 Oliver’s Yard55 City RoadLondon EC1Y 1SP

SAGE Publications Inc.2455 Teller RoadThousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt LtdB-42, Panchsheel EnclavePost Box 4109New Delhi 110 017

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN13 978 0 7619 4262 7ISBN10 0 7619 4262 9

ISBN13 978 0 7619 4263 4 (pbk)ISBN10 0 7619 4263 7 (pbk)

Library of Congress Control Number available

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, IndiaPrinted on paper from sustainable resourcesPrinted in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd,Trowbridge,Wiltshire

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page iv

Contents

List of contributors viiiAcknowledgements x

1 Ways of Knowing and Ways of Doing Geographic Research 1Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine

PART I PHILOSOPHIES 13Introduction to section

2 Positivistic Geographies and Spatial Science 20Rob Kitchin

3 Humanism and Democratic Place-Making 30J. Nicholas Entrikin and John H. Tepple

4 Feminist Geographies of Difference, Relation, and Construction 42Deborah P. Dixon and John Paul Jones III

5 Marx and the Spirit of Marx 57George Henderson and Eric Sheppard

6 Philosophical Bases of Behavioral Research in Geography 75Reginald G. Golledge

7 Structuration Theory: Agency, Structure and Everyday Life 86Isabel Dyck and Robin A. Kearns

8 Realism as a Basis for Knowing the World 98Andrew Sayer

9 Postmodern Geographies and the Ruins of Modernity 107David B. Clarke

10 Poststructuralist Theories 122Paul Harrison

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page v

11 Actor-Network Theory, Networks, and RelationalApproaches in Human Geography 136Fernando J. Bosco

12 Postcolonialism: Space, Textuality, and Power 147Clive Barnett

Editors’ Passnotes 161

PART II PEOPLE 169

Introduction to Section

13 Institutions and Cultures 171Gerard Rushton

14 Places and Contexts 178David Ley

15 Memories and Desires 184David Harvey

16 Experiences and Emotions 191Robin A. Kearns

17 Personal and Political 198Vera Chouinard

18 Difference and Place 205Linda McDowell

19 Local and Global 211Richa Nagar

20 Movement and Encounter 218Lawrence Knopp

21 Spaces and Flows 226Janice Monk

PART III PRACTICES 233

Introduction to Section

22 Quantification, Evidence and Positivism 237A. Stewart Fotheringham

viÿÿCONTENTS

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page vi

23 Geographic Information Systems 251Michael F. Goodchild

24 Humanism and People-Centered Methods 263Paul Rodaway

25 Changing the World: Geography, Political Activism, and Marxism 273Michael Samers

26 Producing Feminist Geographies:Theory, Methodologies and Research Strategies 286Kim England

27 Poststructuralist Theories, Critical Methods and Experimentation 298John W. Wylie

28 Research is Theft: Environmental Inquiry in a Postcolonial World 311Paul Robbins

29 Contested Geographies: Culture Wars,Personal Clashes and Joining Debate 325Gill Valentine and Stuart Aitken

Exercises 337Glossary 338Index 343

CONTENTSÿÿvii

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page vii

List of Contributors

Stuart Aitken is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at San DiegoState University.

Clive Barnett is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University.

Fernando J. Bosco is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department ofGeography at San Diego State University.

Vera Chouinard is Professor of Geography in the School of Geography and Geology atMcMaster University.

David B. Clarke is Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Wales,Swansea.

Deborah P. Dixon is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the Institute of Geography andEarth Sciences at Aberystwyth, University of Wales.

Isabel Dyck is Reader in Geography, Queen Mary, University of London.

Kim England is Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography atthe University of Washington.

J. Nicholas Entrikin is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles.

A. Stewart Fotheringham is Science Foundation Ireland Research Professor andDirector of National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Reginald G. Golledge is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara.

Michael F. Goodchild is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara.

Paul Harrison is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham.

David Harvey is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography andEnvironmental Engineering, City University of New York.

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page viii

George Henderson is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at theUniversity of Minnesota.

John Paul Jones III is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography andRegional Development at the University of Arizona.

Robin A. Kearns is Associate Professor in the School of Geography and EnvironmentalScience at the University of Auckland.

Rob Kitchin is Director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at theNational University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Lawrence Knopp is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies in the Department ofGeography at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

David Ley is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at the Universityof British Columbia.

Linda McDowell is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography and theEnvironment at the University of Oxford.

Janice Monk is Professor of Geography and Regional Development and ResearchSocial Scientist Emerita in Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona.

Richa Nagar is Associate Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Paul Robbins is Associate Professor of Geography and Regional Development,University of Arizona.

Paul Rodaway is Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching at the University of Paisley.

Gerard Rushton is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at theUniversity of Iowa.

Michael Samers is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at the University ofNottingham.

Andrew Sayer is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at LancasterUniversity.

Eric Sheppard is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at theUniversity of Minnesota.

John H. Tepple is a researcher in the Department of Geography at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles.

Gill Valentine is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography at theUniversity of Leeds.

John W. Wylie is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sheffield.

CONTRIBUTORSÿÿix

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page ix

Acknowledgements

A project this large is almost always a long time in coming together. Many of thechapter authors were long suffering through several rounds of edits and unforeseendelays.We would like to thank those who were on board from the beginning, who believedin what we were trying to do, and who stuck with us. Others came on board later in theproject and we’d like to thank them for the swiftness with which they worked. We wouldalso like to acknowledge the support of faculty and student seminar and reading groupsat San Diego State University, and colleagues and students at Universities of Leeds andSheffield. Special thanks go to Fernando Bosco, who allowed some of the ideas in thisbook to be shared in his ‘Philosophy in Geography’ seminar; and to Charlotte Kenten forall her hard work reformatting chapters and chasing missing information.

There is only one Robert Rojek! We owe a huge debt to him for commissioning andsupporting the development of this manuscript through its long gestation process. Thequality of the final product is due to the efforts of David Mainwaring, Brian Goodale thecopyeditor, and Vanessa Harwood the production editor.

Finally, we want to acknowledge the continuing inspiration and energy we gain from ourgraduate students, and we want to thank them for challenging our ways of knowing.

00-Aitken-3325-Prelims.qxd 11/24/2005 7:20 PM Page x

WAYS OF KNOWING AND WAYS OF DOINGGEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine

This book is intended as an accessibleintroduction to the diverse ways of knowingin contemporary geography with the purposeof demonstrating important and strategic linksbetween philosophies, theories, methodolo-gies and practices. As such it builds on theother books in this series: Key Concepts(Holloway, Rice and Valentine, 2003); KeyMethods (Clifford and Valentine, 2003); andKey Thinkers (Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine,2004). Our intention is to guide beginningstudents in the sometimes complex and con-voluted links between ways of knowing andways of doing geographical research. It isa philosophical reader designed to be a practi-cal and usable aid to establishing a basis forresearcher projects, theses and dissertations. Itis an attempt to lift the seemingly impenetra-ble veil that sometimes shrouds philosophicaland theoretical issues, and to show how theseissues are linked directly to methodologies andpractices.The book highlights some intenselyserviceable aspects of a diverse array of philo-sophical and theoretical underpinnings – whatwe are calling ways of knowing. It makes acase for embracing certain ways of knowing interms of how they inform methods and prac-tices. We believe that ways of knowing drivenot only individual research projects but alsothe creative potential of geography as a disci-pline. Philosophies and theories, as ways ofknowing,are not simply academic pursuits withlittle bearing on how we work and how we liveour lives.

The book avoids jargon-laden, impene-trable language and concepts while not sacri-ficing the rigour and complexity of the ideasthat underlie geographic knowledge and theways that it is conflicted and contested. It iswritten for students who have not encoun-tered philosophical or theoretical approachesbefore and, as such,we see the book as a begin-ning guide to geographic research and prac-tice. We believe that grounding research inphilosophy and theory is essential for humangeography research because it provides a hookfor empirical work, it contextualizes litera-ture reviews, it elaborates a corpus of know-ledge around which the discipline grows, itenergizes ideas, and it may legitimate social andpolitical activism. In addition, and importantly,an understanding of philosophy and practicedirects the discipline of geography conceptu-ally and practically towards progressive socialchange by elaborating clearer understandingsof the complexity of our spatial world.

The book is split into three parts: philo-sophies, people and practices. In the first part,leading academics make special and partial‘cases for’ particular philosophies, and illustratetheir argument with short examples.Althoughit is far from comprehensive, the part coversa large swathe of philosophical perspectivesand highlights some of the tensions betweenvarious ways of knowing. It is not intendedto offer the student an all-inclusive guideto philosophies in geography (this is betterachieved by more specialist texts such as

1

01-Aitken-3325(ch01).qxd 11/24/2005 12:23 PM Page 1

Johnston, 1991; Cloke et al., 1991; Unwin,1992) but rather it offers practical insight intohow philosophies inform work and howresearch questions are always based onassumptions and choices between differentways of knowing.The chapters do not resolvephilosophical debates; instead they lead stu-dents to consider what choices and assump-tions must be made when beginning a researchproject, and when choosing methodologies.The second part of the book places geo-graphic thought amidst the complexity andstruggle of people contextualized in places.Within contemporary human geographythere is an emphasis on situated or contextualknowledges – which has its roots in the femi-nist belief that ‘the personal is political’ and crit-ical feminist science’s challenge to traditionalconceptions of scientific practice as objectiveand disembodied (Haraway, 1991; Rose,1997).Thus personal writing is seen by manyas an important strategy to challenge the dis-embodied and dispassionate nature of previousacademic writing (e.g. Moss, 2001). In thesecond part, several prominent geographerswrite about the people, places and events thatshaped their personal ways of knowing.Finally,philosophy is often taught separately frommethodology,which means that students some-times fail to recognize the connections betweentheories and practices. The final part outlinessome of these relationships and illustrates themwith examples from a range of geographicalstudies.

Students beginning a research project ingeography encounter a mind-boggling arrayof methodologies and practices. Thesemethodologies and practices are linked incomplex ways to theories and philosophies.Geographical research comprising a cloudyweb of methodologies, theories, philosophiesand practices ultimately elaborates geograph-ical knowledge. We have tried to representthis complexity in Figure 1.1, and yet this dia-gram structures and represents our concernstoo simply.

Ways of doing are not attached to staticways of knowing but rather are changing asone set of ideas is challenged and informedby others. How we come to approach theworld through theories and philosophies –our ways of knowing – is constantly refined,challenged, rejected and/or transformed.Customarily, theoretical traditions (posi-tivism, humanism, Marxism, feminism, etc.)have been understood to emerge and domi-nate geographical thinking at particular timesfor a particular period. In other words, theyhave become what Kuhn (1962) termed‘dominant paradigms’. As such, some writershave mapped out the development and adop-tion of different philosophic approacheswithin the discipline of geography (e.g.Johnston, 1991; Unwin, 1992) highlightingparadigm shifts – when new philosophicalapproaches emerge to challenge previousways of thinking. Johnston (1996) suggeststhat paradigm shifts are a result of genera-tional transitions.Thus new ways of thinkingare taken up at first by younger academics;as this generation becomes established, andtakes on editing journals and writing text-books, so their ways of thinking come to thefore. A paradigmatic approach to geographybegins in the 1950s when positivistic spatialscience emerged to challenge and supersedethe regional tradition in geography. In turnthe positivist paradigm is understood to havebeen overturned in the 1970s by otherapproaches such as behaviourial geography,humanistic geography and radical approachesincluding Marxism and feminism. In the1990s a paradigmatic perspective wouldunderstand poststructuralism as displacingthese ways of thinking.

Yet, while sometimes a whole set of ideasis thrown out in light of perceived shortcom-ings, usually part of the thinking continuesin one form or another (see Figure 1.2).Theinstitutional framework of geography –professional organizations, journals and depart-mental cultures – may privilege or reinforce

2ÿÿKEY APPROACHES


particular fashionable ways of thinking, butthere are always dissenting voices. In reality,most ways of knowing are partial and are influx; they continue to change as geographersexamine and re-examine their strengths andweaknesses and as new ideas come along as achallenge. The discipline always includes arange of generations, and scholars who don’tact their age! The linear narrative of thedevelopment of unified paradigms thus falselycreates a sense of sequential progress whenconsensus is rarely complete or stable.Althoughthe chapters in this book are loosely orderedin relation to the genealogy of their emer-gence in the discipline, it is not our intentionto suggest that one displaced another. Rather,our intention is to show how each approach to

geography (positivistic geography, humanisticgeography,Marxism, feminism and so on) con-tains within it multiple trajectories of thoughtand how each has continued to evolve what-ever its paradigmatic status. Part of the excite-ment of doing geographical research is thecontinual struggle to make sense of thesechanging perspectives and their connections.

When writing a research proposal, choicesmust be made about appropriate ways ofknowing and doing. Students must be awareof the assumptions of particular ways ofknowing, how they help raise appropriatequestions and their adequacy for addressingthose questions. Ultimately, all researchersmust be able to justify the answers they give totheir research questions and that justification

WAYS OF KNOWING AND WAYS OF DOINGÿÿ3

Ways of DoingWays of Knowing

Philosophies

Methodologies

Geo

gra

ph

ic R

esea

rch

Geo

grap

hic K

no

wled

ge

Practices

Theories

Figure 1.1 Ways of knowing and ways of doing


cannot avoid philosophical and theoreticalways of knowing. In this sense, philosophy isa form of communicating not only what weknow but also how we know it.Understandingphilosophical processes as forms of commu-nication suggests an important pedagogicalmetaphor. Elspeth Graham argues that ‘philo-sophy is to research as grammar is to language ...just as we cannot speak a language withoutcertain grammatical rules, so we cannot con-duct a successful piece of research withoutmaking certain philosophical choices’ (1997:8). Philosophy helps contextualize and justifythe answers to our research questions in waysthat communicate what we know.We can stillspeak and write without awareness of gram-mar, but it is always there. Grammar is a useful

metaphor for understanding the role ofphilosophy in research projects because itsuggests that the more we know about philo-sophical underpinnings the better we appre-ciate how influential they are to our work. Ifdoing research is like the grammatical foun-dations of a language then, Graham (1997)notes, pushing the metaphor further, thebeginning researcher must learn the appro-priate vocabulary and terms. This involvesreading and learning the vocabulary and thegrammar and syntax of the speech commu-nity you wish to join. Just as Mexican Spanishand the practice of Mexican culture are inti-mately tied together, and are quite differentfrom Scottish English and the practice ofScottish culture, then so too are philosophies

4ÿÿKEY APPROACHES

Marxism

Poststructuralism

Humanism

Realism

Feminism

Positivism

Figure 1.2 Ways of knowing clash, connect and change


differentiated. Marxist geographers use termslike production, social reproduction, class,superstructure and dialectics; positivist geo-graphers use terms like paradigms, hypothe-ses, laws and verifiability; feminists and queertheorists use terms like patriarchy, bodies,sexualities and performativity; humanisticand experiential geographers use terms likeessences, taken-for-grantedness and nihilism(these terms and others are defined andexplained in Johnston et al., 2000 andMcDowell and Sharp, 1999). Built aroundthese language differences are systems ofmeaning, and so the beginning researchermust master more than just the terms: shemust also engage associated cultures andpractices.A positivist researcher engaging thepractice of falsification, for example, mightfollow the rules of hypothesis testing; a fem-inist researcher engaging in the practice ofpositionality might want to understand fullyher own personal politics and situatedness.And just as aspects of Scottish and Mexicancultures and practices collide and meld, sotoo do aspects of humanism, Marxism, femi-nism, queer theory and positivism.The con-nections and conflicts are at once dauntingand exhilarating. Exhilarating because this isthe stuff of creative debates and purposefulpractices; daunting because students readingthis book are being asked to gain a workingknowledge of many languages at once.

Ways of knowing are, of course, quite dif-ferent from grammar in that they are at oncemore fundamental, and they are often moreconvoluted. Philosophy as a way of know-ing elaborates the structures and essences ofour existence. This is known as ontology.Ontology comprises theories, or sets of theo-ries, which seek to answer questions aboutwhat the world must be like for knowledge tobe possible. Philosophy also investigates theorigin, methods and limits of our knowledgeabout existence.That is, it establishes what isaccepted as valid knowledge.This is known asepistemology.

In the tradition of Greek Enlightenment,logic and reason are touted as the basis for allepistemologies. From this western perspective,it is assumed that minds are essentially rationaland have similar experiences of the world(Peet, 1998: 5). It is also assumed that ideas canbe abstracted from the material world, and it isthe purpose of philosophy to organize theseideas into coherent patterns and then evaluatethe knowledge derived from those ways ofknowing. Once thought of, these patterns arespoken of and written about so that they maybe understood as axioms around which aspectsof existence revolve, or they may be criticizedand rejected. In its strictest form, the assump-tion that all minds work in the same waysuggests that there can be one, unitary and all-encompassing philosophy. An alternative setof philosophical traditions hold that howwe think is a social construction rather thanderived from some innate, universal logic.From this social constructivist perspective thedistinctions between different philosophies arederived from different political and culturalmilieux and then imposed upon the mindsof those who are part of that context. Thisposition accepts that ontology is grounded inepistemology and that all epistemologies areembedded in social practice.

Most of the authors in this book do notview philosophy as a basis of knowledge thatis completely abstracted from people and theplaces they work. Rather, they assume it tobe the driving force that connects us withothers, and that contextualizes who we are,what we know and what we do. Nor do mostof the authors believe that philosophy andtheory need to employ only logic and rea-soning to organize knowledge into formalsystems of understanding. Some believe thatknowledge comes also from less reasoned andless representable ways of knowing derivedfrom emotions such as anger, passion, love,joy and fear.Ways of knowing are at least inpart derived from these and other emotionsthat are sometimes difficult to write about



and represent in a logical form. Philosophy asoutlined in the chapters in this book is seenas a social, political, and cultural constructionthat contains elements of rationality and irra-tionality. And so, some of the authors arguethat the rationality so valued by GreekEnlightenment thinkers is influenced by irra-tional beliefs and meanings derived from ourbodies and our emotions as well as culturalmeanings and the places where we work andlive.

Theories as Ways of Knowingand Being

Theory can be less heady than philosophy butit is equally important as a way of knowing. Ifphilosophy encompasses larger ways of know-ing that connect us to the beliefs, values andmeanings of others (sometimes known asmetaphysics) and systematize what we know,then theory extends this to the experiences ofeveryday life.As Richard Peet (1998: 5) pointsout, theory ‘has a more direct contact with theoccurrences, events, and practices of lived real-ity’ than philosophy. He argues that theory isderived inductively (working from the specificto the general) and primarily from empiricalsources (those derived directly from experi-ence). He goes on to suggest that theory looks‘for commonalities or similarities, but also(perhaps) systems of difference or, maybe, justdifference’.Theories are also deductive (work-ing from the general to the specific) becausethey often speculate from one aspect of differ-ence and uniqueness to others.

Whereas philosophy engages larger sys-tems and webs of meaning, theory engagesa more specific sphere of understanding andbeing in the world. In the field of the empir-ical sciences, hypotheses are constructed assystems of theories that are tested againstexperience by observation and experi-ment. In the humanities and social sciences,social or critical theories deal directly with

understanding social, political and culturalperspectives and characteristics as they relateto transformations within societies and theday-to-day lives of people.

Practices as Ways of Knowing,Being and Doing

Practices are ways of knowing in action.Academics are engaged in the production ofknowledge and its dissemination. Philosophieshelp articulate the ontological and epistemo-logical bases of that production.Theories helpelaborate the production of knowledge fromexperience and experimentation, and theysometimes challenge conventional wisdom.Assuch, theories are not impartial or neutralbut, rather, they are instruments of persuasionbacked by experience. For some, they suggestaction.This practice may play out in day-to-day lives or it may take the form of social andpolitical activism.Teaching and research prac-tices are also modes of doing, and are chargedwith political will and intent that are some-times explicit and sometimes veiled. For someacademics, doing is not just about teachingand writing, it is also about taking their valuesand beliefs, their philosophies and theories,out into the world from which they arederived in an attempt to transform that worldfor the better.

Research, like social and politicalactivism, is almost always intensely political. Itreacts to, and informs, the larger contexts ofsocietal crisis, injustice and wellbeing.Withinthis realm, disciplines and subdisciplines clashand contend with each other in their attemptsto respond to social crises and injustices.These internal struggles within academia canbecome vitriolic given limited access to finiteresources and money. While touting a questfor truth or a better world, academic debateis also about status, power, and control ofresources. These struggles sometimes delimitboundaries between different discourses and

6ÿÿKEY APPROACHES


sometimes transgress them; they often inflamepassionate struggles between seemingly rivalways of knowing. In sum, teaching, research-ing, writing and practising geography open amyriad of different ways of knowing thatoften clash.

We believe that diverse ways of knowingand practising geography are the basis of thediscipline.When they collide and lock horns,as they often do, a creative energy is unleashedthat questions assumptions and pushes think-ing forward, often in intriguing, innovativeand exciting ways.

A number of years ago a panel at theannual meetings of the Association ofAmerican Geographers positioned advocatesof two seemingly competing philosophies –humanism and positivism – in formal debate.The auditorium was packed with geographersanxious to see some intellectual giants dobattle. Battle was not the intention of theorganizers of the plenary session who, in thesession abstract, elaborated the possibility ofa common ground between humanism andpositivism.The debate began politely enoughas the moderator articulated her desire to usethis forum as a basis for moving a commonground forward towards synthesis. Whileaccepting the possibility of a basis for discus-sion, the protagonists presented diverse casesfor their respective philosophical leanings invery particular ways. In making their respec-tive cases, the speakers either used rhetoricthat politely accepted alternative ways ofknowing but only as perspectives that couldbe subsumed within the practice of theirparticular philosophical leaning, or attackedthe premises of their opponents as untenable.Humanistic philosophies, for example, werepositioned as the basis of being and conscious-ness from which mathematical analysis andlogical deduction were derived as merelyabstract ways of knowing. Alternatively, posi-tivism and scientific perspectives were seenas the logical end point of humanistic assess-ments that merely provided qualitative data

from which quantitative categories could bebuilt. After the presentations a debate ensuedthat was quite vitriolic. Scholars who had builttheir careers on a particular philosophy wereloath to accept the possibility that their wayof knowing was either subservient to or lesspractical than another way of knowing, andthey definitely did not accept the possibilitythat their way of knowing was flawed. In thelast innumerable years other conflicts havearisen between diverse philosophies in mostof the major geography meetings around theworld and also in published work. Using avariety of rhetorical devices, structuralism hasbeen pitted against poststructuralism; Marxismagainst poststructuralism or feminism; ideo-graphy against nomotheticism; postcolonialismagainst environmentalism; environmentalismagainst feminism; possibilism against probabil-ism; relational approaches against theoriesof structuration; and so forth. Sometimes thedebates become intensely myopic and perhapsa little impenetrable when, for example, queertheory challenges feminism or behaviouralismadmonishes behaviourism. And yet, in eachinteraction of ideas and practices there is thecreative potential for change.

Although the rhetoric changes, the termsof these clashes often revolve around what a setof philosophies and theories proposes as a basisfor geographic knowledge and how practicalthose philosophies and theories are in deliver-ing that knowledge.We purposefully list some‘isms’ above without definition because weargue that the meat is in the process of debate:that is where the passion lies! This is not to sug-gest that intensely practical ways of knowingset the tone for subsequent scholarship. Nor isthis about philosophical fads and the current‘ism’ of the day. For example, the debatesbetween particularity (ideography) and gen-erality (nomotheticism) that popularly smat-tered the pages of academic geography in the1950s returned in different forms throughoutthe last half-century with critiques of meta-narratives, discussions about the merits of



humanistic, poststructural and relativisticapproaches, and so forth.The context of thediscussion changes in different times and indifference places. The point is not just whatis contested, but that there is contestationthat is creatively adopted and used to propelgeographical ways of knowing.

Geographical Ways of Knowing

When first confronted with the literatureon how human geographers construct theirworld intellectually, the new student is facedwith a bewildering set of apparent alterna-tives. As a named discipline, geography is anancient form of intellectual inquiry, predatingGreek classicism and its notions of rationalthinking. And yet there is little agreementabout how the discipline is constituted, whatit studies and how it should go about thatstudy. Certainly what is thought of as geo-graphic inquiry has changed significantlyover the millennia, and the last half-centuryin particular has resulted in an increasinglyconflicted and contradictory set of argumentsfor how the discipline is constituted andpractised.

This book attempts to uncover ways ofknowing geography (how it is thought about)and the practice of geography (thoughtexpressed in action) without sacrificingpeople and places as an important part of thatpractice. It attempts to capture contemporarygeography as a known and practised disciplinethat is internally differentiated and contested.Knowledge is always partial and practice isoften infused with passion. The book doesnot attempt to elaborate the entire corpusof knowledge that comprises contempo-rary human geographic thought, but ratherit brings to light the contested and hotlydebated nature of diverse ways of knowing.

Disciplinary boundaries are not cast instone; they are fuzzy and chameleon-like,

changing before our eyes as we focus deeper.Subdisciplinary boundaries are even more dif-ficult to tie down, and yet each embraces anaccepted body of knowledge that legitimizespractice. Embracing a particular way of know-ing distinguishes a thesis or dissertation,enabling some degree of classification. It iswhat examiners and reviewers focus on as theytry to place the work; the success or failure ofa particular study often resides with its abilityto contextualize itself in a larger corpus ofknowledge. For example, thesis or dissertationabstracts that announce respectively a post-colonial approach to the development ofsquatter settlement, a humanistic appraisal ofbelonging and being-at-homeness, an econo-metric appraisal of regional housing demand,ora feminist critique of suburban spatial entrap-ment, suggest diverse and perhaps contradictoryways of establishing academic credibility.Postcolonialism, humanism, econometrics andfeminism are three sets of methods and prac-tices with their own assumptions, values andways of proceeding. Each are legitimate geo-graphic ways of knowing that leave a new stu-dent struggling to place them amongst dozensof others and to get a sense of how theymight relate to each other as well as to thestudent’s own interests and passions.There isnothing absolute or sacred about any particu-lar way of knowing; each is elaborated uponand argued about, and there is no singleset of criteria by which one way of know-ing legitimizes itself over another. The clashof knowledge, the lack of boundaries andabsolutes, the tension between ways of know-ing are at once confusing and exhilarating.They are confusing because each philosophypresents a laudable case for its own existence,leaving difficult choices for students seekingto legitimize their own interests; and exhila-rating because the creative tension betweendifferent ways of knowing engenders passionamongst adherents. And passion is alwaysstimulating.

8ÿÿKEY APPROACHES


Constructing GeographicalKnowledge and Practice

The passion of academic debate is sometimesdisregarded as the synthesizers of geographicknowledge tackle through simplification themyriad arguments and accounts that makeup the discipline. Traditionally, geographicknowledge has been constructed in five ways.

First, confusion is bypassed and underlyingphilosophies are disregarded simply by sug-gesting that geography is primarily what geo-graphers do (Gould, 1985; Johnson, 1991).This perspective relies on geographers’ self-definitions and focuses on disciplinary prac-tices. Referring to actions and activities ratherthan underpinning structures of knowledgeemphasizes output, productivity, utility andproblem-solving above all else. From this per-spective, academic geographers attract studentsto their departments by teaching somethingthat is seen as useful and of some interest tothose who study it. It has been argued thatthey also are inclined to do research that is ofinterest to, and is tied in with, the agendas offinancial sponsors (Unwin, 1992: 6). It mightbe argued further that constructing the corpusof geographic knowledge in this way ties itmost successfully to societal needs, but thisargument presupposes that ‘doing’ and pro-ductivity through problem-solving are alwaysuseful and can be divorced from larger ways ofknowing. It neglects the fundamental issues ofhow problem-solving and utility are con-structed and for whom.

The second way of synthesizing geo-graphic ways of knowing is methodological(see Clifford and Valentine, 2003 for a guide tomethods in human and physical geography).Many geography degree programmes offermethodological and technical options as tracksor even as full-blown diplomas. A unique setof tools – such as those comprised in anddefined by spatial analysis or environmentalmodelling – delimits and justifies disciplinary

boundaries (see chapters in Part 3).The toolscan be learnt and applied to different spatialand environmental phenomena. It may beargued that a large part of the recent successof geography in technological societies maybe attributed to geographical informationsystems, which manage and analyse spatiallyreferenced data through sophisticated com-puter software programs (see Chapter 23).Therecent change in name and orientation fromgeographic information systems to geographicinformation science suggests an appreciation ofthe limitations of technological systems thatare not energized by ideas and frameworks ofknowledge.

A third attempt to tie down humangeography is by identifying a subject matteraround what the discipline studies and how itstudies it. Such definitions delimit certainobjects as legitimately geographic and othersthat are not. For example, in a famous andinfluential essay, Norman Fenneman (1919)described the circumference of geography asbest defined by the region, arguing that itsuse would serve to focus the discipline andprevent its absorption by other sciences.And,at around the same time, American culturalgeographer Carl Sauer stated simply that ‘weare not concerned in geography with energy,customs or beliefs of man [sic] but with man’s[sic] record on the landscape’ (1928: 342).Key concepts (see Holloway et al., 2003)and terms such as landscape, region, environ-ment, space, place, culture, scale and soforth are often adhered to specific categoriesof knowledge in various ways, changing andtransforming as the ideas about them aretugged in different directions by differentphilosophical bents (cf. Earle et al., 1996).These objects of geographical analysis areoften uncritically accepted as part of a par-ticular way of knowing comprising uniformcategories, sometimes referred to as stablereferents within a particular philosophy.Geographic knowledge produced for a



particular audience constitutes these categories.Language operates to establish social and nat-ural worlds through signifying or discursivepractices that generate and organize signs ordiscourse into particular geographical know-ledge or ‘ways of seeing’ such as those pro-posed by Fenneman and Sauer. In its attemptto sort out the complexity, this frameworkprovides a seemingly neutral way of engaginggeographic knowledge.

A fourth strategy may acknowledge otherways of knowing but usually positions them asless consequential or subsumes them as pre-cursors to a dominant way of knowing. Forexample, coming from a positivist and quanti-tative perspective, Brian Berry (1964) arguedthat all geographic patterns and processescould be accessed through establishing a hugematrix of variables across time.Alternatively, inthe 1980s Larry Ford (1984) argued that geo-graphy has its origins in how the landscape isobserved and all other methods and practicesfollow. Michael Goodchild and Don Janelle(1988) used multidimensional scaling tech-niques on data from speciality group member-ship amongst members of the Association ofAmerican Geographers to argue a practicaland dynamic core for the discipline in thosespeciality groups that were most connected.And later that decade, Michael Dear (1988)defined a core of human geography quite dif-ferently in terms of social theory develop-ment. He argued for the discipline’s pivotalrole in the social sciences with its focus onthree primary processes that structure what hecalls the fabric of time–space: the political, theeconomic and the social. These strategies areimportant to the extent that they gain favourwith geographers, and all are agenda based.Most of the authors cited above are willing toacknowledge those agendas,but with nonethe-less convincing arguments they also providea singular way forward that smooths out ordisregards tensions and conflicts.

A fifth way of coming to terms with com-plex and divergent ways of knowing also isinclined to smooth out tensions and conflicts.

This strategy offers a synthesis that relies onunderstandings that change through time(Johnston, 1991; Livingston, 1992).This way ofapproaching philosophy in geography attemptsto provide a linear and relatively objectiveand impartial appraisal of how knowledge isbuilt and transformed.There is what might bethought of as a patterned sequence to howgeographers have come to know the world. Inthis formulation, the discipline’s so-called para-digms or ‘isms’ stretch back over time and helpdefine what comes after.This way of structur-ing knowledge is essentially about lumpingphilosophies into categories that may begin,for example, with environmental determinismin the early twentieth century and then flowthrough possibilism, regionalism, the quantita-tive revolution, structuralism, realism, human-ism, Marxism, feminism, queer geographiesand postcolonialism to end,perhaps,with post-structuralism or the latest intellectual fad. Itis a common practice of textbook writers tosmooth out and generalize the connectionsbetween different philosophies in this waybecause it is deemed too hard for beginningstudents to get their minds around all thesedebates.Too often texts on geographic thoughtneglect the contested nature of the world andour knowledge of it by supplying a relativelylinear set of approaches melding into eachother and ending with a professor’s preferredway of knowing. No wonder students are putoff by this plethora of ‘isms’ and the challengesthat they hold out to each other.

The ‘isms’ suggest abstract knowledgethat is extracted and simplified from a verycomplex set of interactions between people,places and intellectual movements (see Part 2).For today’s students, they often suggest a wayof structuring knowledge that has little bear-ing on research projects and is, rather, aninterpretation of dead or barely alive geo-graphers’ ways of thinking that has only aremote connection with today’s world.The factthat most of the existing books and articles onphilosophy and human geography are eitherwritten by a single author or presented to the

10ÿÿKEY APPROACHES


reader in one voice means that the outline ofeach philosophy is very balanced, neutral andeven. As such students often fail to grasp thecontested nature of the discipline and regardthe approaches as pick ‘n’ mix alternativesrather than recognizing the tensions betweenthose who adopt different philosophicalpositions or the possibilities of collaborationbetween those who have different ways ofthinking. Those tensions often arise from abody of literature that is adopted and elabor-ated by geographers. Particular people writ-ing from particular places at particular timesalso often spur them (see Moss, 2001 orGould and Pitts, 2002 for autobiographicalaccounts of the intellectual development ofgeographers; or Hubbard et al., 2004 for abiographical approach to understanding keythinking on space and place).The energy ofa social movement or an individual’s ideas,or the culture of a specific academic depart-ment, will enhance certain ways of knowingover others. Johnston (2004), for example,highlights the significance of individuals’ net-works and the career trajectories from whichgeography develops by tracing the path takenby David Smith – the connections he forged,and the influences on his decision-making ashe made the switch from a spatial analysistradition to other paradigms.Thus instead ofassuming a geographic imaginary that orga-nizes itself around an ordered timeline ofideas, what happens if we say it is orderedaround different sets of people, places andcontexts for the ideas? What if we openlyacknowledge the political and moral connec-tions, and the personal and social stories, thatgive the ideas life? What if we probe the waysthat philosophical approaches are energized

by conflict, critique and career advancement?What kinds of lessons do we glean from docu-menting encounters between scholarshipand practice? How does the way we live ourlives, the way we connect with social andpolitical struggles and the seemingly randomopportunities that come our way, affect ourgeographical imagination? These questionsdrive the chapters in this book.The chapterauthors do not try to explain or smooth outtensions between their preferred way ofknowing and others.

The chapters in this book provide access-ible accounts of the ways different philoso-phies and theories intersect with and scrunchagainst each other. Rather than searching for acommon ground, we accept that knowledge iscontested, controversial and partial; that it isabout power and career enhancement as muchas it is about a search for enlightenment; that itis about moral integrity and a need to under-stand more fully social and spatial injustices;but that it is also about the academic culture ofparticular places and particular times. Further,this book provides a new way of encounteringgeographical thought because it ties it inti-mately with methodologies and practices.Wedismiss past pedagogies that abstract thoughtfrom people, places and their practices.We donot disengage from the conflict that arisesbetween ideas and factions that compete forcontrol of geography as an intellectual resourcethat helps make sense of the world.Rather,weengage intellectual conflict and tension as theharbingers of change and social engagementthrough practice.Ultimately geography, like allacademic pursuits, is about changing theworld for the better and, as such, it is not aneat and ordered practice.


ReferencesBerry, B. (1964) ‘Approaches to regional analysis: a synthesis’, Annals of the Association

of American Geographers, March: 2–11.Clifford, N. and Valentine, G. (eds) (2003) Key Methods in Geography. London: Sage.Cloke, P., Philo, C. and Sadler, D. (eds) (1991) Approaching Human Geography. London:

Chapman.


Earle, C., Mathewson, K. and Kenzer, M.S. (eds) (1996) Concepts in Human Geography.Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Fenneman, N. (1919) ‘The circumference of geography’, Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 9: 3–11.

Ford, L. (1984) ‘A core of geography: what geographers do best’, Journal of Geography,2: 102–6.

Goodchild, M.F. and Janelle, D.G. (1988) ‘Specialization in the structure and organiza-tion of geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78 (1): 1–28.

Gould, P.R. (1985) The Geographer at Work. London: Routledge.Gould, P.R. and Pitts, F.R. (eds) (2002) Geographical Voices: Fourteen Autobiographical

Essays. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.Graham, E. (1997) ‘Philosophies underlying human geography research’, in Robin

Flowerdew and David Martin (eds), Methods in Human Geography: A Guide forStudents Doing Research Projects. Edinburgh: Longman, pp. 6–30.

Haraway, D.J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:The Reinvention of Nature. New York:Routledge.

Holloway, S.L., Rice, S. and Valentine, G. (eds) (2003) Key Concepts in Geography.London: Sage.

Hubbard, P.J., Kitchin, R. and Valentine, G. (eds) (2004) Key Thinkers on Space andPlace. London: Sage.

Johnston, R.J. (1991). Geography and Geography: Anglo-American Human Geographysince 1945, 4th edn. London: Arnold.

Johnston, R.J. (1996) ‘Paradigms and revolution or evolution?’, in J. Agnew, D. Livingstoneand A. Rogers (eds), Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.

Johnston, R.J. (2004) ‘Disciplinary change and career paths’, in R. Lee and D.M. Smith(eds), Geographies and Moralities. Oxford: Blackwell.

Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (eds) (2000) The Dictionary ofHuman Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kuhn, T.S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1st edn (2nd edn 1970).Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Livingston, D. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell.McDowell, L. and Sharp, J. (eds) (1999) A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography.

London: Arnold.Moss, P. (2001) Placing Autobiography. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.Peet, R. (1998) Modern Geographical Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.Rose, G. (1997) ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics’,

Progress in Human Geography, 21: 305–20.Sauer, C. (1928) ‘The morphology of landscape’, in John Leighly (ed.) (1963), Land and

Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Otwin Sauer. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press.

Unwin, T. (1992) The Place of Geography. New York: Longman.

12ÿÿKEY APPROACHES


Part 1Philosophies

In this part, leading proponents of different approaches to geographic understanding make‘cases for’ different philosophical and theoretical leanings. Some illustrate their argumentswith short examples and others argue their case through logic.Although it is far fromcomprehensive, the part covers a large swathe of philosophical and theoretical perspectives.It is intended not to offer the student a guide to philosophies in geography, but rather tohighlight some of the tensions between various ways of knowing.

We do not go out of our way to suggest a linear sequence between these ways ofknowing, nor do we attempt to smooth out differences.Although each way of knowingentered the discipline at a particular time and for a particular set of reasons and there areimportant connections, each philosophical underpinning continues to influence geographicalresearch in different, conflicted ways. Some of the influences maintain a relatively unchangedcurrency, while others have transformed into different ways of knowing.The part offerspractical insight into how philosophies inform work and how research questions are alwaysbased on assumptions and choices between different ways of knowing.

The chapters are loosely arranged in chronological order. Using this broad framework asa pedagogic experiment, we introduce the chapters in three ways.The chapters onpositivism, humanism, feminism and Marxism (2, 3, 4 and 5) are grouped together becausethe authors articulate very focused, albeit quite different, intentions.We call these ‘SingularIntentions’. Rather than having a specific intention, the chapters on behavioural research,structuration theory and realism (6, 7 and 8) each articulate a basis for understanding ourgeographical world by suggesting ways that knowledge is structured.We call this‘Constructing Geographical Knowledge in Relation to the World’. Finally, postmoderngeographies, poststructuralist theories, actor-network theory and postcolonial theory(Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12) offer arguments for how knowledge is not easily patterned.We call this ‘Beyond Structure’.

Obviously there are important connections and conflicts between all these chapters, andthey could have been grouped in a myriad of ways. Students are invited to find other waysthat these chapters relate to each other, because there are clearly many.

Singular Intentions

In the first chapter of this part Rob Kitchin (Chapter 2) refers to positivist philosophies inthe plural because they elaborate multiple ways of knowing in geography.There is no singlepositivist way of knowing; rather there are multiple positivistic ways of knowing.As with

02-Aitken-3325 Part 1.qxd 11/24/2005 12:24 PM Page 13

positivism, the following three chapters each describe a set of philosophical approachesdesigned with a particular intent.The approaches of positivism are tightly circumscribedaround a perceived need to apply scientific principles, rigour and analytic reasoning.The singular intent of positivist geographers, then, is to apply the principles of science togeographic understanding.

The two most common forms of positivism are based on verification (logical positivism)and falsification (critical rationalism). In the former, deductive reasoning is used to formulatetheory, and then set and test hypotheses.The latter is based on attempting to underminetheory by identifying exceptions.

Advocates who feel that geography tends towards unsystematic and analytically naiveinquiry have propelled a concerted focus on spatial science from the 1950s onwards.Withthe exception of some behavioural geographers (see Chapter 6), however, there is rarely ameaningful engagement with philosophy by those who embrace science in humangeography.This thought is articulated further by Fotheringham in Chapter 22. Kitchinargues that scientific principles applied to quantitative data are seen as factual, objective anduniversal in nature. He notes that this has led feminist geographers to criticize some spatialscience for harbouring alleged hidden, masculinist underpinnings. Few spatial scientists todaywould claim allegiance to the central tenets of positivism, but they do see their approaches assensible, robust and, above all, scientific. Its influence on contemporary quantification(Chapter 22) and GIS (Chapter 23) and on the practices of individual geographers (seeChapters 13, 15 and 18) is profound.

In Chapter 3 Nicholas Entrikin and John Tepple consider the emergence of humanisticgeography as a loosely structured movement that developed out of a critique of what wasregarded as the obsessively narrow focus of positivistic human geography on humandecision-makers as rational economic actors whose behaviour could be predicted andmodelled. Rather, Entrikin and Tepple show how the singular intent of humanisticgeographers has been to demonstrate the importance of individuals’ experiences, beliefs andattitudes in shaping the decisions that we make and the ways that we engage with the world.Here, they illustrate how the emphasis within humanistic geography has been on uncoveringmeanings, values and interpretations in order to incorporate a more complex understandingof human reality into geography. In doing so they highlight the way that humanists drew ona range of philosophies from the humanities (e.g. phenomenology, existentialism) as well asinterpretive traditions of fieldwork from disciplines such as anthropology.The implications ofthis for geographical practice are explored by Paul Rodaway in Chapter 24 where he reflectson the development of people-centred methodologies in geography.The influence ofhumanistic philosophies on the practices of individual geographers who may not callthemselves humanists is reflected in the work of Richa Nagar (Chapter 19),Vera Chouinard(Chapter 17), Larry Knopp (Chapter 20), as well as, more explicitly, in the work of DavidLey (Chapter 14) and Robin Kearns (Chapter 16).

The singular focus on the intentional agent in humanistic geography is the subject ofconflict with other approaches that have sought to highlight how individuals’ choices areconstrained by social structures such as patriarchy (Chapter 4) and capitalism (Chapter 5),and with those that have attempted to tease out the complex relationship between agencyand structure (Chapter 7). Finally, poststructuralism (Chapter 10) and postcolonialism(Chapter 12) have challenged humanism’s very notion of the intentional agent and theuniversal claims that follow from this.

14ÿÿAPPROACHES TO HUMAN GEOGRAPHY


In Chapter 4, Deborah Dixon and John Paul Jones focus on the ways that feminism hasrecovered various geographies of gender, first by critiquing and contesting masculinist waysof knowing and then by elaborating its own epistemologies. Most importantly in terms ofpractice and transformation, they point out that the purpose of feminism is to generate waysof knowing that improve women’s lives. Feminist geographers use multiple theories andmethods to better understand the sources, dynamics and spatiality of women’s oppression andto suggest strategies of resistance.The singular intention of feminists, then, is to betterwomen’s lives.To aid this endeavour, their primary focus is on day-to-day social and spatialactivities.

Beginning with the myriad of processes through which women geographers and theirways of knowing were marginalized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Americangeography, Dixon and Jones make a case for how feminism challenged, and continues tochallenge, the masculinist bases of the discipline.They show that a large part of the earlyostracizing of women’s knowledge was based on the patriarchal practices of thediscipline – paternalism, misogyny, sexual discrimination, gender-coded language – and thekinds of things geographers studied (e.g. distributions of economic activities). Feministgeography not only critiques these bases of the discipline, but also offers an epistemology thattransforms geographic ways of knowing. For example, traditional objects of analysis such asregions, landscapes and places are researched with questions that probe the spatial dimensionsof gender divisions of labour. Feminism also introduces new objects of analysis such as homesand bodies. New epistemologies focusing on difference, gender as social relations and genderas a social construction enable feminists to push geography in new, transformative directionsthat influence methodologies, practices, lived experiences and discursive meanings. In thislatter regard, the chapter links in important ways to Kim England’s (Chapter 26) discussion offeminist methods and methodologies and how those, in turn, produce feminist geographies.The webs of meaning between ways of knowing and ways of doing are circular and often aremutually reinforcing.

In many ways Marxism parallels positivism as a reaction to less theoretically informedempirical studies in geography. Like feminism and positivism, there are multiple variations ingeographic thinking that derive from classical Marxism. Indeed, some claim that a large partof feminism’s focus on the exploitation of women comes from Marxist sensibilities.Henderson and Sheppard argue in Chapter 5 that, in the same way that feminism focuses onmaking women’s lives better, the root of Marxism is to bring about ‘more just conditions forhuman flourishing’. Marxism is largely focused on making sense of the geography ofcapitalism, and its singular intent is to establish spatial justice.

Henderson and Sheppard argue that although established some time ago, Marxist theoryis far from anachronistic.That said, many practitioners prefer to call themselves post-Marxists.Henderson and Sheppard argue that many of the tenets of classical Marxism are nowsubsumed within other ways of knowing such as realism, structuration theory andpoststructuralism (Chapters 8, 7 and 10). Further, they suggest that the appellation ‘post’refers not to the demise of Marxism but rather to approaches that acknowledge the ongoinginfluences of a critical way of knowing.

In their attempts to explain the world, Marxists argue that the positivistic bases of scienceand social science reduce it to a series of stable and well-defined entities connected by causalrelations.As an epistemological basis of Marxism, dialectical reasoning traces how therelations between things are constantly changing, altering the entities themselves. Henderson

PHILOSOPHIESÿÿ15


and Sheppard note that at all scales, from humans to the world economy, objects of analysisare internally heterogeneous and always at risk of being torn apart by the very relationshipsthat bring them into being.They go on to note that dialectical reasoning of this kind is notalien to the sciences.The focus of Marxism, however, is primarily on production,consumption, value and exploitation, the accumulation and circulation of capital and classconflict, with attended concerns about political identities and culture industries. BecauseMarx was concerned with material change and the transformation of people (see hereChapter 25 where Samers looks at the legacy of Marxism for political activism withingeography), his emphasis was the social aspects of individual being, Henderson and Sheppardmake the claim that he is a contemporary thinker.They are concerned that geographersde-emphasize Marx’s focus on the formation of capital and class by looking primarily atgender, race and sexuality.And so this chapter raises conflicts with Chapter 4. Hendersonand Sheppard argue that geographers need to understand, first and foremost, the intersectionsbetween social processes as articulated through the circulation of capital and the socialconstruction of commodity production and distribution.

Constructing Geographical Knowledge in Relation to the World

Behavioural research is tied in part to positivism but, as Reginald Golledge notes inChapter 6, it aligns itself to a much larger set of philosophical underpinnings, includingphenomenology, symbolic interactionism, postmodernism and transactionalism.As a spatialscience, the intent of behavioural research is to seek process explanations for why specificspatial actions are undertaken.The behavioural processes of interest are, for example,perception, learning, forming attitudes, and memorizing. Critical of some of the models anddata used by early quantifiers, behavioural geographers today expand what they see as thelimited purview of normative science by using qualitative data and exploratory andexperimental data analysis techniques, concentrating on individuals and primary data ratherthan aggregate analysis of secondary data.

Focusing on pithy philosophical questions such as ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What reality isrelevant?’, Golledge argues that behavioural research in geography challenges some majorconceptions of spatial science. For example, by introducing the dimension of time toindividuals’ spatial activities a more nuanced articulation of behaviour is possible. In practice,this research does not abandon science and positivism because it uses rigorous experimentaldesign to elaborate on people’s knowledge, perceptions, and actions. Behavioural researchaligns with the basis of positivism articulated in Chapter 2 and with the practice of sciencearticulated in Chapters 22 and 23. Golledge argues that behavioural research tackles age-oldquestions about what is geographical knowledge and how it is constructed.Although heacknowledges the connections between people and knowledge, he argues that throughsystematic research we can know something about the processes through which thatknowledge is elaborated.

According to Isabel Dyck and Robin Kearns (Chapter 7), structuration theory, asconstructed by Anthony Giddens, elaborates a bridging point between humanism andMarxism, but it is also related to the behavioural perspective elaborated through timegeography. Giddens’ intent is to unravel the complexities between human agency (see, forexample, Chapter 24) and structural constraints such as those elaborated by Marxism



(Chapter 5).Time geography points to the possibility of larger societal structures (known asconstraints) within which individual behaviours are articulated. Structuration theoryconstructs society as neither independent of human activities nor their product. Rather, theinterdependence of structure and agency is derived through space and time connections.Structure is seen as rules and resources such as those elaborated through institutions; humanagency is based on the idea that individuals are perpetrators of events and that there is alwayschoice. Human interaction with institutions is always in space and time and so there is alwaysa spatial and temporal dimension to how social systems change. Dyck and Kearns elaboratestructuration theory with relatively straightforward examples involving mothering and healthgeography.They note that poststructural concerns with difference and identity have tendedto divert attention away from the rules and resources through which structure is realized.Argued here is a need to engage with structuration theory as a way of elaborating powerrelations that stretch over time and space globally.

In Chapter 8,Andrew Sayer takes a slightly different view on how knowledge isconstructed.The philosophy of realism, he argues, is not about constructing some basis forreality but rather about assuming that the world is always there and always different from theway philosophers and theorists attempt to get to know it. In short – and this is probably thebiggest difference between realism and the behavioural research articulated inChapter 6 – Sayer argues that the world cannot be got at by systematically researching theprocesses of knowledge formation. He would suggest further that the views expressed inChapters 2 and 6 have difficulty entertaining the idea that knowledge can be fallible. Sayersees social constructions, like those developed in Chapter 5, as wishful thinking unless weare willing to accept that they may not work or make a difference. Realism, then, is aboutunderstanding, first and foremost, that the world is mostly independent of our thoughtprocesses; and although those thought processes and how they construct the world areimportant, they are not omnipotent.

Beyond Structure

At some point in the not too distant past, postmodernist geographers argue, the known andstructured bases of modernity began to unravel.This might have happened with Auschwitz assuggested by Theodor Adorno or with the destruction of Pruitt–Igoe (the public housingexperiment in racial differentiation in St Louis) as suggested by David Harvey. In Chapter 9,David Clarke argues that postmodernism throws into doubt reason as a monolithic anddriving concept of western society. Reason, facts and science are not pillars of understandingbut simply matters of faith like everything else. Stories are just stories that help us along inthe world, and not metanarratives (big stories) with claims to truth and authentic reality(e.g. modern medicine). Metanarratives, argue some postmodernists, are invoked simply as away for science to legitimate itself because of the belief that universal knowledge is possibleand that it grants privileged access to truth. Instead, postmodernists argue, the world isinherently complex, confusing, contradictory, ironic and so forth, and they want to keep itthat way.

Geographers have had a lot to say about postmodern spaces; indeed, Clarke avers that weshould be quite proud of the confusion we’ve instilled in the larger academic debates on therelations between space and time. David Harvey, Ed Soja and Mike Dear have been

PHILOSOPHIESÿÿ17


particularly successful in confusing traditional understandings of urban space. Clarke notesfurther that David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) is one of the most famousbooks on postmodernity. Ironically, a Marxist metanarrative works well for Harvey’s analysisand, as is pointed out by Henderson and Sheppard (Chapter 5) and Clarke, this way ofknowing seems capable of staving off more contemporary discourses that seek to undermineits credibility.

The problem with postmodernism, notes Clarke, is that it tends to delegitimize socialcritique and progressive political activism more than neoliberal capitalism andneoconservatism.And so, perhaps, the postmodern moment may be, in actuality, a furtherengagement with capitalism rather than something radical and transformative.These latteraffectations are perhaps better laid at the feet of other ‘poststructuralists’.

Paul Harrison in Chapter 10 and John Wylie in Chapter 27 argue that we need to divestourselves of the constraints of any kind of structural understanding.The problem withpostmodernism is that it also divests itself from critical and radical perspectives in favour ofwhimsy and planned depthlessness. Poststructuralist theories, and particularly those derivedfrom a wider continental tradition (e.g. Foucault and Derrida), move human geographyforward because they are primarily critical methods for assessing – in deep, archaeologicalways – the insidious power relations embedded in institutions, beliefs and politicalarrangements. Harrison argues further that poststructuralism is more radical than ways ofknowing based on Marxism (such as feminism, realism and structuration theory) because itdoes not offer a base or a focused intention.And it does not position radicalism as ametanarrative.

Poststructuralism differs from preceding ways of knowing in other, interesting ways. Inthis introduction, we suggest that Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 offer singular intentions andChapters 6, 7 and 8 offer a singular base. Poststructuralism, according to Harrison, offersneither a particular diagnosis of how the world is organized nor a systematic alternative.Poststructuralism is anti-essentialist and, as such, it offers a particular concern with radicalotherness and difference. Moreover, while poststructuralism is often characterized in terms ofthe need to be endlessly critical and therefore overly negative, Harrison is at pains toemphasize the affirmative nature of poststructuralism and its deeply ethical nature. Here, hehighlights the writing of Derrida on deconstruction. (Later in Chapter 27 Wyliedemonstrates the importance of Derrida’s notion of deconstruction as well as Foucault’sarticulation of discourse analysis as forms of geographical practice.)

Actor-network theory (ANT) shares the anti-essentialist approach of poststructuralism.Like poststructuralism it aims to understand the complexity of the world. In Chapter 11,Fernando Bosco shows how ANT provides a framework for tracing connections andrelations between a variety of actors – both human and non-human (discursive and materialobjects) – in which geographies are understood to emerge from, or are the effects of, theserelations. Here ANT offers a radical reading of agency, seeing it not as the property ofintentional human actors (contrast Chapter 3) but rather as the product of things comingtogether, such that non-human actors (like a fencepost or a pen) might be understood tohave agency. Bosco draws attention to the way that ANT uses the term ‘actant’, rather than‘actor’, to distinguish the fact that it attributes no special motivation to individual humanactors. Like other relational approaches,ANT is an attempt to escape dualisms such asstructure–agency which so preoccupy Dyck and Kearns in Chapter 7, and it is not limited bythe Euclidean understandings of space that underpin positivistic approaches (Chapter 2).



Postcolonialism, like poststructuralism (Chapter 10), is concerned with the complexitiesof identity, difference and representation. In Chapter 12 Barnett identifies postcolonialism’sorigins in the writings of intellectuals in the mid twentieth century – the time of anti-colonial struggles against European domination. He argues that relations of colonialsubordination are embedded in systems of identity and representation. Here, like Harrison(Chapter 10) and Wylie (Chapter 27), he draws on Foucault’s notion of discourse to explainthe power of cultural representations. From a Foucauldian perspective, postcolonialism doesnot adhere to any singular way of structuring ways of knowing.

Barnett is at pains to stress the intertwined nature of western and non-western historiesand societies. He dwells at length on Said’s book Orientalism – which demonstrates howwestern notions of identity, culture and civilization have drawn on imaginings of thenon-west or the ‘Orient’ in a cultural process of ‘othering’ – to address the relationalconstitution of representations and identities. He then reflects on some of the broader moraland philosophical concerns raised by postcolonialism in relation to universalism, culturalrelativism, and cross-cultural understanding/representation. Like poststructuralism,postcolonialism problematizes textual practices, such as reading, writing and interpreting, andthe ways that textual meanings are produced.

In many ways, Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12 might be thought of as articulating the death ofphilosophy.At the very least they suggest a deterritorialization that makes a mockery of theways knowledge is parsed out in each of the chapters in this part.Whether you arecomfortable going this far or not, it is clear that no one way of knowing has any more or lesslegitimacy than any other, that many talk past each other as much as they align themselves,that each competes in academia and in society to say something of worth, and that there issignificant tension and conflict that is not just based on the logic of a philosophicalargument.

PHILOSOPHIESÿÿ19


POSITIVISTIC GEOGRAPHIES AND SPATIAL SCIENCE

Rob Kitchin

Introducing Positivism

Positivism is a set of philosophical approachesthat seeks to apply scientific principles andmethods, drawn from the natural and hard sci-ences, to social phenomena in order to explainthem. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is widelyacknowledged as the father of positivism. Heargued that social research prior to the nine-teenth century was speculative, emotive andromantic and as a result it lacked rigour andanalytical reasoning. Unwin (1992) details thatComte used the term ‘positive’ to prioritizethe actual, the certain, the exact, the useful,the organic, and the relative. In other words,heposited that it is more useful to concentrate onfacts and truths – real, empirically observablephenomena and their interrelationships – thanon the imaginary,the speculative,the undecided,the imprecise.What Comte demanded was theobjective collection of data through commonmethods of observation (that could be repli-cated) and the formulation of theories whichcould be tested (rather than as with empiri-cism where observations are presented as fact).Such testing would be systematic and rigorousand would seek to develop laws that wouldexplain and predict human behaviour.As such,Comte rejected metaphysical (concerned withmeanings, beliefs and experiences) and nor-mative (ethical and moral) questions as theycould not be answered scientifically. Like withmost other ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’ there are variousdifferent forms of positivism. The two mostcommonly discussed are logical positivism based

on verification and critical rationalism based onfalsification.

Logical positivism was developed by theVienna Circle (a loose collection of socialscientists and philosophers) in the 1920s and1930s. Like Comte, they posited that thescientific method used in the traditionalsciences could be applied directly to socialissues – that is, social behaviour could bemeasured, modelled and explained throughthe development of scientific laws in thesame way that natural phenomena are exam-ined. Such a view is called naturalism and isunderpinned by a set of six assumptions asdetailed by Johnston (1986: 27–8):

1 That events which occur within a society,or which involve human decision-making,have a determinate cause that is identifi-able and verifiable.

2 That decision-making is the result of theoperation of a set of laws, to which indi-viduals conform.

3 That there is an objective world, compro-mising individual behaviour and that theresults of that behaviour which can beobserved and recorded in an objectivemanner, on universally agreed criteria.

4 That scientists are disinterested observers,able to stand outside their subject matterand observe and record its features in aneutral way, without in any respect chan-ging those features by their procedures,and able to reach dispassionate conclusionsabout it, which can be verified by otherobservers.

2

‘


5 That, as in the study of inanimate matter,there is a structure to human society (anorganic whole) which changes in deter-minate ways, according to the observablelaws.

6 That the application of laws and theoriesof positivist social science can be used toalter societies, again in determinate ways,either by changing the laws which operatein particular circumstances or by changingthe circumstances in which the laws willoperate.’

The Vienna Circle significantly extendedComte’s work, however, by formulating rig-orous analytical procedures centred on verifi-cation. As such, they sought to define precisescientific principles and methods by whichsocial behaviour could be measured and sociallaws verified (the extent to which scientifictheories explained objective reality). Themode of measurement they advocated wasone centred on the precise quantitative mea-surement of facts (e.g. heights, weights, time,distance, wage).These measurements allowedthe statistical testing of relationships betweenvariables as a means to test (verify) explana-tory laws. Because the method focuses onknown facts that are easily collected acrosslarge populations (e.g. using the census) it ispossible to test and verify laws against verylarge sample sizes. Here, a deductive approachis employed, wherein a theory is formulatedand hypotheses are set and then tested. Incases where the data do not support thehypotheses, the theory can be modified, newhypotheses set, and the data reanalysed. Acumulative process is thus adopted, whereintheories are extended and built up in a struc-tured and systematic manner through theincorporation of new findings and the rejec-tion and resetting of hypotheses. Given thatsamples are often not perfect, complete veri-fication is understood to be impossible, andlogical positivism thus deals with weaklyverified statements understood in terms of

probabilities (the statistical likelihood ofoccurrence) that it aims to strengthen(Johnston, 1986). By increasing the strengthof the probability that a relationship did notoccur by chance and is potentially causal,hypotheses can be tested and theories deduc-tively constructed. In this way, logical posi-tivism provides a method for gaining objectiveknowledge about the world. Objectivitythrough the independence of scientists is main-tained through conformity to the followingfive premises (Mulkay, 1975, cited in Johnston,1986: 17–18):

1 Originality – their aim is to advanceknowledge by the discovery of newknowledge.

2 Communality – all knowledge is shared,with its provenance fully recognized.

3 Disinterestedness – scientists are interestedin knowledge for its own sake, and theironly reward is the satisfaction that theyhave advanced understanding.

4 Universalism – judgements are on acade-mic grounds only, and incorporate noreflections on the individuals concerned.

5 Organized scepticism – knowledge isadvanced by constructive criticism.’

In contrast to Comte, the Vienna Circleaccepted that some statements could be ver-ified without recourse to experience, makinga distinction between analytical statementsand synthetic statements. Analytical state-ments are a priori propositions whose truth isguaranteed by their internal definitions(Gregory, 1986a). Such analytical statementsare common in the formal sciences and math-ematics, where questions are often solved ina purely theoretic form long before theycan be empirically tested. Indeed, theoreti-cal physics almost exclusively seeks to pro-vide solutions (based on known laws andproperties) to problems that remain impossi-ble to empirically test (see for example SteveHawking’s A Brief History of Time). Synthetic

POSITIVISTIC GEOGRAPHIES AND SPATIAL SCIENCEÿÿ21

‘


statements are propositions whose truth needsto be established through empirical testingbecause they lack internal definition and arecomplex. In addition, the Vienna Circle for-warded scientism (that is the claim that thepositivist method is the only valid and reliableway of obtaining knowledge, and all othermethods are meaningless because they do notproduce knowledge that can be verified) anda narrowly defined scientific politics thatargued that positivism offers the only meansof providing rational solutions to all problems(Johnston, 1986).

Critical rationalism was developed inresponse to logical positivism and challengesits focus on verification. Forwarded by KarlPopper, it contends that the truth of a lawdepends not on the number of times it isexperimentally observed or verified,but ratheron whether it can be falsified (Chalmers,1982). Here it is argued that rather than tryingto provide a weight of confirmatory evidence,scientific validation should proceed by identi-fying exceptions that undermine a theory.If no exceptions can be found then a theorycan be said to have been corroborated. Thecritique of such an approach is that a theorycan never be fully validated as a yet unidenti-fied exception might still be awaiting discovery(Gregory, 1986b). While many geographerswould profess to adopting a critical rationalistapproach based on falsification, in practice theytend to employ verification, seeking to explainaway exceptions or residuals by recourse to sta-tistics based on probability, rather than reject-ing a hypothesis outright. A variety of otherversions of positivism have been proposed andcontemporary positivist philosophy signifi-cantly extends the work of the Vienna Circle.That said, debates in geography draw on theseolder forms of positivism, mainly becausepositivist geography itself rarely engages inany deep or meaningful dialogue with philo-sophy and as such its underpinnings have notbeen advanced with regard to new forms ofpositivism.

Development and Use of Positivismin Human Geography

Positivism is one of the unrecognised,‘hidden’ philosophical perspectives whichguides the work of many geographers …[It remains hidden] in the sense that thosewho adhere to many of its central tenetsrarely describe themselves as positivists …While many boldly carry the banner oftheir chosen philosophy, the name of pos-itivism is rarely seen or heard in the worksof geographers who give assent to its basicprinciples. (Hill, 1981: 43)

Until the 1950s, geography as a discipline wasessentially descriptive in nature, examiningpatterns and processes, often on a regionalbasis, in order to try to understand particu-lar places. From the early 1950s, a number ofgeographers started to argue that geographi-cal research needed to become more scien-tific in its method, seeking the underlyinglaws that explained spatial patterns andprocesses. For example, Frederick Schaefer,in a paper often cited as the key catalyst forthe adoption of scientific method in humangeography, argued that ‘geography has to beconceived as the science concerned with theformulation of the laws governing the spatialdistribution of certain features on the surfaceof the earth’ (1953: 227). In effect Schaeferdrew on the arguments of logical positivismto contend that geography should seek toidentify laws, challenging the exceptionalistclaims of geographers such as Hartshorne(1939) that geography and its methodwas unique within the social sciences. Inother words, geography should shift from anideographic discipline (fact gathering) focus-ing on regions and places to a nomothetic(law producing) science focused on spatialarrangement.

The principal concern of the early advo-cates of geography as a spatial science was thatgeographical enquiry up to that point was

22ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


largely unsystematic and analytically naive.Geographers were developing empiricistaccounts of the world by simply accumulat-ing facts as evidence for generalist theories.The problem with such empiricist endeav-ours was that they did not distinguishbetween causal correlations and accidentalor spurious (non-causal) associations. Forexample, environmental determinist accountssuggested that environmental conditionsexplicitly influenced society in a causal fash-ion (e.g. high ambient temperatures causedunderdevelopment in tropical countries byinducing idleness among local residents)(Hubbard et al., 2002). Moreover, suchaccounts committed ecological fallacies, thatis ascribing aggregate observations to all caseswithin an area. However, just because twothings are observed in the same place at thesame time does not mean that one caused theother or that they apply universally. Thesepatterns need to be tested scientifically.Indeed, most people now accept that ambienttemperature may influence human behaviour,but it does not determine it, and it has littleor no effect on levels of development. Forgeographers such as Schaefer, geography as adiscipline would gain real utility, and by asso-ciation respectability within the academy,only if it became more scientific. Scientificmethod would provide validity and credibilityto geographic study and it would providea shared ‘language’ for uniting human andphysical geography.

Quantitative revolution

What followed was the so-called quantitativerevolution wherein the underlying principlesand practices of geography were transformed(Burton, 1963), with description replaced withexplanation, individual understandings withgeneral laws, and interpretation with predic-tion (Unwin, 1992). In order to employ a sci-entific method, to transform human geographyinto a scientific discipline concerned with the

identification of geographical laws, a numberof geographers started to use statistical tech-niques (particularly inferential statistics, con-cerned with measuring the probability of arelationship occurring by chance) to analysequantitative data. Quantitative data were seen asfactual, as objectively and systematically mea-sured.They were therefore universal in nature,free of the subjective bias of the measurer andanalyst. By statistically analysing and modellingthese data, geographers hoped to be able toidentify universal laws that would explainspatial patterns and processes, and also providea basis for predicting future patterns and iden-tifying ways to intervene constructively inthe world (e.g. altering policy to engenderchange). So, just as physics and chemistry triedto determine the general laws of the physicalworld, geographers adopted a naturalist posi-tion (a belief in the equivalence of methodbetween social and natural sciences) to try todetermine the spatial laws of human activity.

This transformation in theory and praxisled to a whole variety of different types oflaws, most of which did not pretend to be theuniversal law as portrayed by many critics. Forexample, Golledge and Amedeo (1968, sum-marized in Johnston, 1991: 76) detailed fourtypes of law being developed in human geo-graphy:‘Cross-sectional laws describe functionalrelationships (as between two maps) but showno causal connection, although they maysuggest one. Equilibrium laws state what willbe observed if certain criteria are met. …Dynamic laws incorporate notions of change,with the alteration of one variable being fol-lowed by (and perhaps causing) an alterationin another … Finally statistical laws … areprobability statements of B happening, giventhat A exists’ (the first three laws might bedeterministic or statistical).

The aim, in short, was to create a scientificgeography, with standards of precision, rigourand accuracy equivalent to other sciences(Wilson, 1972). However, as Hill (1981) notes,given that spatial science borrowed the idea of



scientific method largely without consciousreflection on its philosophical underpinningsit is perhaps better to term it positivistic ratherthan positivist. Certainly, many positivisticgeographers (most of whom would prefer toadopt the label quantitative or statistical geo-graphers) would balk at the scientism and sci-entific politics of logical positivism, thoughthey would see the scientific method as themost sensible and robust (rather than the only)approach to geographical enquiry (see alsoChapter 22).

As with all ‘revolutions’, certain key sitesand people were instrumental in pushing anddeveloping the emerging quantitative geogra-phy. In the US, geographers such as WilliamGarrison at Washington State,Harold McCartyat Iowa State and A.H. Robinson at Wisconsintrained a generation of graduate students whobecame faculty elsewhere, where in turn theypropagated their ideas (Johnston, 1991). Inthe UK, Peter Haggett at Bristol and laterCambridge was a key influence (along withphysical geographer Richard Chorley). IndeedHaggett’s book Locational Analysis in HumanGeography (1965) was an important text that

helped to strengthen the case for quantitativegeography. Such was the pace of adoption thatby 1963 Burton had already declared that therevolution was over and quantitative geogra-phy was now part of the mainstream.That said,it is important to note that not all geographerswere enthusiastic converts to what was increas-ingly called spatial science, and many contin-ued to practise and teach other forms ofgeographical enquiry (Johnston,1991;Hubbardet al., 2002).Nonetheless, the quantitative turn,and its conception of space as a geometricalsurface on which human relationships are org-anized and played out,did change how many ofthese geographers conceived the notions ofspace and place.

Harvey’s explanation in geography

Despite the rapid growth of quantitativegeography throughout the 1960s, as noted, itlargely operated in a philosophical vacuum: itfocused on methodological form, not thedeeper epistemological structure of know-ledge production (Gregory, 1978). DavidHarvey’s book Explanation in Geography

24ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

BOX 2.1 SPATIAL MODELS AND LAWS

Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s a whole plethora of geographical modelsand laws, based on scientific analysis of quantitative data and taking the form ofmathematical formulae, were developed using a hypodeductive approach. For example,early quantitative geographers tried to find a formula that adequately modelled theinteraction of people between places. One of these was Isard et al.’s (1960, detailedin Haggett, 1965: 40) inverse-distance gravity model:

Mij = (Pj / dij ) f (Zi )

where Mij is the interaction between centres i and j, Pj is a measure of the mass ofcentre j, dij is a measure of the distance separating i and j, and f (Zi) is a function ofZi, where Zi measures the attractive force of destination i. This advanced earlier mod-els that did not take into account how ‘attractive’ each location might be in relation toothers (for example, in climate or amenities).


(1969) was a milestone text for the discipline.Harvey’s key observation was that until thatpoint geographers had rarely examined ques-tions of how and why geographical know-ledge was produced.And no one had tried toforward a robust and theoretically rigorousmethodological (rather than philosophical)base for the discipline. Harvey’s text thussought to provide such a base by explicitlyacknowledging the importance of philoso-phy to geographical enquiry. In particular hedrew on the philosophy of science (whichcan effectively be translated as positivismdespite the fact that Harvey never uses theterm) to construct a theoretically soundontology and epistemology – presented as acoherent scientific methodology. As Harvey(1973) himself later acknowledged (seeChapter 9), however, wider philosophicalissues were skirted as his aim was to con-centrate on formalizing methodology usingphilosophy rather than philosophy per se.

Spatial science as implicit positivism

While Harvey’s text was enormously influen-tial, providing an initial, theoretically robustontological and epistemological base for spa-tial science, it is fair to say that most geogra-phers employing the scientific method havesubsequently paid little attention to its philo-sophical underpinnings.As Hill (1981) notes,positivism implicitly underpins much spatialscience work, in that while research seeks todetermine casual relationships and spatial lawsthrough statistical analysis and geographicalmodelling, there is little explicit appreciationor engagement with positivism or otherphilosophies.As such, while there is the adop-tion of a scientific method and the use ofterms such as law, model, theory and hypo-thesis, these are often used without an appreci-ation of what they actually mean or constitute(Hill, 1981; Johnston, 1986). Such researchforms a major part of the discipline today,despite criticisms levelled at its positivistic

underpinnings. For example, nearly all GISand geocomputational research is practised asspatial science, although it is fair to say thatmuch of it has actually continued the tradi-tion of empiricism; wherein facts are allowedto ‘speak for themselves’ and are not subject tothe rigours of spatial analysis through statisti-cal testing (for example, most mapping workwhere the maps are allowed to speak forthemselves); it is also increasingly rare to seehypotheses stated and then tested.This is notto say that all quantitative geography is impli-citly positivist (or empiricist). In fact much isnot. Indeed quantitative geography refers tothe geographical inquiry that uses quantitativedata, and such data can be interrogated from anumber of ontological and epistemologicalpositions (it is important never to conflatedata type with a philosophical approach).

Criticism and Challenges toPositivist Geography

The period of transformation in geography’smethod opened the way for a sustained periodof reflection on the ontology, epistemologyand ideology of geographical inquiry fromthe late 1960s onwards.This coincided witha period of large social unrest in many west-ern countries when many geographers werequestioning the relevance and usefulness ofthe discipline for engaging with and providingpractical and political solutions. Consequently,numerous geographers started to questionthe use and appropriateness of the scientificmethod and its new, philosophical base ofpositivism from a number of perspectives. Itis important to note here that many of thesecritiques were not of using and analysingquantitative data per se, but rather of the pos-itivist approach to analysing such data; it wasa critique of ontology, epistemology, methodand ideology, not data type.

The critiques of positivistic geographycame from many quarters. For some, such as



Robert Sack (1980), positivistic geographywas a form of spatial fetishism, focusing onthe spatial at the expense of everything else.Spatial science represented a spatial separatistposition, decoupling space from time andmatter, which he argued meant that it hadlittle analytical value: determining spatialpatterns would not tell us why such patternsexist or why they might change over timebecause the approach fails to take account ofsocial and political process.

Marxist and radical critiques developedthe latter point. By rejecting issues such aspolitics and religion and trying to explain theworld through observable facts, radical criticsnoted that spatial science was limited tocertain kinds of questions and was furtherlimited in its ability to answer them. It treatedpeople as if they were all rational beingsdevoid of irrationality, ideology and history,who made sensible and logical decisions. Ittherefore modelled the world on the basis thatpeople live or locate their factories and so onin places that minimize or maximize certaineconomic or social benefits. Critics arguedthat individuals and society are much morecomplex, with this complexity being impossi-ble to capture in simple models and laws.As aconsequence, Harvey, in a noted turnaround,condemned positivistic geography just a fewyears after writing its ‘bible’: there is ‘a cleardisparity between the sophisticated theoreti-cal and methodological framework we areusing and our ability to say anything mean-ingful about events as they unfold around us’(1973: 128). For Harvey, spatial science couldsay little about issues such as class divisions,Third World debt, geopolitical tensions andecological problems because it was incapableof asking and answering the questions neededto interrogate them. Moreover, it was notedthat positivistic geography lacked a normativefunction in that it could seek to detail whatis and forecast what will be, but could giveno insight into what should be (Chisholm,1971). For Harvey and others, the only way

to address such issues was to turn to radicaltheories such as Marxism which sought touncover the capitalist structures that under-pinned social and economic inequalities andregulated everyday life, and to transform suchstructures into a more emancipatory system.

Accompanying these radical critiques,from the early 1970s humanist geographers(see also Chapter 3) similarly attacked posi-tivism with regards to its propensity to reducepeople to abstract, rational subjects and itsrejection of metaphysical questions (Buttimer,1976; Guelke, 1974; Tuan, 1976). In effect itwas argued that spatial science was peoplelessin the sense that it did not acknowledgepeople’s beliefs, values,opinions, feelings and soon, and their role in shaping everyday geogra-phies. Clearly, individuals are complex beingsthat do not necessarily behave in ways that areeasy to model. Humanistic geographers thusproposed the adoption of geographical enquirythat was sensitive to capturing the complexlives of people through in-depth, qualitativestudies.

In addition, both radical and humanistcritics questioned the extent to which spatialscientists are objective and neutral observersof the world, contending that it is impossible(and in the case of radicals undesirable) tooccupy such a position. Geographers, it wasargued, are participants in the world, withtheir own personal views and politics, notprivileged observers who could shed thesevalues while undertaking their research(Gregory, 1978).At the very least, researchersmake decisions over what they study and thequestions they wish to ask, and these are notvalue-free choices.

This argument was supplemented byfeminist geographers such as Domosh (1991),Rose (1993) and McDowell (1992) whoargued that spatial science was underpinned bya masculinist rationality (see also Chapter 4).That is, positivism was defined by man’s questfor a god’s-eye view of the world, one whichwas universal, ‘orderly, rational, quantifiable,

26ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


predictable, abstract, and theoretical’ (Stanleyand Wise, 1993: 66) and in which the knower‘can separate himself from his body, emo-tions, values, past and so on, so that he and histhought are autonomous, context-free andobjective’ (Rose, 1993: 7). They argued thatgeographical enquiry had to reject such ration-ality and become much more sensitive topower relations within the research process,and the geographers had to be more self-reflexive of their positionality, supposed exper-tise, and influence on the production ofknowledge. In other words,geographers had togive up the pretence that they could necessar-ily create a master, universal knowledge of theworld and accept that knowledge will alwaysbe partial and situated (from a certain perspec-tive).What this meant in practice was that fem-inist geographers largely dismissed quantitativegeography as a viable means of feminist praxis.

In turn, this feminist critique opened thedoor to a wider debate on the relationshipbetween feminism, epistemology and spa-tial science in a special forum of ProfessionalGeographer (1994: ‘Should Women Count?’),that in turn helped (alongside texts such asPickles, 1995) to fuel the development ofcritical approaches to GIS in the late 1990sand early 2000s. Critical GIScience draws offfeminist, postmodern and poststructuralisttheories to rethink the modus operandi ofspatial science (see Curry, 1998; Kwan, 2002;Harvey, 2003). In many senses it is an attemptto reposition quantitative geography byproviding it with a radically different philo-sophical framework from positivism, one thatis more contemporary and robust to traditionalcriticisms of spatial science and that enables itto address questions that previously it avoidedor was unable to tackle.

Positivist Geography Today

Despite the criticism levelled at geographicalwork underpinned by positivist reasoning,

implicit positivism remains strong withinhuman geography. A very large number ofgeographers argue that they are scientists,employ scientific principles and reasoning,and seek laws or mathematical models thatpurport to explain the geographical world.However, few seemingly give much thoughtto the philosophical underpinnings of theirscientific method or philosophical debate andcritique in general. This leaves much spatialscience (and by association, quantitativegeography) with relatively weak and unstablephilosophical underpinnings (much of itbacksliding into empiricism) and vulnerableto theoretic critique and challenge for whichit has little response.This is not to say that allspatial science lacks theory; rather it lacks afundamental and robust ontological, episte-mological and ideological base. It also doesnot mean that spatial science is not useful orvaluable within certain limited parameters.The work of spatial scientists clearly doeshave utility in addressing both fundamentalscientific questions and ‘real-world’ practicalproblems and therefore has academic meritand worth (and it most definitively has utilityin the eyes of policy-makers and businesses).However, by ignoring wider philosophicaldebate spatial scientists often fail to make arobust case for their approach to fellowgeographers. As a consequence, many areseduced by the criticisms levelled at posi-tivism and quantification more broadly,and become suspicious and wary of suchresearch. Rather than tackle these criticisms,spatial science increasingly relies on the com-mercial and policy cache of GIS to makeimplicitly positivistic geography sustainable.As the debates in GIScience illustrate, how-ever, the implicit positivism underpinningGIS use is open to challenge, with an acknow-ledgement that the employment of the scien-tific method can be practised from morecritical perspectives. What might usefullytranspire in the long term then is the devel-opment of spatial science underpinned by



more critical philosophies, with a move awayfrom or reworking of implicit positivism.That said, given the demand for GIS andquantitative geography in the public and

private sector, it is likely that unreconstructed,positivistic geography is secure for the fore-seeable future.

28ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

ReferencesBurton, I. (1963) ‘The quantitative revolution and theoretical geography’, The Canadian

Geographer, 7: 151–62.Buttimer, A. (1976) ‘Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld’, Annals of the Association of

American Geographers, 66: 277–92.Chalmers, A.F. (1982) What Is This Thing Called Science? St Lucia: University of

Queensland Press.Chisholm, M. (1971) ‘In search of a basis of location theory: micro-economics or welfare

economics’, Progress in Geography, 3: 111–33.Curry, M. (1998) Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies.

New York: Routledge.Domosh, M. (1991) ‘Towards a feminist historiography of geography’, Transactions,

Institute of British Geographers, 16: 95–115.Golledge, R. and Amedeo, D. (1968) ‘On laws in geography’, Annals of the Association

of American Geographers, 58: 760–74.Gregory, D. (1978) Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson.Gregory, D. (1986a) ‘Positivism’, in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory and D.M. Smith (eds), The

Dictionary of Human Geography, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Gregory, D. (1986b) ‘Critical rationalism’, in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory and D.M. Smith

(eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Guelke, L. (1974) ‘An idealist alternative to human geography’, Annals of the Association

of American Geographers, 64: 193–202.Haggett, P. (1965) Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London: Arnold.Hartshorne, R. (1939) The Nature of Geography. Lancaster, PA: Association of American

Geographers.Harvey, D. (1969) Explanation in Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold.Harvey, F. (2003) ‘Knowledge and geography’s technology: politics, ontologies, repre-

sentations in the changing ways we know’, in K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile andN. Thrift (eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage, pp. 532–43.

Hill, M.R. (1981) ‘Positivism: a “hidden” philosophy in geography’, in M.E. Harvey andB.P. Holly (eds), Themes in Geographic Thought. London: Croom Helm, pp. 38–60.

Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R., Bartley, B. and Fuller, D. (2002) Thinking Geographically: Space,Theory and Contemporary Human Geography. London: Continuum.

Isard, E., Bramhall, R.D., Carrothers, G.A.P., Cumberland, J.H., Moses, L.N., Prices,D.O. and Schooler, E.W. (1960) Methods of Regional Analysis: An Introduction toRegional Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Johnston, R.J. (1986) Philosophy and Human Geography: An Introduction toContemporary Approaches, 2nd edn. London: Arnold.


Johnston, R.J. (1991) Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Geography since1945, 4th edn. London: Arnold.

Kwan, M.-P. (2002) ‘Feminist visualization: re-envisioning GIS as a method in feministgeographic research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92:645–61.

McDowell, L. (1992) ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in humangeography’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 17: 399–416.

Mulkay, M.J. (1975) ‘Three models of scientific development’, Sociological Review, 23:509–26.

Pickles, J. (ed.) (1995) Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic InformationSystems. New York: Guilford.

Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Sack, R. (1980) Conceptions of Space in Social Thought. London: Macmillan.Schaefer, F.K. (1953) ‘Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological examination’,

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 43: 226–49.Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1993) Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology.

London: Routledge.Tuan, Y.-F. (1976) ‘Humanistic geography’, Annals of the Association of American

Geographers, 66: 266–76.Unwin, T. (1992) The Place of Geography. Harlow: Longman.Wilson, A.G. (1972) ‘Theoretical geography’, Transactions, Institute of British

Geographers, 57: 31–44.



HUMANISM AND DEMOCRATIC PLACE-MAKING

J. Nicholas Entrikin and John H. Tepple

Introduction

Humanistic geographers study topics suchas the cultural construction of place andlandscape, the cartography of everyday life,the power of language and meaning to createand transform environments, place and iden-tity, religious symbolism and landscape, andgeographical myths and narratives (Leyand Samuels, 1978; Adams et al., 2001a).Common to all of these research interests isa concern with understanding meaningful,humanly authored worlds (Tuan, 1976).Beginning students in geography may recog-nize these topics as part of their course workand readings and wonder why they maynever have been taught about humanisticgeography. How could a geographical orien-tation that has been associated with so manythemes of current interest be relegated pri-marily to discussions of the recent history ofthe field? How, for example, could it be solittle noted in the many announcements ofthe so-called ‘cultural turn’ in contemporarygeography? An intellectually satisfying answerwould require a historical analysis that wouldbe inconsistent with the forward-lookinggoals of this volume. However, discussionsurrounding one issue, the nature of the geo-graphical subject or agent, helps both to giveinsight into the recent disciplinary amnesiaabout humanistic geography and at the sametime to recognize its currency.Before turningto this theme, it is first useful to provide somebackground.

Origins

The term ‘humanistic geography’ createssome confusion in that it has both a generaland a specific meaning. In its current usagehumanistic geography is typically associatedwith a specific intellectual orientation ingeography in the 1970s and 1980s. Broadlyunderstood, however, the same term maybe applied to the relatively undernourishedroots of modern human geography in thestudy of the humanities. Such a link hasarguably existed since at least the time ofAlexander von Humboldt in the early nine-teenth century (Tuan, 2003; Bunkse, 1981).The primary sources of its recent reappear-ance were a series of influential articles by Yi-Fu Tuan (1976),Anne Buttimer (1974; 1976),and Edward Relph (1970; 1977) and a book,Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems,edited by David Ley and Marwyn Samuels(1978). Taken together these works offer aglimpse at what might be described as ahighly varied and loosely structured move-ment in late-twentieth-century geography.It was held together more by a strong senseof what was being opposed than by whatwas being advocated. Its proponents shareda common vision of the narrowness of thepositivistic human geography of the period.The spatial analytic tradition had emerged asa powerful force in the 1960s after the so-called ‘quantitative revolution’ and its onlyopposition was the diminished and intellec-tually aging legacy of a descriptive landscape

3


and regional geography. Both of these researchorientations generally lacked a robust conceptof individual agency or an interest in howgeography might contribute to an understand-ing of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Entrikin, 1976).

In the mathematical models of spatialanalysis, rational actors made decisions based onperfect information in the non-environmentsof isotropic planes, homogeneous and feature-less spaces in which the only variable was therelative distance between and among pointsor locations on the plane. Regional and land-scape studies tended not to focus on individ-ual actors, but rather to look for the sourcesof geographical variation in the ways of lifeof social and cultural groups. Framed in thescholarly and social context of the 1970s,humanistic geographers saw their work asopening the discipline to more realistic con-ceptions of humans as geographical agents.In this belief, humanists saw their efforts asintellectually liberating. They argued thatagents draw on their experiences, attitudes,and beliefs, as well as their moral and aestheticjudgment, in making decisions that shape theirenvironments. Geographical agents were notonly economic actors seeking to enhancetheir material wellbeing, but also moral andcultural beings. Stated another way, one couldsay that humanistic geographers resisted thereductionist tendencies in human geogra-phy. They challenged what they viewed asan overemphasis on analytic simplicity thatseemed to distance human geography fromthe creative and chaotic flux of everyday life.This laudatory goal, however, brought with itthe difficult challenge of working with a com-plex conception of geographic agency. AsDavid Ley wrote:

An aspiration of humanistic perspectivesis to speak the language of human expe-rience, to animate the city and its people,to present popular values as they intersectwith the making, remaking and appropri-ation of place. (1989: 227)

To achieve such a goal required an emphasison the human subject as the creator andinterpreter of meaning. This emphasis wasevident in the semantic depth that humanistgeographers gave to traditional concepts suchas place, region, space, landscape, and natureand the extended reach of these conceptsinto studies of literature and art.Where oncethese concepts referred to an underlyingworld of natural and cultural elements, thehumanists made visible their relation tohuman projects and the subjects who createdthem. Meaning is not something to be foundin objects, but instead must be understood inrelation to subjects. Thus place, region, andlandscape are not simply spatial categories fororganizing objects and events in the world,but rather processes in the ongoing dynamicof humans making the earth their home andcreating worlds out of nature (Tuan, 1991b).It is for this reason that meaning, imagina-tion, and human agency are so closely associ-ated with humanistic geography. It is also forthis reason that humanistic research and writ-ing are often seen as being relatively subjec-tive. The humanistic project in geographymay be understood as part of what DenisCosgrove describes in another context as an‘alternative geographical tradition’, one associ-ated with ‘a more self-reflective moral projectthe primary goal of which is the wisdom …that comes from self-knowledge as an embod-ied being in the world, and wherein action isgoverned by the examined life, rather than acalculus of power’ (2003: 867).

Humanistic geography was one of twomajor 1970s intellectual movements thatgrew out of a discontent with spatial analysis.The other was a concern with social rele-vance and politics that took its most co-herent form in a structural neo-Marxism(Harvey, 1973; Duncan and Ley, 1982). Bothof these challenges to the reigning orthodoxyin human geography sought to incorporatea more complex human reality than wasevident in the models of spatial analysis.

HUMANISM AND DEMOCRATIC PLACE-MAKINGÿÿ31


Humanistic geography has been seen as theless theoretical and political of the two move-ments, a view that is not incorrect but thathas often been overstated to the point thathumanistic geography has been inaccuratelylabeled as being atheoretical and apolitical.Each of these alternative positions wasattacked by positivistic geographers forundermining human geography’s scientificcredentials in their apparent move away fromobjective research methodologies toward moresubjective and seemingly value-laden studies(see Chapter 2).The rigor of data collection,measurement, hypothesis testing, and modelbuilding seemed to be giving way to philo-sophical pronouncements and ‘soft’ studies ofinterpretation and meaning or to ideologicallydriven analyses.

Some of these criticisms were valid, butothers reflected an underlying scientism, inwhich science is manipulated and trans-formed from a form of inquiry into a rhetor-ical weapon. Such criticisms rarely foundtheir target, however, as it became clear thathumanistic geography for the most part didnot directly challenge spatial analysis, butrather encouraged an expansion of the scopeof human geography (Bunkse, 1990).Humanists posed different types of questionsthat emphasized meaning, values, and inter-pretations. For example, humanists wouldargue that individuals choose pathwayswithin the city not just in terms of distance,time, or cost minimization, but also becauseof the perception of danger, a sense ofbelonging, or aesthetic sensibilities. Regionsare not only agglomerations of economicactivities and the functional dependenciesof employment opportunities and residentialspaces, or even spatial categories of humanactivities, but also part of the identity of indi-viduals and groups, part of how they seethemselves in relation to others and how theygive meaningful order to their experience ofnear and distant places. Geographical studiesof migration are more than simply origin and

destination studies of push–pull factors; theyalso include the experiences of attachment,dislocation, alienation, and exile that consti-tute the experiential reality associated withleaving one’s home. Thus movements ofpeople through space could also be seen interms of the experience of place.

Critics found humanistic geography tobe a diffuse target. For example, the human-istic geography described by Tuan (1976;1986; 1989) emphasized the relativelyneglected tie of geography to the humanitiesand the ideals of liberal education (Entrikin,2001). His version of this movement con-sisted of a broadening of scholarly horizonsof geography rather than a direct challenge tothe intellectual legitimacy of spatial models.Tuan sought to expose geographers to differ-ent modes of experience and different ideasof ‘the good life’ and its ideal environments,believing that such exposure contributes to adeeper understanding of our own experi-ences and beliefs. His approach to geographywas thus not an imperialist one of colonizingsubstantive areas of neighboring disciplinesbut rather one of adding dimensionality anddepth to the traditional themes and conceptsof geography.To understand fully the ways inwhich humans transform their environments,the geographer could not leave unexploredthe meanings that cultures have given tonature, the values and goals that shape theiractions in building places and landscapes, ortheir imaginative explorations of other pos-sible environments.

Other geographers, such as David Ley(1977) and Edward Relph (1977), presented asomewhat different argument in support of ahumanistic geography as an alternative to theprevailing naturalist model of social science, amodel that emphasized the methodologicalunity of the natural and social sciences. Inpresenting a vision of geography as an inter-pretive social science, these humanists soughtto open the discipline to the unique qualitiesof human beings as intentional agents who act

32ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


in the world in relation to their projects.Proponents considered various philosophiesthat emphasized intersubjectivity, includingphenomenology, existentialism, structuralism,and hermeneutics.

It is interesting to note in this context thatgeography has a humanist orientation whilerelated human sciences such as sociology andanthropology have no such broadly appliedlabel. This is no doubt related to the stronghold of materialist orientations in geographythat retarded the development of interpretivetraditions in the field (Lowenthal, 1961). Suchtraditions in other disciplines, for example,ethnomethodology, phenomenological soci-ology, symbolic interactionism, ethnography,and so on, all preceded their equivalents ingeography. Geography had a late start in thestudy of meaning, and thus it is not surprisingthat all of the various forms of interpretivestudy were lumped under the broad concep-tual umbrella of humanistic geography. Theterm ‘humanistic geography’ became the sig-nature in geography for the study of meaningand experience and the move beyond thetraditional concern with linking concepts totheir referents toward an interest in relatingmeaning to subjects.

A less frequently cited third direction forthis orientation emphasized the close connec-tions of humanism to the historical perspec-tive in geography. This linkage was madeespecially clear in Cole Harris’ (1978) argu-ments concerning the historical mind andlater supported by Denis Cosgrove (1989) andStephen Daniels (1985). Daniels wrote that:

If humanistic geography is to be morethan a criticism of positivist geography itneeds a more thoroughly reasoned philo-sophical base, a closer understanding ofthe conventions through which humanmeanings are expressed, a more adequateaccount of what humanistic methods areor might be, and above all a greater his-torical understanding. (1985: 155)

For Cosgrove,

Any humanist endeavour is inevitablyhistorical and, to a degree, reflexive for itconcerns the nature and purposes of con-scious human subjects together with theirindividual and collective biographies.(1989: 189)

These different directions indicate thathumanistic geography was less a coherentstrategy than a shared spirit of opening thefield to alternative forms of analysis. Its initialformulations had a liberationist quality tothem. In all of this variety certain commonthemes stood out, primarily the importanceof the individual as an intentional agent,whose actions are shaped not only by mater-ial needs but also by a geographical imagina-tion that included moral and aesthetic ideals.This fully dimensional geographical agent isthe primary legacy of the humanistic move-ment of the 1970s. It would soon turn intothe most visible target of those seeking totranscend this orientation.

Transcendence

The social scientific path of humanistic geo-graphy led to early conflicts with those whoquestioned the individualist and voluntaristiccharacter of such studies. Surely, critics wouldargue, human beings are not free agents in theworld but rather are constrained through eco-nomic, political, and cultural structures thatlimit the possibilities for choice and action.The life choices of an American academic liv-ing in Los Angeles are clearly very differentfrom those of a newly arrived immigrant fromMexico working in the garment industry indowntown Los Angeles. Some sort of balancebetween constraint and choice is necessary,and humanist geographers and their criticscontested this middle ground (Gregory, 1981;Duncan and Ley, 1982). This argument



merged into the so-called ‘structure–agency’debates of the 1980s, when alternatives such asstructuration theory (see Chapter 7) and crit-ical realism (see Chapter 8) claimed to offerpositions that could incorporate the human-ist’s concern with agency with a theorized setof structural constraints.

Structuration theory emphasized the waysin which actions and practices interacted withstructural constraints to both transform andreproduce social structures. Everyday habitualroutines – such as going to work or to school,choosing where to live to be with others whoshare similar qualities and tastes, staying hometo raise children – reproduce and reinforcestructures of existing social relations. Theactions that structurationists studied, however,tended to be the routine and the customarywith very little attention paid to questions ofmeaningful or intentional action. Thus theseeming absorption of the humanist concernwith agency into the more broadly conceivedsocial theory of structuration in fact largelyneglected this core humanist theme. Criticalrealism, a view about what is real (ontology)that is based upon an analytically prior com-mitment about how the world works (the-ory), also emphasized structures and largelyignored agency.

The structure–agency debates took onthe appearance of both ends struggling togain the middle ground but gradually becamemore and more one-sided as meaningfulagency became an increasingly ‘thin’ theoret-ical concept.Thus, in spite of its name, the so-called structure–agency debate diminishedrather than strengthened the role of humanagency in geographical studies. The seamlesstransition made by many of the participantsof this debate into support for theories ofpractice, whether derived from the work ofAnthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, or, morerecently, the actor-network theory of BrunoLatour, contributed further to the demise ofthe intentional agent and the affective ingeography. The intentional agent, so central

to the humanist perspective in geography, isless transcended by the move toward theoriesof practice as it is submerged and eventuallyforgotten.

Humanism, Pre, Post, and Anti

Actor-network theory is unique among the-ories of practice in its denial of the intellec-tual separation between the human and thenon-human (see Chapter 11). Latour chal-lenges the legacy of humanism, which heassociates with ‘the free agent, the citizenbuilder of the Leviathan, the distressing vis-age of the human person, the other of a rela-tionship, the consciousness, the cognito, thehermeneut, the inner self, the thee and thouof dialogue, presence to oneself, intersubjec-tivity’ (1993: 136). All such agency-relatedconcepts remain for Latour hopelessly asym-metrical and one-sided in giving value,importance, and causal power exclusively tohumans and relegating the non-human to theinert world of things and objects. He claimsthat this division needs to be overcome inorder to see more clearly the world as it pre-sents itself to us in the form of networks,relations, and hybrids that cross the artificialboundaries drawn between culture andnature, the worlds of people and of things.Global warming, genetic engineering, anddeforestation offer examples of such net-works that cannot be understood properlywithin the confines of humanist orientations.His is a position that one might label as pre-or posthumanism, since for Latour (1993)humanism is an element of modernism, andhis argument against both modernism andpostmodernism is that we have never beenmodern.

From poststructuralism (see Chapter 10)came a more fundamental attack on human-ism and the outlines of an anti-humanism.In an era in which geographers engage post-structuralism, postcolonialism, ecocentrism,

34ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


and radical feminism, the intentional agent orsubject of the humanist movement has beenattacked as being a fiction, a constructionused by those presenting false universalclaims about humanity. These universalclaims about the human condition were seenas the partial views of privileged culturalelites, defined variously by sex, gender, eth-nicity, nationality and other differentiatingqualities (Bondi, 1993; Rose, 1993).The alter-native positions, many of which are discussedin detail in other parts of this volume, arelarge and diverse but they share an importanttopical concern with the construction of thesubject. Their views of the subject are oftenopposed to a humanist subject which is des-cribed variously as Eurocentric, masculinist,racist, and so on, and associated with a hege-mony that actively hides difference andsilences the voices of the culturally less pow-erful and oppressed. The reflexive, centeredsubject and the individual intentional agenthave been replaced by the decentered subjector subject position, given form and shape bysocial forces that underlie and produce thecompeting discourses of modern life.What isgained is a strong program for the sociallyconstructed self, and what is lost is theautonomous, intentional agent.

This transformation is especially evidentin discussions of place and space.For example,Robert Sack, in his book Homo Geographicus(1997), provides a theoretical scaffolding for ahumanist conception of self and place. In hisargument place and self are mutually constitu-tive. Each may be seen as influenced by forcesof nature, society, and culture, but the selfas autonomous agent is the core mechanismof place-making and in turn place facilitatesand constrains the agent. The place-makingactions of individuals and groups transformenvironments, from the simple act of con-sumption to the potentially more conse-quential and larger-scale acts of collectiveagencies, such as communities, corporations,and governments. The humanist geographer

recognizes the socially or humanly constructednature of these places but does not charac-terize this world solely in terms of imper-sonal forces of nature and society and thepower of some groups to dominate all groups.Human agents are the primary place-makers,both as individuals and as members of collec-tives.To the extent that individuals are awareof their roles and responsibilities as place-makers, they are autonomous agents ableto make moral decisions about the value ofplaces in relation to the goals of human pro-jects. Such agency neither presupposes a com-pletely unconstrained, autonomous actor norprivileges consensus and cooperation overresistance and conflict.

Poststructuralism in geography shifted theconcept of the individual subject from cen-tered to decentered (Pile and Thrift, 1995;Pile, 1996). Indeed the active subject andsubjectivity are transformed into subjectpositions, created by the contingent inter-section of often conflicting and multiplediscourses. Place is similarly the contingentintersection of multiple and sometimes con-flicting social processes (Massey, 1994). Suchviews were often presented from those seek-ing to introduce a more explicit ethnic, gen-dered, or sexual vocabulary to geographicaldiscourse and who saw humanistic geogra-phy as too prone to ignoring difference.Thissame anti-universalistic position was adoptedthrough postcolonialism as a reflection of aEurocentric position.The autonomous moralagent of the humanist was transformed intothe socially constructed subject, adrift andrudderless in the discursive currents of powerrelations. Critics argued that humanism andits subject had been transcended by politi-cally progressive alternatives. However, polit-ical progressiveness without moral agencyand a sense of moral growth, so central to thehumanistic project, is difficult to imagine letalone to measure or prove.

For the current critics of humanism, allis power, and humanistic geographers are



frequently judged as being naive about thisissue. However, power has not been ignoredin humanist geography (Tuan, 1984). In mak-ing his case for an appreciation of Renaissancehumanism, Cosgrove notes the fundamentalambiguity in humanism (and by implication,humanistic geography) between its libera-tionist and dominating character:

It is of direct contemporary relevancebecause humanism has always been veryclosely aligned in practice with the exer-cise of power both over other humanbeings and over the natural world. Inlarge measure geography has developedas one of the instruments of that power.At the same time, and herein lies the sub-tlety of the dialectic, both humanism andgeography offer the opportunity to sub-vert existing power relations (1989: 190)

This opportunity depends in part uponresuscitating moral and political agency.

Possibilities

What is the current relevance of humanism ingeography? As noted earlier, one understand-ing of humanism in geography refers to a veryspecific moment in the history of the disci-pline, a moment that has now passed. At thattime, humanistic geography offered a criticalvoice against the narrowing of the field andan alternative vision of humans as complexintentional agents. As developments in otherfields transformed geography, this once revo-lutionary insight became a taken-for-grantedaspect of geographic research.The critical, lib-erationist voice of the humanist was muted byother voices that claimed the title of ‘criticalgeography’ (Adams et al., 2001b). For thisgroup, humanists were insufficiently radical orwere even conservative.The relatively atheo-retical and apolitical quality of much of thework presented under the title of humanistic

geography gave support to this view (Barnesand Gregory, 1997).

At the same time that humanistic geogra-phy was being challenged by its various crit-ics, neo-Marxist geography was undergoing atransformation from a structural form, deeplyantagonistic to the perceived idealism andsubjectivism of humanistic geography, to acultural Marxism. Although still hostile toidealism and subjectivism, many of its practi-tioners appeared to have incorporated thehumanist concern with place and identity,symbolic landscapes, and the geography ofeveryday life into their own research (Harvey,1996; 2000). Raymond Williams and HenriLefebvre were cited as the intellectual ances-tors of such a move away from earlier, moreeconomistic and structural forms of analysis.One would expect to find a role for human-istic geography in this so-called cultural turn,but it is largely missing from this literature.

The current geographical research mostclosely and explicitly tied to the legacy ofhumanism is the work in moral geographyand ethics (Sack, 2003; Proctor and Smith,1999; Smith, 2000). In fact, humanists havelong expressed interest in moral issues. Therecent interest in ethics has been evident inarticles, books, special sections of journals, andrelatively new journals, such as Ethics, Place andEnvironment and Philosophy and Geography. It iswithin this emerging subfield that the human-ist’s concerns with the autonomous inten-tional agent and humans as the creators andinterpreters of meaning are most evident. Likehumanistic geography, moral geography is abroad field organized loosely around severalthemes, such as social and environmentaljustice, contextual ethics, professional ethics,and geographical understanding as a source ofmoral judgment. Two notable contributors,David Smith and Robert Sack, have sought tomake geography fundamental to an under-standing of modern ethics.

Smith (2000) presents a contextual ethics,which examines the influence of proximity,

36ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


distance, and boundaries in an ethics of care.Sack (2003) looks at place-making as humanprojects guided by instrumental and intrinsicjudgments of goodness. Each of their positionson moral geography requires a strong concep-tion of the autonomous agent, one linked invarying degrees to community and culture,but with the capacity to make independentmoral judgments.As Sack states,‘moral theorycannot force us to behave well’ (2003: 31); itcan only offer the tools for helping humanschoose well, and one of those tools is geo-graphic understanding. The work of Smith,Sack, and others in this area seemingly beliesthe claim of critics that humanistic geographyis somehow antagonistic to theory.

Indeed, it is through this connection tomoral theory that one can also reclaim theovert political aspects of humanistic geogra-phy. More specifically, humanism, and byimplication humanistic geography, is closelytied to conceptions of liberal democracy.Tzvetan Todorov makes this point forcefullyin his study of the origins of French human-ism, Imperfect Garden:The Legacy of Humanism,where he writes that:

Liberal democracy as it has been progres-sively constituted for two hundred years isthe concrete political regime that cor-responds most closely to the principlesof humanism, because it adopts the ideasof collective autonomy (the sovereignty ofthe people), individual autonomy (the lib-erty of the individual), and universality (theequality of rights for all citizens). (2002: 31)

He cautions, however, that:

Nonetheless, humanism and democracydo not coincide: first, because real demo-cracies are far from perfect embodimentsof humanist principles (one can endlesslycriticize democratic reality in the name ofits own ideal), then because the affinitybetween humanism and democracy is nota relationship of mutual implicationexclusive of any other. (2002: 31)

The autonomous individual is central tohumanism, but it is not an autonomy thatignores others as critics often assert or imply.This point is evident in Todorov’s three non-reducible ‘pillars’ of humanism:

the recognition of the equal dignity of allmembers of the species; the elevation ofthe particular human being other thanme as the ultimate goal of my action;finally, the preference for the act freelychosen over one performed under con-straint. (2002: 232)

When understood as a form of life, as opposedto a set of institutions, liberal democracy maybe described as an ongoing project that, likeall human projects, takes place. The basicpolitical tension within this form of life isbetween the individual and the community,between the autonomy of the individual andthe good of the community.Democratic com-munities face the continuous challenge ofmaintaining a healthy balance between theprivate and public spheres, of creating a viablecivil society. Rules of place are used to main-tain this distinction and to achieve this bal-ance (Sack, 2003; Cresswell, 1996; 2004).Thecollective is constantly challenged to avoidthe breakdown of the group caused by theretreat of individuals into the private sphere.Equally, a healthy democracy requires vigi-lance against the loss of the private sphereto the public and against the model of thepeople-as-one that characterizes totalitarianregimes.Thus moral theory in support of thedemocratic concerns the other-directednessof the individual whose identity is deter-mined not only in the private sphere offamily and personality formation but also inthe engagement of others in the public realm.Humanistic geography as a form of moraleducation contributes to the goals of demo-cratic community building by exposingindividuals to other ways of life, differentexperiences, and different interpretations of



experience.The moral horizons of individualsare expanded and their moral geographies arefused with the moral geographies of others.

Such fusion links the moral to the geo-graphical imagination. Places are often ima-gined before they are realized (Tuan, 1990).Giving material form to imaginative worldsleads to a continuous process of transformingenvironments. The world may be character-ized as a dynamic composite of places of dif-fering scales that are being continuously made,unmade, and remade in relation to humanprojects. Places may be made unintentionally,through habit and custom, or intentionallythrough planning and forethought.They maybe made undemocratically through fiat andthe imposition of absolute power or theymay be made democratically through collectivediscussion, planning, action, and participationof all those affected by communal decisions.They may be created through the official lan-guage of the state or through the alternativelanguage of the dispossessed – a language thatdoes not appear on maps but that constructs ageography of everyday life in marginalizedcommunities. The most powerful tools thatindividuals have in creating places are languageand imagination and these are part of the coreof the humanist perspective in geography(Lowenthal, 1961;Tuan, 1991a;Wright, 1947).

The current fascination with the decen-tered subject emphasizes subject positionsconstructed through the intersection of socialforces and the interplay of discourses. Powerrelations are their collective starting point, andthemes of domination, oppression, transgres-sion, and difference are woven into the tradi-tional geographic concerns of place, space,and landscape. The politics is described asdemocratic but in an agonistic form, wherethe democratic is viewed as a continuous andunending process of conflict, in which con-sensus and community are viewed with mis-trust as hidden forms of domination, of thetyranny of the powerful over the powerless(Entrikin, 2002a).

The humanist engages the same questionof constructed geographies with a centeredsubject interpreting the world, a subject whoacts as a relatively autonomous agent whosepower rests primarily in language, the powerto create meaning, and the ability to commu-nicate and cooperate with others. Placesare socially produced, not as the contingentintersection of social processes, but ratherthrough the cooperative actions of individu-als in communities. It is the geography cre-ated by meaningful action that is of greatestconcern to the humanist and the one mostevidently missing from many contemporarygeographic practices.

In their inherent contingency, places astools for human projects are a means of givingorder and stability to the flux of experience.Places are necessary conditions of social exis-tence, and the making and unmaking of placesare essential elements in the struggles to givethis existence specific form.They are the sitesfor recognizing difference as well as for for-ging the common bonds of humanity.They arethe sites of goodness as well as evil.The mys-teries that in part motivate humanistic geogra-phers are not those related to individuals andgroups competing over projects or that somegroups seek to impose their will on others.Instead, they involve the recognition thatplace-making may also result from meaningfulcooperation and that some projects may evenbe based on shared commitment to achievingsome form of moral progress (Entrikin,2002b).Todorov’s description of the humanistproject describes as well the geographic pro-ject of democratic place-making, which

could never bring itself to a halt. It rejectsthe dream of a paradise on earth, whichwould establish a definitive order. Itenvisages men in their current imperfec-tion and does not imagine that this stateof things can change; it accepts, withMontaigne, the idea that their gardenremains forever imperfect. (2002: 236)

38ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Humanistic geography offers no specificdesign for an ideal cosmopolitan place, but itdoes offer a means of seeing the possibility of

individual and collective moral progresstoward the creation of more humane anddemocratic environments.


ReferencesAdams, P.C., Hoelscher, S. and Till, K. (eds) (2001a) Textures of Place: Exploring

Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Adams, P.C., Hoelscher, S. and Till, K. (2001b) ‘Place in context: rethinking humanist geo-

graphies’, in P.C. Adams, S. Hoelscher and K. Till (eds), Textures of Place: ExploringHumanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xii–xxxiii.

Barnes, T. and Gregory, D. (1997) ‘Agents, subjects and human geography’, in Readingsin Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry. London: Arnold, pp. 356–63.

Bondi, L. (1993) ‘Locating identity politics’, in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds), Place and thePolitics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 84–101.

Bunkse, E. (1981) ‘Humboldt and an aesthetic tradition in geography’, GeographicalReview, 71: 127–46.

Bunkse, E. (1990) ‘Saint-Exupéry’s geography lesson: art and science in the cultivation oflandscape values’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80: 96–108.

Buttimer, A. (1974) Values in Human Geography. Commission on College Geography24. Washington: Association of American Geographers.

Buttimer, A. (1976) ‘Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld’, Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 66: 277–92.

Cosgrove, D. (1989) ‘Historical considerations on humanism, historical materialism, andgeography’, in A. Kobayashi and S. Mackenzie (eds), Remaking Human Geography.Boston: Unwin, pp. 189–205.

Cosgrove, D. (2003) ‘Globalism and tolerance in early modern geography’, Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers, 93: 852–70.

Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Daniels, S. (1985) ‘Arguments for a humanistic geography’, in R. Johnston (ed.), The

Future of Geography. London: Methuen, pp. 143–58.Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1982) ‘Structural Marxism and human geography: a critical

assessment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 72: 30–59.Entrikin, J.N. (1976) ‘Contemporary humanism in geography’, Annals of the Association

of American Geographers, 66: 615–32.Entrikin, J.N. (2001) ‘Geographer as humanist’, in P.C. Adams, S. Hoelscher and K. Till

(eds), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, pp. 426–40.

Entrikin, J.N. (2002a) ‘Democratic place-making and multiculturalism’, GeografiskaAnnaler, 84B: 19–25.

Entrikin, J.N. (2002b) ‘Perfectibility and democratic place-making’, in R. Sack (ed.),Progress: Geographical Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 97–112.

Gregory, D. (1981) ‘Human agency and human geography’, Transactions of the Instituteof British Geographers, n.s. 6: 1–18.


Harris, C. (1978) ‘The historical mind and the practice of geography’, in D. Ley andM. Samuels (eds), Humanistic Geography: Progress and Problems. Chicago: Maroufa,pp. 123–37.

Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold.Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.Ley, D. (1977) ‘Social geography and the taken-for-granted world’, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, n.s. 2: 498–512.Ley, D. (1989) ‘Fragmentation, coherence, and limits to theory in human geography’, in

A. Kobayashi and S. Mackenzie (eds), Remaking Human Geography. Boston: Unwinand Hyman, pp. 227–44.

Ley, D. and Samuels, M. (eds) (1978) Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems.Chicago: Maroufa.

Lowenthal, D. (1961) ‘Geography, experience, and imagination: towards a geographicalepistemology’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51: 241–60.

Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

Pile, S. (1996) The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity. London:Routledge.

Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (1995) ‘Introduction’, in S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds), Mapping theSubject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge, pp. 1–12.

Proctor, J. and Smith, D. (eds) (1999) Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain.London: Routledge.

Relph, E. (1970) ‘An inquiry into the relations between phenomenology and geography’,Canadian Geographer, 14: 193–201.

Relph, E. (1977) ‘Humanism, phenomenology, and geography’, Annals of the Associationof American Geographers, 67: 177–83.

Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sack, R. (1997) Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and MoralConcern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sack, R. (2003) A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good. London: Routledge.Smith, D. (2000) Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.Todorov, T. (2002) Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.Tuan, Y.-F. (1976) ‘Humanistic geography’, Annals of the Association of American

Geographers, 66: 266–76.Tuan, Y.-F. (1984) Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.Tuan, Y.-F. (1986) The Good Life. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Tuan, Y.-F. (1989) Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress. Madison, WI:

University of Wisconsin Press.

40ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Tuan, Y.-F. (1990) ‘Realism and fantasy in art, history, and geography’, Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers, 80: 435–46.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1991a) ‘Language and the making of place: a narrative-descriptiveapproach’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81: 684–96.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1991b) ‘A view of geography’, Geographical Review, 81: 99–107.Tuan, Y.-F. (2003) ‘On human geography’, Daedalus, 132: 134–7.Wright, J. (1947) ‘Terrae incognitae: the place of imagination in geography’, Annals of the

Association of American Geographers, 37: 1–15.



FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE,RELATION, AND CONSTRUCTION

Deborah P. Dixon and John Paul Jones III

4

Introduction

Feminist geography is concerned first andforemost with improving women’s lives byunderstanding the sources, dynamics, andspatiality of women’s oppression, and withdocumenting strategies of resistance. Inaccomplishing this objective, feminist geo-graphy has proven itself time and again as asource for innovative thought and practiceacross all of human geography. The work offeminist geographers has transformed researchinto everyday social activities such as wageearning, commuting, maintaining a family(however defined), and recreation, as well asmajor life events, such as migration, procre-ation, and illness. It has propelled changes indebates over which basic human needs suchas shelter, education, food, and health care arediscussed, and it has fostered new insightsinto global and regional economic transfor-mations, government policies, and settlementpatterns. It has also had fundamental theoret-ical impacts upon how geographers: under-take research into both social and physicalprocesses; approach the division between the-ory and practice; and think about the pur-pose of creating geographic knowledge andthe role of researchers in that process. Finally,feminist geography has helped to revolution-ize the research methods used in geographicresearch.

Feminist geography, however, cannotneatly be summed up according to a uniformset of substantive areas, theoretical frameworks,

and their associated methodologies: hencethe plural ‘geographies’ in the title of thischapter. To facilitate our survey of feministgeography, we draw out three main lines ofresearch. Each of these holds the concept ofgender to be central to the analysis, but theydiffer in their understanding of the term.Under the heading of gender as difference,we first consider those forms of feministgeographic analysis that address the spatialdimensions of the different life experiencesof men and women across a host of cultural,economic, political, and environmental arenas.Second, we point to those analyses thatunderstand gender as a social relation. Here,the emphasis shifts from studying men andwomen per se to understanding the socialrelations that link men and women in com-plex ways. In its most hierarchical form, theserelations are realized as patriarchy – a spatiallyand historically specific social structure thatworks to dominate women and children.A third line of inquiry examines the ways inwhich gender as a social construction has beenimbued with particular meanings, both posi-tive and negative. Not only are individuals‘gendered’ as masculine or feminine as a formof identification, but also a wealth of phe-nomena, from landscapes to nation-states, aresimilarly framed. In practice, there is quite abit of overlap among each of these lines ofresearch. Yet it is still useful to make a dis-tinction in so far as each body of work lendsitself to a particular set of research questionsand associated data and analyses.


Recovering the Geographies of Gender

Before we get started, it would be helpful toset a context for our survey of these threetheoretical perspectives. This involves think-ing about the discipline’s traditional male-centeredness,which we can categorize in threeways: institutional discrimination, substantiveoversights, and ‘masculinist’ ways of thinkingand writing. We begin by noting that geo-graphy, in both the US and Europe,was formedout of a late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century academic setting that was highlyexclusionary in terms of class, race/ethnicity,and gender. Early universities were dominatedin the main by upper-class white men.WithinAnglo contexts, a small number of womenacademics were primarily concentrated in theteaching and helping professions (e.g.nursing).Few were to be found in the disciplines fromwhich modern geography was established,such as geology and cartography. During thenineteenth and well into the mid twentiethcenturies, a crude form of biological stereo-typing underlay not only conceptions of whatwomen were able to achieve intellectually, butalso their physical capacity. This was despitethe fact that many women in the early years ofthe discipline – Mary Kingsley is a celebratedexample – were engaged in intellectually stim-ulating and physically rigorous explorations oftheir own. Moreover, women also played acentral role in educating geographers withinteacher training institutions.

It was out of this broader, academicclimate that ‘expert’ societies arose so as toestablish geography as a specialized, intellec-tual endeavor.The goal of these societies wasto define the discipline as a science (as opposedto lore) by debating theory, the kinds ofphenomena to be investigated, and appropri-ate methodologies, and to work within uni-versities to establish programs at both theundergraduate and graduate levels. The twomost influential of these, the Association ofAmerican Geographers in the US and the

Royal Geographical Society in the UK, werenot open, as they are today, to anyone inter-ested in promoting geographical knowledge.Instead, their members first had to be nomi-nated and then elected.These and other rulesand practices had a filtering effect on mem-bership by specifying who was considered alegitimate scientist. For example, the earlyconstitution of the Association of AmericanGeographers reserved full membership forthose who had previously published originalresearch. Yet with few women included ingraduate training, most women writers pub-lished their research in a style and in venuesnot deemed scholarly. Not surprising, then, isthe fact that of the 48 original members of theAssociation of American Geographers, estab-lished in 1904, only two were women: EllenChurchill Semple and Martha Krug Genthe(who, among the entire original membership,held the only PhD in geography, obtained inGermany).

All told, the male-oriented culture ofthese academic societies and university depart-ments had a significant negative impact onthe number and status of women in the dis-cipline. Many women reported a range ofobstacles and difficulties in negotiating thefield, from a benign paternalism to outrightmisogyny, and from tokenism to blatantsexual discrimination.The resistance of malegeographers to women conducting indepen-dent fieldwork lasted well into the 1950s:geography’s expeditionary legacy continuedto lead some to a nostalgic belief that only‘stout hearted men’ were capable of suchresearch (sometimes referred to as ‘muddyboots’ geography). Overall, geography’sculture offered few opportunities for con-structive engagement to the vast majority ofcollege educated women, as evidenced by themuch larger proportion of women found inthe humanities and some cognate social sci-ences, such as anthropology and sociology.

Bearing this institutional discriminationin mind, it is not surprising to find substantive

FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCEÿÿ43


oversights in which male-dominated activitiesconstituted the norm of geographic research.This presumption is strikingly revealed in thegender-coded language geographers haveused in their research. In reading the litera-ture produced by geographers up to andincluding the 1970s,what appears to be a meresemantic peccadillo – as in the ‘Man–Land’ tra-dition or the assumption of ‘economic man’ –actually reveals an underlying assumptionabout what constitutes primary human activ-ities and who constitute economic, political,cultural, and environmental agents (who, forexample, makes history and geography in thebook, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of theEarth?). So blatantly sexist is some of thiswriting that geographers’ citing their pre-decessors today often liberally pepper theirquotations with ‘[sic]’ – a term used to indi-cate that what has just preceded is reproducedexactly as written.Though some may regardthis practice as pedantic, it does allow con-temporary writers the opportunity to expli-citly distance themselves from sexist (or racist,etc.) language.

More significant than the stylistic substitu-tion of ‘man’ for ‘human’ are the ways inwhich putatively male activities have been theprimary focus of analysis across each of geo-graphy’s traditional objects of inquiry, be theselandscapes, regions, spatial variations, or theenvironment. As many feminist geographershave pointed out, the discipline’s prioritizationof traditionally male, productive activities hasin one way or another worked to marginalizethe study of women’s lives. It has meant, forexample, that geographers have spent moretime examining steel manufacturing than, say,day care. We can see this bias reproduced ina wide range of substantive research areas.Traditional cultural geography, for example,was concerned to evaluate how different cul-tures made use of the earth and its resourcesin the process of making a living and con-structing built environments in accord withthese demands.Traditional regional geography

focused in turn on a complex of interrelationsthat gave a specific and interactive character toareal divisions, but here the categories to beintegrated mirror the list of productive activi-ties listed above – the only significant addi-tions being the physical environment, thedistribution of population (typically distin-guished by ethnicity only), and the (largelymale) arena of formal politics. And, in theperiod of spatial science prior to the develop-ment of a social relevance perspective, locationtheory took this abstraction of the productiveactivities of society to its furthest extent,deploying the assumption of economic man inan idealized space and tracing its implicationsfor the distribution of economic activities (asin assessments of the models of von Thünen,Weber, Lösch, Alonso, and Christaller, as wellas various versions of the gravity model).

As a result, those geographers interested inworking on activities such as childraising, edu-cation, neighborhood organization, and socialwelfare (i.e. activities known as ‘social repro-duction’ as opposed to productive economicones) did so in a vacuum.Thus, though thereexisted specialized study groups within Anglo-American academic societies devoted totransportation, industry, economic develop-ment, and land use, specialty groups devoted togender, children, education, and sexuality aremore recent phenomena.And at the interdisci-plinary level, the focus on production relativeto reproduction within geography meant thatspatially minded social scientists who wantedto examine, say, the family, health care, or socialwelfare,would have to look to other disciplinesmore sympathetic to their study (e.g. sociology,social work) for their graduate training, therebydiminishing the scope and ultimately theacademic significance of the field.

Completing our discussion on the silenceof gender is the claim that, prior to the arrivalof feminist geography, the discipline operatedwith what is termed a masculinist epistemology.This epistemology is based on a way of know-ing the world (through universalism), framing

44ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


the world (through compartmentalization), andrepresenting the world (through objectivity).Universalism is the belief that there exists a‘god’s-eye’ position from which the worldcan be surveyed in its totality. Such a positionlifts one out of the messy, complicating factsof class, race/ethnicity, national origin, politi-cal persuasion, and, of course, gender andsexuality, which would otherwise ‘bias’ theinvestigative process.Yet, as feminist researchershave pointed out, the attempt to transcendsuch facts of life is ultimately driven by thebelief that they could and should be transcended.Such goals carry an air of omniscience andinfallibility, which cements the role of the sci-entist and ‘his’ position of authority.

Compartmentalization relies on the use ofrigidly fixed boundaries to comprehend thequalities and characteristics of phenomena,such as nature and culture, male and female,plant and animal.The rationale for this obses-sion, wherein everything has its place, is rigor,a stance that guards against any ambiguity thatmight undermine scientific analysis of causeand effect. Feminist critics of excessive com-partmentalization point to the homogenizingeffects of taxonomies, which result in a ten-dency to overlook difference within and acrossresearch objects. In highlighting difference,feminists focused less on the objects containedwithin categories than on how these categorieswere formed in the first instance.This led fem-inists to develop relational as opposed to dis-crete understandings of phenomena, in whichthey argued that objects were defined not bytheir supposedly intrinsic characteristics (e.g.biology) but by interrelations within the socialworld (e.g. gender divisions of labor).

Related to both universalism and com-partmentalization is a masculinist strategyof representing the world as an objectiveobserver. To achieve this, the researcher pur-posively excludes any trace of their ownthoughts and feelings by adopting a thirdperson, passive tense style that is stripped ofself-referencing, hesitation, emotive phrasing,

or rhetorical flourishes. Such writing attemptsto use clear prose that can be commonlyunderstood, even while invoking the neces-sary technical terminology. Marked adher-ence to this mode of communication assuresother scholars that the research reported hasnot been biased by personal or societal influ-ences. Moreover, it is assumed to enableresearchers to systematically compare findingsin a manner untainted by individual presenta-tion styles, thereby bolstering the belief thatobjectivity contributes to a growing stock ofscientific knowledge. Underlying this assump-tion, however, is a belief in a ‘common’ frameof reference wherein everyone does indeedclearly understand what is being said. Such astyle also serves to distance the author fromany responsibility for the reception of her orhis work: even though they may recognizethat some research could be used towardsocially undesirable ends, authors adopting thisstance ultimately affirm that science is inher-ently apolitical.

These dimensions of masculinist epistemo-logy are not the subject of feminist debateand critique alone, for scholars have longdebated the advisability and possibility of con-ducting distanced research. For example, thefield of hermeneutics, the origin of which liesin the exegesis of the Bible, explicitly dealswith the complicated role of researchers inrelation to their research contexts.The contri-bution of feminist thought has been to recog-nize that universalism, compartmentalization,and objectivity have traditionally been associ-ated with male faculties of sense and reason,whilst their oppositions – particularism, rela-tionality, and subjectivity – have been consti-tuted as the domain of unreasoning, femalefaculties driven by mere sensibility. A majorarea of feminist research, therefore,has involvedcharting the ways and means by which thisgendering of epistemology took place, and anassessment of its repercussions in terms of themarginalization of women within and beyondacademia.



In an ironic turn, therefore, the discipline’straditional disregard for gender has providedresearch material, as well as a professional chal-lenge, for feminist geographers. Movingbeyond mere critique, feminist geographershave produced an alternative, feminist epi-stemology that not only transforms how geo-graphy’s accepted objects of analysis – regions,landscapes, places, etc. – are to be researched,but has brought to light a range of otherobjects of analysis, such as the body. Today,feminist approaches intersect with all ofhuman geography’s domains. Feminist geogra-phy spans traditional geographic foci in devel-opment, landscapes, and the environment,contributes to what has been labeled the ‘new’regional, cultural, and economic geographies,and has realized numerous connections toother fields, especially philosophy, English,cultural studies, anthropology, postcolonialstudies, economics, and sociology, amongothers.As a result of these developments, fem-inist geography now constitutes a fully fledgedsubdisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavor,complete with a specialized journal, Gender,Place and Culture. In the following sections,we draw out three theoretical approachestoward gender that have emerged over the past30 years, and discuss how each has made, andcontinues to make, its own contribution togeographic research.

Gender as Difference

The geographic concepts of location, distance,connectivity, spatial variation, place, contextand scale have all been enriched through thelens of feminist theory, which focuses on thedifference that gender makes to a host of socialprocesses. Feminist geographers transform thequestion, ‘Where does work take place?’, forinstance, by the more targeted one, ‘Whoworks where?’ This more specific question canhelp researchers better understand the spatialdimensions of gender divisions of labor and

their effects on women’s economic wellbeing.Likewise, studies that look at connectivityhave been enriched by an examination of thegendered character of the subjects undertak-ing the activity, whether in migration, com-muting, or communication.

As part of a project’s research design,researchers often separately measure for menand women variables such as unemploymentrates, income, and educational levels, typicallycollected across geographic units. The differ-ential spatial experiences of men and womencan then be analyzed. Comparing the spatialvariation of women’s and men’s unemploy-ment rates, for example, can yield insights intothe particular processes that contribute tothe economic marginalization of women asopposed to men.With the understanding thatthese processes may not operate equally for allwomen across space, moreover, researchers canraise questions of place context – a term usedto refer to the combination of cultural, eco-nomic, political, and environmental dimen-sions that give character to a particular setting.A focus on place has researchers address how aparticular context influences women’s lives,and can be the basis for cross-context com-parisons among women for any number ofresearch problems. For example, one mightfind that the degree and type of women’spolitical involvement in different places areinfluenced by contextual factors such as thegender division of labor in local economies,the quality of education in the localities, or theseverity of local environmental problems.

An emphasis on gender as difference alsoenhances studies employing different scales ofanalysis. Key here is the fact that processesinfluencing spatial patterns of women’s liveswork across different scales, with some oper-ating at relatively local levels and others moreextensively. In examining women’s economicviability, for example, researchers would finduseful an investigation of the presence of localsocial networks that partly influence their jobsearches; at the same time, they cannot neglect

46ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


how the place context within which womenare seeking employment is itself positionedrelative to global capital flows, which willaffect the type and availability of employ-ment, as well as the local gender division oflabor.

Still another avenue for feminist geo-graphic research on difference can be foundunder the heading of sense of place, whichrefers to the perceptions people have of par-ticular places and natural and built environ-ments more generally. Studies of sense ofplace emphasize psychosocial influences uponone’s interpretations, evaluations, and prefer-ences regarding places or their representationin one medium or another. Such studies areoften based upon the collection of primarydata, and are therefore particularly wellsuited for asking questions of difference, sincethe researcher can purposively include bothmen and women respondents. One might, forexample, compare men’s and women’s mentalmaps of a local neighborhood, using the detailtherein to help answer questions about theirperception of dangerous and safe zones acrossthe study area.The range of places for whichmen and women respondents might beexpected to differ is large, from classrooms,wilderness areas, and spaces of the home,to sports venues, drinking establishments, andshopping malls.This knowledge has practicalrelevancy in that it identifies places that areenabling for women, and might offer guide-lines for the construction of environments thatare non-threatening.

By introducing gender difference into allmanner of geographic concepts, feministgeography has initiated new lines of inquiryin geography, thereby redressing the researchimbalances noted earlier in this chapter.Recallthat the theorization of these spheres has tradi-tionally marked a separation between presump-tively male-oriented productive economicactivities and female-oriented reproductiveactivities. Feminist geographers of differencehave made two significant contributions with

respect to this framework. First, they havebrought to light the role of women in theeconomy by noting, for example, the contri-bution of First World women who work insuburban back-offices devoted to processingcredit applications, and that of Third Worldwomen whose labor in branch manufactur-ing plants makes possible the production oflow-wage consumer items, such as electronics.Second, feminist geographers have expandedsubstantive domains, including new researchon women’s roles in neighborhood associa-tions, household survival strategies in ThirdWorld countries, inequalities in the provisionof day care facilities, and efforts to eliminateenvironmental pollution and toxic waste haz-ards through grassroots organizing.To uncoverthese geographies, feminist geographers havebecome leaders in the collection of primary,field-based data, precisely because such dataare necessary to reveal women’s everydayspatial experiences. Though such methodo-logies as interviews, focus groups, ethno-graphies, participant observation, and surveysare more time consuming than simply down-loading data from secondary sources, such as thecensus, they are necessary to bring to light thecomplexities of those experiences.

Gender as a Social Relation

In turning their attention to gender relations,feminist geographers shift their focus frommen and women as discrete objects of inquiry,which, as we noted above, is itself a mas-culinist formulation, to the structured inter-connections that routinely intertwine theirlife experiences. Patriarchy is one of the keystructures studied by feminist geographers.The term ‘patriarchy’ describes the system-atized exploitation, domination, and subordi-nation – in short, oppression – of women andchildren through gender relations. It is heldtogether through language, as when menspeak loudest, longest, and last, and is given



form through rules of behavior and legalstatutes that stamp in gendered terms whattypes of activities are desirable, appropriate,expected, or sanctioned, and that specify, for-mally or informally, who maintains access tomaterial resources. Thus, patriarchy is legiti-mated and perpetuated by a host of socialnorms and moral rules – as when, for exam-ple, women ‘naturally’ assume the major bur-den of raising children.The relations that linkthe lives of men and women take place withinand between a variety of specific sites, such asthe family, school, and church, each of whichis infused with patriarchy, the effects of whichrange from a patronizing paternalism to out-right violence.

Research into specific examples of patri-archal relations is complicated by the recogni-tion that this structure is always socially,historically, and geographically specific. Inother words, there is no single patriarchy, but amultitude of variations. This variation ensuesin large part from the way patriarchy intersectswith other kinds of social structures, and oneimportant line of inquiry in feminist geo-graphy has been to study the intersection ofpatriarchal and capitalist social relations. ForMarxist or socialist feminists, capitalism is thekey structure in modern life: through it onecan apprehend the ways in which labor isexpropriated from the working class by thosecapitalists who control the means of produc-tion. These feminists study the way capitalistsocial relations are formed in conjunctionwith patriarchal gender relations, the result ofwhich are variations in women’s economicposition. In addition, they note that capitalismhas extended its power into the home, result-ing in a class of unpaid women whose house-hold labor is expropriated by the male wageearner and, by extension, his employer. Forthese feminists, capitalism determines the spe-cific form that patriarchy takes. It is the com-plex and differentiated intersection of theserelations that gives us varieties of women’sexploitation across the globe.

In radical feminism, by contrast,patriarchy is prioritized. These scholars notethat, historically speaking, patriarchy predatescapitalism, and facilitated its emergence withinspecific sociohistorical contexts. These femi-nists ground their prioritization not in the con-trol over labor, but in men’s control overwomen’s bodies – a control exercised in sexualrelations and childrearing, and maintainedthrough patriarchal ideology and violence.Still other theorists have attempted to create arapprochement between these positions, arguingthat the two structures, while analytically dis-tinct, are co-present in everyday practice. Assuch, they can be studied as mutually enablingstructures in a wide variety of contexts.

While socialist and radical feminists weredebating the theoretical primacy of patri-archy and capitalism, black, Latina, and ThirdWorld feminists developed extensive cri-tiques of the Eurocentricity of these debates,drawing attention to the extent to whichwomen’s lives are also indelibly racialized andcolonized. These feminists have pointed tothe global diversity of patriarchal and classrelations and their intersection with otherglobal-to-local structures. Still another struc-tural relation contextualizing patriarchy isheteronormativity, a concept developed byqueer theorists. This term describes thewidespread assumption that heterosexuality isthe natural form of sexual relations, whilehomosexuality is an aberration. Like patri-archy and other structures, heteronormativ-ity is a social relation with its own language,norms, and practices. As a consequence ofthese arguments, contemporary researchundertaken to illuminate the structuraldynamics and locational specificity of patri-archy needs to contend not only with classrelations under capitalism, but minimally alsothose of race, colonial history, and sexuality.Like some feminists researching gender asdifference, those who study gender as a socialrelation often rely upon research strategiesthat involve ‘talking to women’ through

48ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


interviews, focus groups, and the like. But inaddition, they are equally likely to pay atten-tion to the subtle ways that patriarchy, class,race, nation, and sexuality are formed andperpetuated through everyday forms of rep-resentation, including political rhetoric (e.g.speeches, policy documents), media imagery(e.g. film and video, magazines, the Internet),and bodily adornment and comportment(e.g. dress, mannerisms, habits).

Gender as a Social Construction

Social constructivists are interested in the waysin which ‘discourses’ establish distinctions – ordifferences – between individuals and groups,made and natural objects, types of experience,and aspects of meanings.They argue that noneof these are naively given to us as unmediatedparts of reality; instead, all are framed throughcategorizations that enable us to comprehendthem. In this view, people, objects, experi-ences, and meanings have no intrinsic mean-ing until their qualities and boundaries havebeen framed in discourse. We use the term‘discourse’ to refer to particular framings, mostof which rely upon one or another binaryopposition, such as nature/culture, male/female, individual/society, objective/subjective,and orderly/chaotic. Discursive constructionrefers to the social process by which thesecategories are produced and filled with objectsand meanings.Though discourses are enabledand reproduced through language, to con-structivists ‘discourse’ is a term more compli-cated than its everyday use as ‘mere words’, forit refers not only to the processes of categor-ization (see above) but also to everyday socialpractices – from raising children to dancing –that, like language, are also imbued withmeaning and hence also signify somethingabout the world.Through discourse we cometo understand where things fit in the world,literally and figuratively.We also come to com-prehend the relationships among categories

that have been established.And, discourses tellus a great deal about what is appropriate andwhat is inappropriate, what is valued and whatis devalued, and what is possible and what isimpossible.

Applied to feminism, discursive construc-tion points to gender codings as key elementsin establishing difference and policing cat-egories. Feminist geographers working withtheories of social construction of gender, forexample, are interested in the ways in whichdiscursive categories, particularly male/femaleand masculine/feminine, are brought intoplay at specific times and in specific places inorder to establish spaces of exclusion andinclusion. Drawing on all feminists’ concernfor difference, feminist social constructivistsalso examine how these explicitly genderedcategories seep into other socially constructedones, such as ‘race’ and ‘sexuality’,‘production’and ‘reproduction’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, andso on.

Take for example the concept of ‘male-ness’. To constructivists, this is not a term thatrefers to a naturally given object with essen-tial characteristics. It instead describes a socialconstruct, formed out of ideas concerningwhat it is to be male, as opposed to what it isto be female.This binary construct is deter-mined and maintained by a gender-specificlanguage about people’s beliefs, actions, andqualities. Thus, words such as ‘caring’, ‘ten-derness’, and ‘empathetic’ have different gen-dered connotations than words such as ‘stoic’,‘noble’, and ‘boisterous’. Importantly, themeaning, significance, and social value ofthese terms are not fixed, but vary from onecontext to another: hence, tenderness couldconceivably take on a masculine quality. Atthe same time, however, the connotationsamong these terms are socially determined,and hence linked to dominant forms ofpower (which can be defined as the abilityto construct and maintain difference throughlanguage and practices). Finally, once male-ness has been granted the status of ‘normal’,



the social relations that ensue – such aspatriarchy – may also be regarded as naturaland, hence, enduring.

Perhaps nowhere is discursive analysismore illuminating and yet controversial thanin the analysis of sexual difference. Someconstructivists see such difference as anotherexample of discourse, one rooted in biologi-cal categorizations of physicality, from shapeand form to genes and voice.They argue thatbiological and other discourses continuallyimpact the body, through ideas and practicessurrounding medical protocols, labor prac-tices, legal statutes, and reproductive capabil-ities. The discourses that circulate in thesedomains are so encoded on bodies that weseldom take time to think about the everydayreinforcements that buttress male/female dif-ference. (Think, for example, about the dis-cursive work silently undertaken in publicbuildings, with their separate bathrooms formen and women.) These insights have ledsome feminists to question the very founda-tion of the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’: theysee biological discourses as creating the con-ditions by which we ‘perform’ our sex andgender. Others accept biological differencesas ‘prediscursive’, but are equally attuned tothe ways in which all aspects of the body,including the mind, are gendered, raced, andsexualized through their embeddedness in dis-course. Thus, while we cannot lift ourselvesoutside socially derived significations that struc-ture our understandings of male and female,there is at base a materiality upon which thesesignifications are attached (even if we cannotreally know or experience that materialityoutside discourse).

Given either emphasis on the construc-tion of gender, how do geographicallyinformed constructivist analyses proceed?The primary goal of most such analyses is tounderstand how sexed and gendered mean-ings are at work in all aspects of everydayspatial life, policing what is thought anddelimiting places and identities.To undertake

such work, feminist geographers look first tothose sites from which knowledge concern-ing gender is articulated, such as schools,churches, media outlets, the home and gov-ernment agencies, and consider how thesesites collect information, rework it as know-ledge, and then proceed to disseminate thatknowledge through particular networks.How, for example, do the ‘real’ life stories inteen magazines configure and reproduce asocially and spatially specific audience (e.g.‘white mallrats’)? How does housing designboth reflect and reproduce ideas about whatkinds of (gendered) activities occur where,and by whom? How has the teaching ofgeography within schools helped to constructit as a primarily male discipline? Second, fem-inist geographers look to the geography ofdiscourses through which people are gen-dered, as well as to the other discourses theyintersect, such as race, nationality, ethnicity,sexuality, nature, and so on. What complexgendered codings, for example, lie at theintersection of the term ‘Mother Nature’, andwhat undercurrents ensue for how the envi-ronment is ‘managed’? How is it that a daycare center is regarded as a traditional work-site for domesticated women, while a gardenallotment is considered an escapist landscapefor married (but not gay) men? What com-plex gendered and raced meanings accom-pany partitions of space such as ‘ghettos’,‘working-class areas’, and ‘farmsteads’? Evenentire countries, such as Australia and France,tend to be gendered differently in popularmedia (e.g. as ‘laddish’ vs ‘sensualist’). Thirdand finally, one can consider how the every-day operation of these discourses can affect aform of ‘discursive violence’, foisting ontopeople an identity they may not wish toadhere to, and rendering other forms of iden-tity that do not fit into the accepted cat-egories as aberrant or unnatural. This isespecially true when bodies or identities aremarked as ‘queer’ and made to feel uncom-fortable in what is largely a heterosexually

50ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


coded built environment. In all of these sortsof analyses, feminist social constructivists turnto qualitative methodologies to trace the sub-tle plays of discursive constructions in all sortsof representations, including not only those ofthe media and everyday speech, but those inthe built environment itself.

Indeed, the traditional concept of the‘field’ itself – whether the home, the work-place, the urban neighborhood, or the remotevillage – has been opened up considerably byfeminist geographers. Classically, in geograph-ical research, the researcher remains mysteri-ous, distant and silent while the field subjectdiscloses more and more information: in thiscase, the visibility of the researched obscuresthe presence of the researcher. In contrast,feminists emphasize that, like her or hisobjects of analysis, the researching subject islikewise constituted – or positioned – by gen-der relations of social power. Gender relationsform part of a broader, social context withinwhich research takes place – from the indi-vidual biographies and social structures influ-encing both the geographer and her researchsubjects, to the subdiscipline of geographywithin which she works, and on to the fund-ing agencies, the universities, and the placecontexts, both global and local, that informand bracket the work. This, then, is the new‘feminist field’: a fluid, complex, and spatiallystretched set of relations that bear little resem-blance to older notions of expert geographersresearching people in particular places.

By Way of Conclusion: SuggestedReading

In this concluding section, we offer a briefroadmap through some texts and articles thathave been important in the development offeminist geography.We also point to a few clas-sic debates and emerging lines of inquiry.Webegin with the note that feminist geographyexerted a compelling critique of geography as

a male-oriented discipline in the mid 1970s.Mildred Berman’s (1974) article on sexualdiscrimination within the academy wasmatched by Alison Hayford’s (1974) assess-ment of the wider, historical ‘place’ of women.Later work by Linda McDowell (1979) andJanice Monk and Susan Hanson (1982)expanded on the substantive oversights andmasculinist presumptions of geographicresearch. Both Hanson and Monk were laterelected President of the Association ofAmerican Geographers (two of only fivewomen elected). Susan Hanson’s (1992)address challenged geographers to considerthe commonalities between feminism andgeography and to transform both disciplines.Janice Monk’s (2004) presidential address tothe Association takes a historical approach torecover the work lives of women geographerswho taught and practiced during long periodsof professional exclusion.Two years after Monkand Hanson’s (1982) essay, the Institute ofBritish Geographers’ Women and GeographyStudy Group published Geography and Gender:An Introduction to Feminist Geography (1984).A ground-breaking text in many ways,Geography and Gender focused attention onthe specificities of women’s experiences,within and beyond the academy. Studentsinterested in a feminist examination of thehistory of the discipline should also read thearticle by Mona Domosh (1991), as well asAlison Blunt’s (1994) analysis of nineteenth-century explorer and writer Mary Kingsley.

The 1980s and early 1990s saw the emer-gence of a large body of work on the inter-section between gender, work, and space.A key early text in this regard is by LindaMcDowell and Doreen Massey (1984); theyhistoricize the geographies produced by theintersection of gender and class relations.A couple of years later, the relative role of patri-archy vs capitalism in explaining women’sexploitation became the topic of a lively the-oretical exchange in the journal Antipode.The radical vs socialist feminist division is



clearest in the essays by Jo Foord and NickyGregson (1986) and Linda McDowell (1986),and in the response by Gregson and Foord(1987). Readers might also want to consultSylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990),which offers a good sociological accountof patriarchy in capitalist societies. DoreenMassey’s book Space, Place and Gender (1994)collects her works through the mid 1990sand gives insights into one of feminist eco-nomic geography’s most original thinkers.Another good choice for those interested inwomen and work is Susan Hanson and GerryPratt’s Gender, Work and Space (1995), NickyGregson and Michelle Lowe’s Servicing theMiddle Classes (1994), and Kim England’sWho Will Mind the Baby? Geographies ofChildcare and Working Mothers (1996).

In the 1980s and 1990s, geographersbegan to engage academic debates surround-ing postmodernism (see Chapter 9), one keyvector of which was the relationship betweenthis then-new area of thought and feminism.Interested readers might follow debates inLiz Bondi (1991), Gerry Pratt (1993), andJ.-K. Gibson-Graham (1994). Another keydebate circulating through postmodernismand feminism was sparked by David Harvey’sThe Condition of Postmodernity (1989). Hispolitical economic analysis of culture underlate capitalism was roundly criticized byDoreen Massey (1991) and Rosalyn Deutsche(1991). Reading this along with Harvey’s(1992) rejoinder is helpful, but a better senseof his thinking on the intersection betweenclass and gender can be found in Chapter 12of Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference(1997).

Especially since the mid 1990s, feministgeographers have produced a substantialamount of work at the intersection of bodies,identities, and space/place.An early edited col-lection of important works is found in NancyDuncan’s BodySpace (1996). Other feministreadings of bodies can be found in Heidi Nastand Steve Pile’s edited volume Places through

the Body (1998), in Ruth Butler and HesterParr’s Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies ofIllness, Impairment and Disability (1999), inElizabeth Teather’s Embodied Geographies:Space, Bodies and Rites of Passage (1999), and inselected chapters of Linda McDowell’s CapitalCulture: Gender at Work in the City (1997a).Also see Robyn Longhurst’s Bodies: ExploringFluid Boundaries (2000) and Pile’s The Body andthe City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity(1996). Some of the essays in the above col-lections were harbingers of a shift towardqueer theory in geography. An early book inthis area was the edited collection by DavidBell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire (1995).Michael Brown unpacks the geographies ofthe ‘closet’ in Closet Space: Geographies ofMetaphor from the Body to the Globe (2000).Finally, geographic approaches to masculinityhave appeared in works by Peter Jackson(1991), Steve Pile (1994), and Richard Phillips(1997).

There is a wealth of feminist research onthe interplay of gender, nature, and develop-ment (including ‘post’ or ‘anti’ developmenttheory). Readers might consult the collec-tion edited by Janet Momsen and VivianKinnaird (1993), as well as work by CathyNesmith and Sarah Radcliffe (1993) andRadcliffe (1994). A good collection of workin feminist political ecology is by DianneRocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, andEsther Wangari (1996). Feminist geographershave also drawn on postcolonial theoriza-tions to better understand the global con-struction of gender, race, nation, and class.Students should consult Alison Blunt andGillian Rose’s edited volume Writing Womenand Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies(1994) and Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan’sPostcolonial Geographies (2003).

There are a number of good sources toturn to for feminist research methods ingeography. A 1993 collection in The CanadianGeographer traced the contours of feministepistemology alongside in-depth qualitative

52ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


research methods. Heidi Nast’s editedcollection, ‘Women in the “Field”’, appearedin The Professional Geographer (1994). Many ofthe articles offer interesting and introspectiveexaminations of feminist methods as theyplayed out in the work of the assembledgeographers. Other good assessments of the‘field’ are by Cindi Katz (1992) and AnnOberhauser (1997). As discussed above, femi-nist research methods are typically qualitative(e.g. Nash, 1996), but there has been a livelydebate on the role of quantitative methods infeminist research (Kwan, 2002). See the col-lection in The Professional Geographer (1995),which appeared under the heading, ‘ShouldWomen Count?’ Pamela Moss’s edited collec-tion Feminist Geography in Practice (2002),as well as the volume by Melanie Limb andClaire Dwyer (2001), offer students a wealthof direction in the pursuit of feministresearch.The 2003 special issue on ‘Practicesin Feminist Research’ in ACME: AnInternational E-Journal for Critical Geographiesconsiders what holds feminist methodo-logy together as a distinct approach given the

spread of critical methodologies withingeography more generally. Students interestedin praxis should consult the collection inAntipode (1995), as well as essays by VickyLawson and Lynn Staeheli (1995) and SusanSmith (2002).

Thorough overviews of feminist geo-graphy can be found in Linda McDowell andJo Sharp’s A Feminist Glossary of HumanGeography (2000), as well as in collections byLinda McDowell (1997b; 1999) and JohnPaul Jones III, Heidi Nast, and Susan Roberts(1997). Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography(1993) provides an extended, close reading ofgeography’s masculinist bias, largely as readthrough the field’s twentieth-century history.The conclusion attempts to rethink space byreconfiguring a number of key binaries thathave influenced thinking in geography.Students would be well advised to peruse thecurrent and back issues of Gender, Place andCulture, while the online bibliography offeminist geographic research found at http://www.emporia.edu/socsci/fembib/is an excel-lent source of material.


ReferencesACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2003) ‘Practices in Feminist

Research’, collection, 2(1): 57–111.Antipode (1995) ‘Symposium on Feminist Participatory Research’, collection, 27: 71–101.Bell, David and Valentine, Gill (eds) (1995) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality.

London: Routledge.Berman, Mildred (1974) ‘Sex discrimination in geography: the case of Ellen Churchill

Semple’, The Professional Geographer, 26: 8–11.Blunt, Alison (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley in West Africa.

New York: Guilford.Blunt, Alison and McEwan, Cheryl (2003) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum.Blunt, Alison and Rose, Gillian (1994). Writing Women and Space: Colonial and

Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford.Bondi, Liz (1991) ‘Feminism, postmodernism, and geography: space for women?’,

Antipode, 22: 156–67.Brown, Michael (2000) Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the

Globe. New York: Routledge.Butler, Ruth and Parr, Hester (eds) (1999). Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of

Illness, Impairment and Disability. London: Routledge.


Canadian Geographer (1993) ‘Feminism as method’, collection, 37: 48–61.Deutsche, Rosalyn (1991) ‘Boy’s town’, Environment and Planning D: Society and

Space, 9: 5–30.Domosh, Mona (1991) ‘Towards a feminist historiography of geography’, Transactions of

the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 95–104.Duncan, Nancy (ed.) (1996) BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and

Sexuality. London: Routledge.England, Kim (ed.) (1996) Who Will Mind the Baby? Geographies of Childcare and

Working Mothers. London: Routledge.Foord, Jo and Gregson, Nicky (1986) ‘Patriarchy: towards a reconceptualization’,

Antipode, 18: 186–211.Gibson-Graham, J.-K. (1994) ‘Stuffed if I know! Reflections on post-modern feminist

research’, Gender, Place and Culture, 1: 205–24.Gregson, Nicky and Foord, Jo (1987) ‘Patriarchy: comments on critics’, Antipode, 19:

371–5.Gregson, Nicky and Lowe, Michelle (1994) Servicing the Middle Classes: Class, Gender,

and Waged Domestic Labor in Contemporary Britain. New York: Routledge.Hanson, Susan (1992) ‘Geography and feminism: worlds in collision?’, Annals of the

Association of American Geographers, 82: 569–86.Hanson, Susan and Pratt, Gerry (1995) Gender, Work and Space. London: Routledge.Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Blackwell.Harvey, David (1992) ‘Postmodern morality plays’, Antipode, 24: 300–26.Harvey, David (1997) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. London:

Blackwell.Hayford, Alison (1974) ‘The geography of women: an historical introduction’, Antipode,

6: 1–19.Jackson, Peter (1991) ‘The cultural politics of masculinity: towards a social geography’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 199–213.Jones, John Paul III, Nast, Heidi and Roberts, Susan (eds) (1997) Thresholds in

Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham, MD:Rowman and Littlefield.

Katz, Cindi (1992) ‘All the world is staged: intellectuals and the projects of ethnography’,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10: 495–510.

Kwan, Mei-Po (2002) ‘Feminist visualization: re-envisioning GIS as a method in feministgeographic research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92:645–61.

Lawson, Vicky and Staeheli, Lynn (1995) ‘Feminism, praxis and human geography’,Geographical Analysis, 27: 321–38.

Limb, Melanie and Dwyer, Claire (2001) Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers:Issues and Debates. New York: Arnold.

Longhurst, Robyn (2000) Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge.Massey, Doreen (1991) ‘Flexible sexism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and

Space, 9: 31–58.Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.McDowell, Linda (1979) ‘Women in British geography’, Area, 11: 151–5.

54ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


McDowell, Linda (1986) ‘Beyond patriarchy: a class-based explanation of women’ssubordination’, Antipode, 18: 311–21.

McDowell, Linda (1997a) Capital Culture: Gender at work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell.McDowell, Linda (ed.) (1997b) Space, Gender, and Knowledge: Feminist Readings.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.McDowell, Linda (1999) Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist

Geographies. London: Blackwell.McDowell, Linda and Massey, Doreen (1984) ‘A woman’s place?’, in Doreen Massey and

John Allen (eds), Geography Matters! Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,pp. 128–47.

McDowell, Linda and Sharp, Jo (eds) (2000) A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography.London: Arnold.

Momsen, Janet and Kinnaird, Vivian (eds) (1993) Different Places, Different Voices:Gender and Development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. New York: Routledge.

Monk, Janice (2004) ‘Women, gender, and the histories of American geography’, Annalsof the Association of American Geographers, 94(1): 1–22.

Monk, Janice and Hanson, Susan (1982) ‘On not excluding half of the human in humangeography’, The Professional Geographer, 34: 11–23.

Moss, Pamela (ed.) (2002) Feminist Geography in Practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Nash, Catherine (1996) ‘Reclaiming vision: looking at the landscape and the body’,

Gender, Place and Culture, 3: 149–69.Nast, Heidi and Pile, Steve (eds) (1998) Places through the Body. London: Routledge.Nesmith, C. and Radcliffe, Sarah A. (1993) ‘(Re)mapping Mother Earth: a geographical

perspective on environmental feminisms’, Environment and Planning D: Society andSpace, 11: 379–94.

Oberhauser, Ann M. (1997) ‘The home as “field”: households and homework in ruralAppalachia’, in John Paul Jones III, Heidi Nast and Susan Roberts (eds), Thresholdsin Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham, MD:Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 165–83.

Phillips, Richard (1997) Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure. London:Routledge.

Pile, Steve (1994) ‘Masculinism, the use of dualistic epistemologies and third spaces’,Antipode, 26: 255–77.

Pile, Steve (1996) The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity.London: Routledge.

Pratt, Gerry (1993) ‘Reflections on poststructuralism and feminist empirics, theory andpractice’, Antipode, 25: 51–63.

Professional Geographer (1994) ‘Women in the “Field”: Critical Feminist Methodologiesand Theoretical Perspectives’, collection, 46: 426–66.

Professional Geographer (1995) ‘Should Women Count? The Role of QuantitativeMethodology in Feminist Geographic Research’, collection, 47: 427–58.

Radcliffe, Sarah (1994) ‘(Representing) postcolonial women: difference, authority andfeminisms’, Area, 26(1): 25–32.

Rocheleau, Dianne, Thomas-Slayter, Barbara and Wangari, Esther (eds) (1996)Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. New York:Routledge.



Rose, Gillian (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, Susan (2002) ‘Doing qualitative research: from interpretation to action’, in MelanieLimb and Claire Dwyer (eds), Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues andDebates. New York: Arnold.

Teather, Elizabeth (ed.) (1999) Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites ofPassage. London: Routledge.

Walby, Sylvia (1990) Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell.Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1984) Geography and Gender: An

Introduction to Feminist Geography. London: Hutchinson.

56ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


MARX AND THE SPIRIT OF MARX

George Henderson and Eric Sheppard

Marxism is an extraordinarily rich tradition,with numerous offshoots, variants, and adher-ents. It offers both commentary and substan-tive thought on economics, development,urbanization, agriculture and industry, politicsand governance, international relations, socialclasses and divisions, science, literature, paint-ing, film, history, the environment, ethics, andmore. It is interested in what the world is likeand who makes it that way; in what know-ledge and feelings people have about their sit-uations and how those perceptions arise fromthose very situations. It is at root an inquiryinto human endeavors of all sorts, with theaim of bringing about more just conditionsfor human flourishing.To cover Marxism in asingle chapter, even those Marxist approachesundertaken in geography, is a tall order.We canonly cut it down to size and offer a few start-ing points and guide posts, with the hope ofraising more questions than can be answeredhere.

We begin by discussing why Marxismremains relevant, notwithstanding recentmaterial and intellectual developments.Then,we discuss the geographical resonance of itsphilosophical foundations.Turning our atten-tion, like Marx, to capitalism, we discussMarx’s political economic analysis and how ithas been developed to make sense of thegeography of capitalism.Finally,we show howMarxist geographers embrace a much broaderset of questions than the economy, illustratingthe richness and ongoing vitality of thisapproach. Students of human geography

should be wary, therefore, of jettisoning Marxalong with some objectionable bathwater.

The deployment of Marx’s ideas in geo-graphy has an interesting history.At one level,interest in Marxism has declined markedlyin popularity since 1990. At that time, themost influential and widely cited geographers,following David Harvey, drew heavily onhis ideas. Since, Harvey’s scholarship hasundergone steady criticism, and many of themost influential geographers now positionthemselves as post-Marxist. At another level,however, the apparent decline of Marxismmarginalizes the fact that a number of its mostimportant insights have been internalizedwithin human geography.We argue here thatany ‘death of Marx’ is premature, by demon-strating what makes his ideas of ongoingrelevance to geography.

One reason advanced for the death ofMarxism is historical: the dissolution of thoseregimes in the Soviet Union and EasternEurope that self-identified as Marxist. Theconfinement of Marxist-influenced politicalsystems to North Korea, Cuba and China,with democracy supposedly on the rise every-where, is widely alleged to prove the bank-ruptcy of Marx’s theories (although Chinainvites pause for reflection).This argument isproblematic. First, the Marxism practiced insuch countries has had little in common withthe ideas of Marx. Marx focused much of hisattention on understanding capitalism ratherthan developing schemes for socialist andcommunist societies, and would have found

5


little to praise in those autocratic and repressiveregimes. Second, global political and economicdevelopments since 1990 have resulted in aworld that looks more like the capitalism thatMarx envisioned than at any time since hewrote.We now live in a world dominated byneoliberal capitalist ideologies and practices,with non-capitalist economic practices at ahistorically low ebb. While there are manysimilarities between the rapidly globalizingBritish-dominated and free-trade-orientedworld economy studied by Marx and today’sUS-dominated neoliberal globalization, theprevalence of capitalist practices and discoursesis far greater. Powerful nation-states take fewactions without reflecting on how they will beassessed by ‘the market’. In the global south,which for decades sought a ‘Third World’between capitalism and state socialism, elitesnow adopt capitalism as their chosen develop-ment vehicle.Everyday discourse is dominatedby stock market returns, interest rates, marketsand consumption. Unions and progressivepolitical parties have either lost influenceor reinvented themselves to adapt to neo-liberalism. Seeking someone to help makesense of these developments, Cassidy (1997)described Karl Marx in The New Yorker as ‘thenext great thinker’.

A second argument advanced againstMarx, influential in geography, is philosoph-ical. French postmodern and poststructuralthinkers, expressing their own frustrationwith the French left’s ongoing dalliance withSoviet Stalinism, began to argue in the 1960sagainst Marx, and other grand theorists.It is from this position that critical Anglo-American geographers have expressedincreasing skepticism about the relevance ofMarx’s ideas, notwithstanding shared politicalsentiments.These debates have become quitepersonal, as Marxist and post-Marxist geo-graphers each advance their position by carica-turing and denigrating (othering) theiropponents. We argue, however, that there isfar more heat than light in these disputes.The

appellation ‘post’ refers not to a distinctlynew time period with radically different ideasand practices, but to an approach that acknow-ledges the ongoing influence of pre-existingideas and practices even as it seeks to decon-struct them. Marx remains a key startingpoint for the grand philosophers of the ‘post’variety (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,Spivak), and similarly cannot be set aside bycritical geographers. The often unacknow-ledged continuities between Marxism and the‘posts’, we argue, also point to the ongoingrelevance of Marx’s thought.

Philosophical Foundations:Materialism and Dialectics

One of geography’s distinguishing features is aconcern for nature–society relations. This isalso at the center of Marx’s desire to develop amaterialist account of society.Materialism is theview that whatever exists depends on matter.As Marx developed the idea, he pointed tohow human activities are grounded in thebiophysical environment from which sus-tenance, clothing and shelter are drawn.Thispristine ‘first nature’ formed a materiallynecessary foundation for human society. Atthe same time, he noted that society has pro-gressively transformed, reshaped and commodi-fied nature, creating a ‘second nature’. Ourcontemporary world, where climate, ecosys-tems, organisms and the landscape are pro-foundly reshaped by human activities, certainlyis one where almost all aspects of nature havebeen transformed.Yet nature is also shaped bybiophysical processes that continually breakout of the boxes into which humans seek tocram nature (think of global warming, or madcow disease), biting back in ways that showhow second nature remains crucial to sociallife, and always partially beyond the control ofcapitalism.This ongoing, complex and inter-dependent relationship between societaland biophysical processes is well captured by

58ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


applying Marx’s favored dialectical analysis(see Smith, 1990; Castree, 1995, for a moredetailed account).

A second distinguishing feature of a geo-graphical way of knowing, therefore, is to payattention to the relational nature of the world.Waldo Tobler famously quipped that the firstlaw of geography begins with the presupposi-tion that everything is related to everythingelse: nature with society; economic, political,cultural processes with one another; localplaces with one another and with globalprocesses; and so on. Such relational thinkingwas also central to Marx, who developed aform of relational dialectical thinking inopposition to the Aristotelian (i.e. essentialist)logic that dominates such mainstreamapproaches to science as logical empiricism.Dialectical reasoning (dating back to Greekphilosophy) focuses on analyzing the relationsbetween things, rather than the things them-selves. Harvey describes this well:

Dialectical thinking emphasizes theunderstanding of processes, flows, fluxes,and relations over the analysis of elements,things, structures and organized systemsall … There is a deep ontological prin-ciple involved here … that elements,things, structures and systems do notexist outside of or prior to the processesthat create, sustain or undermine them …Epistemologically, the process of enquiryusually inverts this emphasis: we get tounderstand processes by looking either atthe attributes of what appear to us … tobe self-evident things or at relationsbetween them … On this basis we mayinfer something about the processes thathave generated a change in state but theidea that the entities are unchanging inthemselves quickly leads us to a causaland mechanistic thinking. Dialecticalreasoning … transforms the self-evidentworld of things … into a much moreconfusing world of relations and flowsthat are manifest as things. (1996: 49)

Whereas mainstream science and social scienceseek to explain the world by reducing it toa series of stable and well-defined entities(quarks, organisms, human agents) connectedby stable causal relations, dialectical reasoningtraces how these interrelations are constantlychanging, altering the entities themselves. Aslong as they are reproduced by the relationsconstituting them, entities seem to be stableand well defined. These ‘permanances’ areillusory, however. Entities of all scales, fromhumans to the world economy, are internallyheterogeneous and always at risk of being tornapart by the very relationships that broughtthem into being.1

Marx insisted that materialism must beboth dialectical and historical. Dialecticalmaterialism focuses on relations between thematerial world and our ideas about it, argu-ing that each shapes the other, but that themind always remains dependent on materialprocesses supporting human life. A logicalextension of this way of thinking, in otherwords, is that commonly held dualisms, suchas society and nature or culture and nature,must be carefully scrutinized. Indeed, this isa project that quite a few Marxist-inspiredgeographers have undertaken in lively fashionin recent years (cf. Castree, 2003).

Historical materialism holds that any modeof production is beset with contradictions thatcan undermine its viability and tear it apart –even capitalism. Thus, instead of acceptingglobal capitalism as a utopian end-state inwhich markets optimally allocate society’swealth amongst its members, Marx sought toidentify its contradictions and potential limits,and (to a much lesser extent) to speculate onhow those limits might be reached and whatmight succeed capitalism. Marx’s historicalmaterialism is sometimes misleadingly repre-sented as a teleological sequence of stages ofsocietal development: slavery → feudalism →capitalism → socialism → communism. As anineteenth-century white male thinker, thereis little doubt that Marx had a pretty

MARX AND THE SPIRIT OF MARXÿÿ59


Eurocentric view of the world, and at timesdid resort to a stagist shorthand whereby thehistorical sequence experienced in Europewas taken to be universal.Yet the idea of his-torical materialism simply holds that anysuch mode of production has internal con-tradictions that can undermine it, withoutspecifying fixed sequences, or even a pre-determined set of possible modes of produc-tion. Such a prior identification of entitieswould be inconsistent, of course, with dialec-tical reasoning.

Marx’s Political Economy

While Marx did not offer a canned historicalsequence of social change, he did argue thateach place and time is characterized by apredominant mode of production: a sociallyorganized way in which humans providefor the material basis of their existence, bycoordinating production with the social rela-tions necessary to support it. For example,under slavery owners of the means of pro-duction also owned labor, whereas undercapitalism individuals own their own labor,which they bring to the labor market.Thesedifferent systems are governed by differentnorms and legal principles about who countsas a free person. Moreover, Marx argued thatthe social relations deemed ‘necessary’ for thematerial basis of human life were outcomesof antagonistic group relations, struggles overideas, and often the exertion of brute force bya ruling class. Social relations are not naturallynecessary but are historically wrought throughstruggles over material and political interests.An important corollary is that all historicallysignificant modes of production must becapable of producing a surplus (i.e. more atthe end of the year than at the beginning),or else they would have no reserves totide them through a period of crisis. Marxrecognized that diverse modes of produc-tion typically coexist (e.g. slavery has not

been eliminated in today’s capitalist worldeconomy), but analysis should begin withthe dominant one.

Capitalism

Marx spent much of his lifetime applyingthis philosophical approach to unravel anddemystify the capitalist mode of production,which he saw as a definite improvement overslavery and feudalism but still riven with hid-den contradictions and inequalities. Undercapitalism, he argued, the production ofgoods to support human life takes the formof commodity production. Commodity pro-duction occurs when goods are produced tomake a profit, rather than to meet a particularneed. Historically, some possess the means ofproduction to make these goods (capitalists),or the land and other natural resources usedfor commodity production (landowners),whereas others provide the labor powernecessary for production (workers). Workersare free to choose where to work (in theory,if not in practice), but do not have the meansto undertake commodity production them-selves.2 There are thus distinct class positionsthat different individuals occupy in a capital-ist mode of production, shaping their inter-ests and identities, which Marx was carefulto distinguish as ‘class-in-itself ’ (the interestsshared by those associated with a particularclass position) and ‘class-for-itself ’ (the cre-ation of a shared identity, necessary for mem-bers of a class to pursue their intereststhrough collective action). In addition, capi-talism entails legal institutions, particularlythose creating and guarding private propertyrights; political institutions, a state seekingto mitigate the contradictions of capitalismwithout disaffecting the different classes; anda set of discourses legitimizing and normaliz-ing capitalism, such as those of neoliberalism(cf. Jessop, 2002).

Marx provided distinctive insights into theinequities and contradictions of capitalism,

60ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


quite different from the classical politicaleconomists who preceded him or the mar-ginal economists who came after. On the faceof it, under capitalism it seems that the mar-ginal value of goods to society is given by theirmarket price; that capitalists and workers earnwhat they deserve. It seems that capitalistsmake their profit as fair payment for the capitalthey invest, reflecting the value of that capitalto society. By the same token, wages are inter-preted as a measure of the social utility oflabor.According to Adam Smith’s principle ofthe invisible hand, the free operation of mar-kets means that the self-interested actions ofindividuals produce a fair redistribution ofsociety’s wealth amongst its members. YetMarx’s analysis showed that things are not asthey seem, whether we consider productionor consumption. Marx’s notion of capitalism isa far cry from those who equate capitalismwith markets.Rather, capitalism is a distinctiveway of socially organizing production, in whichthe market is necessary for capitalism’s exis-tence3 while also obscuring the nature ofcapitalist production.

Production, value and exploitation

Marx was terribly concerned with what isreal and tangible and with what the seeminglyreal and tangible obscures. The very firstwords of Capital display this focused zeal:‘Thewealth of those societies in which the capi-talist mode of production prevails, presentsitself as “an immense accumulation of com-modities” … Our investigation must there-fore begin with the analysis of a commodity’(Marx, 1967 [1867]: 35). One of Marx’s firstquestions was a basic one: what gives thesecommodities their value? He argued thatmarket prices are only one way in which theirvalue can be assessed. He stressed that com-modities have use value, a measure of theirutility to those purchasing and selling them.They also have labor value, measured by thelabor time socially necessary to make those

commodities (including the labor invested inthe materials and machinery used up duringproduction). ‘Socially necessary’ refers to thelabor time associated with prevailing produc-tion methods. Marx showed that capitalismcan make a surplus only if the labor value con-tributed by workers to the production processis greater than the labor value of the real wagethey receive (see Box 5.1).

Without exploitation in labor valueterms, monetary profits are impossible. Marxalso argued that in the long term, goods willexchange in the market in proportion to theirlabor value: supply and demand fluctuationscan drive market prices away from these pro-portions, but only in the short term. Thesepropositions have been controversial, but theyhave turned out to be robust. Money profitsindeed cannot be made without exploitationin labor value terms, and empirical calcula-tions have confirmed that long-run pricescorrelate closely with labor values.

Labor power is the only commoditywhere these propositions do not apply,becausethe free labor market does not extend insidethe factory gate:

We now know how the value paid by thepurchaser to the possessor of this peculiarcommodity, labor-power, is determined.The use-value which the former gets inexchange, manifests itself only in theactual usufruct, in the consumption ofthe labor-power. The money-owner buyseverything necessary for this purpose, suchas raw material, in the market, and paysfor it at its full value. The consumption oflabor-power is at one and the same timethe production of commodities and ofsurplus-value. The consumption of labor-power is completed, as in the case of everyother commodity, outside the limits of themarket or of the sphere of circulation.Accompanied by Mr Moneybags and bythe possessor of labor-power, we thereforetake leave for a time of this noisy sphere,where everything takes place on the



surface and in view of all men, and followthem both into the hidden abode of pro-duction, on whose threshold there staresus in the face ‘No admittance except onbusiness.’ Here we shall see, not only howcapital produces, but how capital is pro-duced. We shall at last force the secret ofprofit making … On leaving this sphere ofsimple circulation or of exchange of com-modities, which furnishes the ‘Free-traderVulgaris’ with his views and ideas, andwith the standard by which he judges asociety based on capital and wages, wethink we can perceive a change in thephysiognomy of our dramatis personae.He, who before was the money-owner,now strides in front as capitalist; thepossessor of labor-power follows as hislaborer. The one with an air of impor-tance, smirking, intent on business; theother, timid and holding back, like onewho is bringing his own hide to marketand has nothing to expect but – a hiding.(Marx, 1967 [1867]: 175–6)

Under the capitalist mode of production thefull value of what working people make can-not return to them. If it did, capitalism wouldnot exist. In so far as market exchange is per-petuated, so are the social relationships thatdefine capitalism. Not only are the economic

and social realms inseparable, but Marxredefines each in terms of the other.

Consumption and commodity fetishism

In all of this there is a pervasive though pecu-liar irony. Marx wrote that even while com-modity production is central to capitalism,any given commodity tells us nothing aboutthe social conditions and relationships thatwent into its making. Even though socialrelationships are a necessary, definitive aspectof commodity exchange under capitalism,‘Value,’ Marx quipped, ‘does not stalk aboutwith a label describing what it is. It is value,rather, that converts every product into asocial hieroglyphic’ (1967 [1867]: 74).Commodities, once in people’s possession,are understood by them merely as use values –by the comfort, utility or pleasure they bring,their distinctiveness, and the individual stylethey confer on their owners.The conditionsunder which they are produced are utterlylost to our eyes, except for the occasionalexposé about the sweatshop labor behindNike shoes or mistreatment of the cattle inour hamburgers.Under capitalism, it becomeseasier to desire these appealing things than itdoes to question the social manner of theirproduction. Marx called this strange state of

62ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

BOX 5.1 MARX’S THEORY OF EXPLOITATION

Whereas in money value terms it may seem that workers earn a fair day’s pay for afair day’s work by participating in the labor market, in labor value terms they areexploited. A component of the labor value they contribute is captured as capitalists’profits:

Value of one hour of labor (1)= labor value L received by workers as their wage + surplus value S retained

by capitalists

1 = L + S; rate of exploitation (E) = S/(L + S)


affairs commodity fetishism: once labor powertakes the form of commodities, labor poweras a social phenomenon, binding together awhole class of individuals with a commoninterest, becomes imperceptible. More ironi-cally, commodity fetishism has itself becomea commodity, the raw material for the adver-tising industry that has exploded since Marx’stime.

In putting commodity production frontand center, Marx is saying that several issuesare at stake. First, whereas all people havealways relied upon the non-human world(‘nature’) for their survival, under capitalismcommodity production mediates our relationswith the non-human world. In particular, atti-tudes toward nature and material appropria-tions of it tend to be highly instrumental, veryoften wasteful, and generally subservient tothe interests of private property, resourceextraction, and the like. (Neil Smith, 1990 andDenis Cosgrove, 1998 [1984] stress, however,that such alienation from nature has alsofueled strong movements romanticizing andaestheticizing nature, like the World WildlifeFund, or the growing interest in eco-tourism.)

Second, commodity production struc-tures relationships between people, whosecapacity for labor becomes a commodityitself, lying beyond their direct control.Thosethings and human relationships that fit therequirements of commodity production willdominate in capitalist society. Furthermore,these phenomena come to dominate peoplethemselves, as we bring our own interestsinto greater and greater alignment with thoseof commodity production, and measure ourworth by our wealth.The primary way for usto meet our needs is to purchase the goodsproduced under capitalism, provided we havethe wherewithal and opportunity to sell ourlabor power. But needs are a trickier matterthan it seems at first. Capitalism, Marx says,can indeed provide many people’s needs butthese accord with a restrictive sense of whatit might mean to live a fulfilling life.

Third, the idea of commodity fetishismhints that capitalism entails a struggle overand for knowledge. In so far as the social rela-tions of capitalism become, in a sense, fixedby the requirements of commodity produc-tion, they also become opaque to us.This isbecause the things that capitalism makes, andwhich surround us in our everyday existence,do not reveal to us the social dimensionsof their own origins and existence. But it isprecisely an understanding of these socialdimensions Marx saw as crucial for emanci-patory transformation.

Finally, because there are real interests atstake on all sides of the capital–labor relation,we would expect that the making of com-modities is not a one-time affair. It is and mustbe repeated but is at the same time the stuffof historical modification and geographicalmodification from place to place.

Time and Space: the Accumulationand Circulation of Capital

Marx argues that capitalism is inherentlydynamic: accumulation of capital must everexpand. He predicted, for example, that moreand more kinds of things would becomecommodities, more and more ‘needs’ wouldbe invented, more and more parts of a coun-try’s population would become wage workers(‘alienated’ from their own means of produc-tion) who were not wage workers before,and more and more non-capitalist societiesaround the world would become drawn intocapitalism’s orbit. At the same time, he pre-dicted that even as the size of the workingclasses grew, a countermovement would alsodevelop whereby in many economic sectorsmachines would replace human labor. To avery large degree, developments during thetwentieth century bore him out.

Capital accumulation is a continuousthough expanding cycle or circuit centering,as has been noted, on the production of



commodities. In Figure 5.1 (adapted fromHarvey, 1982: 70), money M is used to pur-chase two kinds of initial commodities C –labor power LP (typically advanced by workers)and the means of production MP – for pur-poses of making new and different commodi-ties. During production P, new commoditiesC′ are made by consuming LP and (a portionof) MP, producing a surplus value at the end.C thus grows to C′ because a labor processhas imparted surplus value to the commodity.These new commodities are taken to themarket where a successful sale realizes moremoney M′, so that the whole process canbegin again.

Figure 5.1 implies that value, once cre-ated by labor, must be preserved or translatedthroughout this whole process. Only laborcreates value during production; commodityexchanges and sales after the fact serve topreserve and circulate that value, at least if all‘goes well’. Figure 5.1 also illustrates that thecirculation of capital comprises three individ-ual circuits: the circulation of money capital,productive capital, and commodity capital(M–M′, P–P, and C–C′, respectively). Capitalthus takes different forms whose needs con-tinually contradict each other. Let us take acloser, if very brief, look through each ofthese windows.

In the circuit of money capital, M isadvanced to pay for production, and M′ is thatplus the profits made as a result of a successfulsale.Thus capitalists must be concerned withpreserving (or enhancing) the value of moneyitself, retaining enough of it to invest in suc-cessive rounds of production. Money mustcirculate as efficiently and rapidly as possible;time is money and delays are costly. Yet,money capital is ultimately used for produc-tion, which takes time and material resources.

During the circulation of productivecapital, some portion of money must be atrest, in order for production to occur, contraryto the interest of capital in its raw moneyform. It takes time to assemble inputs, makecommodities and then get them to market andsell them. The longer this takes, the slowermoney capital can move, cutting into profitrates.This can be counteracted by acceleratingthe circulation of money capital. In addition,capitalists have to manage processes that takefar longer than the time necessary to produceand sell a commodity: machinery and build-ings, but also new product development,require investments that can only be paid backafter many production cycles.While firms seekto set aside profits to pay for such fixed costs,the credit market is essential to enable capital-ists to borrow for these longer-term invest-ments. The second circuit also has its owninternal contradictions. Capitalists want thevalue of productive capital to last for its life-time. Yet capitalist competition is based ondeveloping new products and technologies,which have the effect of undermining thevalue of already existing products and tech-nologies.This undermines the value of olderproductive capital, which may become obso-lete before it has paid for itself.

The circuit of commodity capital beginswhen C′ becomes M′, i.e. when productivecapital generates the money necessary to payfor a new round of production. But muchcan go wrong between shipping a productto market and realizing profits. Productionand sales are separated over time and space.Capitalists may fail to predict demand cor-rectly, particularly in distant markets; productsmay be delivered too late; and productive andmoney capital can get lost en route.Also, thereis no guarantee that commodities will remain

64ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

M…C (LP, MP)…P…C′…M′…C (LP, MP)…P…C′…

Figure 5.1 The circulation of capital


‘socially useful’. Intense competition amongcapitalists places an extraordinary premiumon stylistic change and innovation.

Particular roles ‘crystallize’ out of thesecircuits: finance capitalists have much to sayabout where money capital is invested; indus-trial capitalists organize and supervise pro-duction; and wholesalers and retailers managethe sale and purchase of commodities. Asfinance, industrial, and merchant capitalistshave sought greater efficiencies, a vast arrayof new strategies has been devised: sophisti-cated and risky forms of financial securities,just-in-time methods of production, reloca-tion of assembly plants and processing facili-ties, and stunning concentration in retailmarkets, to name only a few.These have theircorollaries in waves of plant closures, localand regional deindustrialization, rollbacks oflabor and environmental standards, and fraudand bankruptcies on Wall Street.

The seeming functionality of Figure 5.1hides the impossibility of its smooth and seam-less practice over time and space. It demandscoordination of a great many things, not leastformal arrangements for human exploitation,only to lead down a path of regular economicand social crisis.

Yet we should not forget a fourth circuit:what Marx called ‘variable capital’. Variablecapital refers to the contributions of labor tothe value of commodities.This circuit entailsthe making and perpetuation of workingclasses and the suite of daily practices, socialdifferences, supportive networks, and culturallogics that attend our daily return to work(e.g. K. Mitchell et al., 2003). It is as complexas any of the other three: it has to do not sim-ply with how the capability for work is estab-lished but with the circumstances wherebyparticular groups of people, demarcated bygender, race, nationality, sexuality and ethni-city, are targeted for particular kinds of jobs.It depends upon forms of unpaid, often hid-den and women’s labor, raising generations offuture workers and returning already existing

paid workers, clothed and fed, to work. It alsoinvolves maintaining a surplus army of work-ers, populations of unemployed, who must besustained through periods of economic crisisto be drawn upon during periods of recovery.Finally, it entails struggles over people’s iden-tities as workers versus a fuller conception ofhuman being. It is through the circuit of vari-able capital and the struggles that shape it thatliving standards and an acceptable quality oflife are hammered out.

Time is also important in wider sensesthan circuits of capital. The pressure to turnM into M′ has been expressed in a politics ofthe working day: specifically, how long itshould be, how fast work should proceed,how many days should comprise the workweek, and how much time should be allowedfor vacation, family, and sick leave. Suchinnovations as the eight-hour day, the week-end, and paid (or unpaid) leave are all out-comes of the struggle over time and towhom it rightly belongs. Depending uponhow history is periodized and narrated, theconcern for profit rates can become palpablein other ways. It is therefore common tospeak of the Great Depression of the 1930sor the Downturn of the 1970s. While it ishotly debated whether profit rates mustnecessarily fall in some coordinated fashionthroughout the whole of the capitalist world,one thing is clear.The sense of time itself isoften measured in ways that articulate to howcapitalism structures everyday life.

Marx had much less to say about space,but the work of a generation of economicgeographers has come a long way in rem-edying this shortcoming. First, a dialecticalapproach means that space (and time) can-not be treated as externally given entities –coordinates and dates:

Space and time are neither absolute norexternal to processes but are contingentand contained within them. There are mul-tiple spaces and times (and space–times)



implicated in different physical, biologicaland social processes. The latter all produce –to use Lefebvre’s (1974 [1991]) terminology –their own forms of space and time.Processes do not operate in but actively con-struct space and time and in so doing definedistinctive scales for their development.(Harvey, 1996: 53)

The space–times of capitalism are created as aresult of capitalist political economic processesseeking to facilitate, or in the case of classstruggle, sometimes to disrupt or tame, capitalaccumulation.Under capitalism, time took theform of clock time, so that hours worked andprofit rates could be calculated, whereas spacewas precisely measured, to define propertyownership, the location of resources, labor,inputs and markets, and their accessibility.Thespatial organization of activities is important tothe functioning of capitalism.The greater thesocio-economic distance between inputs, pro-duction, and markets, the more time it takesfor the circuit of capital to be completed.Greater distances are also a source of greateruncertainty and disruption of circuits.Enormous effort has been put into reducingthese spatial barriers, coming up with geo-graphic technologies that enhance ease oftravel and communication, ranging from sex-tants and sailing clippers, to GPS and theInternet (Hugill, 1993; 1999). Marx termedthis the tendential ‘annihilation of space bytime’ (1973; Harvey, 1985b). In brief, temporalbarriers to the turnover of capital can bereduced by reducing socio-economic distance.The complement to this ever-shrinking world,though, is that it is selectively shrinking,leaving whole areas and peoples abandonedand delinked from this dominant economy oftime–space compression. This delinking hasbeen dubbed ‘time–space expansion’ (Katz,2001; Crump, 2003).

Second, production of the built environ-ment is also a vital aspect of the spatiality ofcapitalism. Urban morphologies can enhance

capital accumulation by providing appropriateland use plans, buildings and spatial arrange-ments. Company towns located workers incompany-built housing close to factories,enhancing control over labor. The operationof the land market also sorts urban areas outinto land use patterns in which those withmore money can demand favored locations,whereas others (workers) take what is left over.In early industrial cities, this meant that work-ers crowded into relatively expensive butundesirable central city locations near factories.

Communications infrastructures and builtenvironments that once best served capitalaccumulation subsequently can become abarrier to capital accumulation, however. Asproduction methods change, and previouslydesirable inner city locations become polluted,congested and run down, there is strong pres-sure to pull investments out of these landscapesand to restructure the landscape in order to sat-isfy the distinct locational preferences of a newera of capitalism. For example, suburbanizationwas a way of avoiding congested inner cities,and also catalyzed inner city decline in theUSA. Not only wealthy and white residents,but also retailing,manufacturing, and real estatecapital left inner cities for the greener pasturesof the metropolitan fringe with the space tobuild big box stores and single-floor factories,catalyzed by state subsidization of highwaysystems and housing purchases, and by theemergence of independent municipalities onthe urban fringe with the power to excludeundesirable land uses and offer residents lowertaxes and a cleaner environment (Harvey,1972;Walker, 1981).Over time this would produce a‘rent gap’ in the inner city that recently hasbeen attracting investments back downtown asgentrification, enterprise zones, and assortedpublic–private partnerships (Smith, 1996).Investment is thus a see-saw process wherebycapital is pushed into and pulled out of placesover time (Smith, 1990).

Such periodic spatial restructuring, typi-cally occurring during periods of economic

66ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


turndown, can be observed at spatial scalesranging from the intraurban to the interna-tional. Indeed, recent Marxist research hasdevoted considerable attention to how eventhese scales are produced and transformed ascapitalism evolves, arguing that the recentacceleration of globalization is associated witha declining importance of the nation-statescale relative to global scales and subnationalscales – glocalization. National economiesboth are increasingly shaped by supranationalforces and devolve responsibilities for eco-nomic prosperity and competitiveness fromthe nation to cities and industrial districts(Swyngedouw, 1997; Brenner, 1999).

Third, political processes governing thecapitalist economy are generally organizedterritorially, as national, regional and localstates.Territorial governance structures exper-iment with different schemes to coordinatecapitalist production and demand, since themarket is not self-regulating (Tickell andPeck, 1992; Painter, 1997). For example,between 1945 and 1973 First World nation-states catalyzed a Fordist regime of mass pro-duction, complemented by political and legalstructures that permitted higher wages to payfor those products, and a welfare safety net forthose left behind. After Fordism ran into dif-ficulties in the 1970s, new regulatory systemssought, with mixed success, to shift to a moreflexible regime of accumulation, comple-mented by what Bob Jessop (1994) hasdubbed the Schumpeterian workfare state – amode of social regulation replacing safety netswith welfare-to-work programs. Differentterritories also compete with one another,seeking to attract geographically mobile cap-ital to employ their relatively immobile work-force. This local entrepreneurialism hasintensified with time–space compression andglocalization, pitting all residents in one placein competition with their counterparts else-where, irrespective of class.Harvey argues thattime–space compression has made differententrepreneurial conditions in different places

the critical factor in such competition,although others argue that geographical loca-tion as such still matters (Sheppard, 2000).

After a review of all of these processesand conditions, one would be excused forthinking it all a bit chaotic.The ‘circulation’of capital, while an absolute necessity, isindeed a vast, inconstant, and risky attempt tocoordinate the transfer of value from oneincarnation of capital to the next and fromone place to another. Geographical regimesof capital accumulation are unsteady over thelong haul, making uneven geographicaldevelopment (i.e. persistent spatial inequali-ties in wealth and economic growth) aninherent feature of capitalism.

In historical and geographical reality thereis an extraordinary variety of ways for accu-mulation to proceed. Because capitalism hasinternal contradictions, a variety of accumula-tion strategies necessarily results.Because cap-italism is peopled – i.e. it always confronts andintersects with ongoing traditions, practices,and power relations that are geographicallyand historically variable – it is also necessarilydifferent from place to place and time to time.This raises an important question. If, as Marxsays, capital accumulation is an expansiveprocess over time and space, what is lost andwhat is gained by interpreting historical andgeographical differences through the ‘time-less’ lens of Marxism’s concepts (Chakrabarty,2000)?

Class conflict

Marx saw that the value of labor powerwould become a major object of strugglebetween classes, as we suggested above. Suchstruggles have become a regular feature ofcapitalist societies. People know these strug-gles both in specific terms and more gener-ally as the desire to preserve or enhance theirstandards of living and quality of life. Thevalue of labor power may rise or fall, butwhen it rises high enough to threaten capital



accumulation, capitalism necessarily enters aperiod of crisis.

Yet competition between places exempli-fies how geography vastly complicates Marx’sanalysis of class conflict. In Marx’s analysis,class location shapes interests and identities,pitting classes against one another. Whereasneoclassical economists claim that wages andprofits are set by some stable competitiveequilibrium at which each is paid accordingto its social utility, Marxist economists haveshown that this makes sense only in an eco-nomy with no class divisions. The historicalreality of classes belies this claim.Whatever theprofits and wages at any point in time, bothclasses seek to shift this ratio in their favor,claiming a bigger piece of the pie for their col-lectivity and destabilizing the economy. Thestate seeks to manage such conflicts, typicallyby favoring one side over the other.The eco-nomic policies of the Bush administration inthe early twenty-first century are an excel-lent case in point, offering tax breaks to thewealthy while cutting welfare and healthbenefits for the poor.

Class is a notoriously slippery issue, how-ever. It is not at all clear how or whethershared interests result in a shared identity andcollective action. The real economy is madeup of all kinds of economic actors who donot fall neatly into one class or another, suchas children employed in the family business,workers with pension funds in the stockmarket, and middle managers (Wright, 1985).Geography further complicates this. Whenlocalities compete with one another, theinterests of workers in one location are pittedagainst those of workers elsewhere, in waysthat call into question the optimism of Marxand Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, aboutworkers’ social power (Harvey, 2000: Chapter3). When capital accumulation favors someplaces over others, workers in those placessystematically benefit at the expense of work-ers elsewhere, making it in their immediateinterest to align with capitalists to protect

communities. For example, the AFL-CIO,seeking to sustain the elite status of the USworking class, has often supported Americaninternational economic policy, itself aimed atmaintaining American economic hegemonyat a global scale.

Many opportunities exist for workers toinfluence and even direct capital investments.The new field of ‘labor geography’ seeksto understand not so much how workersrespond to capital’s lead regarding plant clos-ings, regional growth or decline, or otherindications of uneven development, but howworkers themselves play a role in shaping thegeography of capital in the first place (Herod,1998; 2001).

Consciousness, Culture andRepresentation

The foregoing implies the importance of notlosing sight of people’s intentionality, agency,and self- or group understanding, even if theseare not exercised freely. The issue is a broadone and multiplies rapidly.What is the natureof people’s consciousness under capitalism?How much does capitalism determine whatwe think, feel, believe, and communicate?How does it shape society more broadly byentering the realm of symbol and meanings?These questions may be put in the context ofMarx’s belief that capitalism is voracious intransforming everything it comes into contactwith.

Capitalism is mediated by powerful cul-tural and social processes that have provenuniquely useful to its perpetuation. Capitalismis insinuated in the most basic of institutions,where meanings are given material force. Forexample, the legal system of the United Statesgives meaning to the force of law (as does thatof any nation-state). It fundamentally protectsand legitimates the institution of private prop-erty and often gives vent to the class strugglebetween employer and employee interests.

68ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Legislatures have codified into law theprivatization of public assets and basic socialservices, during certain historical periods, so asto minimize the socialization of the economyand reinforce the disciplining of the laborforce (Peck, 1996). It remains the case also thatcertain quarters of knowledge production(e.g. natural resource management, telecom-munications policy, pharmaceutical patents,book and music copyrights) reflect the basictensions in a society where almost everythingbecomes a commodity.

The exact path of many cultural andsocial transformations is by no means clear orpredictable, however. Most contemporarywork in Marxist geography accords with thenotion that people are not mere dupes.Thereare many issues, then, to be raised about ourmanifold ways of making meanings andputting meanings into practice. ParaphrasingMarx, however, we do so through forms notof our own making.These forms include classbut also citizenship, religion, race, sexuality,gender, ethnicity, and nationality: what goeson in these realms, including their emergenceand how they are mutually composed, is notsimply reducible to capitalism.Yet Marx him-self was not exactly clear on these matters andit has been left to his interpreters to try towork things out.

Some Marxists sought to relegate thesphere of cultural belief and tradition, reli-gion, politics, law, science, literature and thearts, and so forth to a so-called superstructure.This was said to rest upon a ‘base’ (i.e. capital-ism, narrowly defined). In this view, the needsof capital and the material interests of capital-ists dominate in capitalist society; legal andpolitical systems, religion, schooling and cul-tural works would be arranged to support,foster, and ultimately reflect those needs andinterests. Little more needed to be said.Whilepopular for a time, this ‘base and superstruc-ture’ model left far too much unaccountedfor, and contradicted much of what is knownabout social and cultural history.

This model did not take root in Marxistgeography. Instead, while asserting that therequirements of capital do indeed make it avoracious force, geographers such as DavidHarvey were interested in how culture, state,the law, the arts, etc. were inextricably boundwith the circulation of capital. Harvey (1982)argued that capitalism in different times andplaces is actually made differently preciselybecause it intersects and even relies upon localcultural and social variation. Capitalism needneither flatten out geographical differences inways of life and modes of power nor put adefinitive, totalizing stamp on all those things.This was a restricted claim about culture: cap-ital could not get along without it, but therewas more to culture than capital. Harvey elab-orated on these views in a classic essay onmid-nineteenth-century Paris (1985a) andagain in his popular book The Condition ofPostmodernity (1989). Denis Cosgrove took upsimilar questions in his book Social Formationand Symbolic Landscape (1998[1984]), lookingat how the rise of landscape painting and aes-thetics in the 1700s and 1800s reflected waysin which land came to be defined as propertyto be privately owned and visually possessedduring the transition from feudalism to capi-talism in Western Europe. He did not claimlandscape painting’s link to capitalism was theonly and sufficient link to be made, stressingalso quite separate traditions in the art andtechnology of painting, and the uniquebiographies of artists and patrons.

The role of culture in capitalism has beengiven a different spin by Don Mitchell, whois interested in how culture becomes reifiedin capitalist settings. He means this in twosenses: first that ‘culture’ is a concept, a labelwe give to those kinds of phenomena that wedeem ‘the cultural’; and second that ‘culture’,once deployed in that fashion, becomes static,objectified, and commodified. For a Marxistlike Mitchell these are interesting observa-tions to make for what they tell us about thecontradictions of the sort of society we live in.



Positing culture in static, proprietary termsleads to what Mitchell and others have calledculture wars. Culture wars refer, among otherthings, to struggles over who has control overthe manner in which a nation’s history, liter-ature, and peoples will be represented, andover how certain kinds of heritages and lega-cies should be defined and reproduced. Suchculture wars are evident in the US (and indifferent regions and municipalities withinthe US) over such issues as public schooltextbook adoption, public education on sex-ualities, funding for ‘controversial’ artists, therole of free speech in public space, and indeedwho has the right to occupy public space.Mitchell is especially interested in how capi-talist urban restructuring has becomeexpressed through cultural (and legal) battlesover the occupation of public space.As manycentral cities have felt the stresses and strainsof disinvestment and interurban competition,strategies for attracting mobile capital haveincluded privatization of and increased sur-veillance over the use of public space. In thismanner ‘culture’ is said to be put to ‘work’ incapitalism (D. Mitchell, 2000; 2003).

Capital circulation fuels another static andproprietary view of ‘culture’: its embeddednessin commodities. Drawing upon Adorno andHorkheimer’s notion of a ‘culture industry’,Mitchell (2003) notes how consumers areencouraged to identify themselves with thegoods they buy or desire. In this sense, we arewhat we eat, wear or drive, a process that dif-ferentiates consumers.Very specific consumeridentities are promulgated along the linesof, for example, gender, race, and sexuality(Dwyer and Jackson, 2003; Rushbrook, 2000).What happens to people when their identitiesbecome shaped by what they purchase? ForAdorno and Horkheimer, when culture is a‘consumable’, this wreaks havoc with the pos-sibility that culture can help us imagine moretranscendent modes of social being. Mitchelland others ask us to examine the consumer-culture logic of shopping spaces, such as theenclosed themed malls outside Denver,

Colorado and Minneapolis, Minnesota (Goss,1993). In order to market the vast range ofcommodities that capitalism is so adept atproducing, these spaces indicate that capital-ists steadily have eroded the divide betweencommodities as such and the appealingenvironments that surround them.The moreconsumption includes the human environ-ment as such, the more natural it feels to be‘consumers’ and the more ‘thingified’ culturebecomes. As the French ‘situationist’ GuyDebord (1970) once sardonically observedabout capitalism: that which appears is goodand all that is good appears.While these the-orists of consumer capitalism throw downthe gauntlet and demand we really thinkabout what is asked of us as consumers, itshould be noted that other scholars put moreemphasis on the indeterminacy of meaningin the realm of commodity production andconsumption (Dwyer and Jackson, 2003;Sayer, 2003).

The embeddedness of cultural meaningsin commodities, and of commodities in cul-tural meanings, has proved to be central towhat some have dubbed the ‘cultural turn’ inhuman geography. To some degree this cul-tural turn indicates the influence (if notwholesale acceptance) of semiotics, particu-larly as inspired by French semioticiansRoland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Thesethinkers fashioned an important set of argu-ments concerning the ‘sign’ value of com-modities that mobilizes desire and thusaccompanies, augments, and potentially shapesthe traditional Marxist categories of exchangeand use value.The cultural turn in Marxist orMarxist-inspired geography does not stop atthe symbolic value of commodities, however.Other work in this tradition turns to examinethe sphere of production and labor. Thisbranch of Marxist-inspired research main-tains a deep engagement with ethnographicapproaches and asks how cultural meaningsare intrinsic to the labor process itself, suchthat one cannot be known without the other.Some of the most interesting research in this

70ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


area looks at how ostensibly capitalist andnon-capitalist economic processes articulate toproduce forms of labor and accumulation thatdefy familiar categories of understanding. Forexample,Vinay Gidwani (2000; 2001) arguesthat labor processes can be shaped by the cul-tural logics of working people, for whomlabor has purposes other than a paycheck. Hesheds a fascinating light on what the capacityto labor means in different places.This capacitymay be used on the labor market, or as a con-scious withdrawal from the labor market tosignify the status and distinction that comeswith leisure. Thus labor is not a purely eco-nomic category; it is laden with meaning, andhow those meanings are acted upon has adirect effect on actual work arrangements andthe production process. Therefore, in orderto explain what happens in production, labormust be understood in a meaning-full sense.

To return to the opening thought of thissection, the issue is not only that social andcultural institutions and beliefs are useful (ornot) to capitalism. It is that cultural practicesand meanings make capitalism different fromplace to place. How much so, and whetherdifference presides to the extent of makingcapitalism as such unknowable to us, is aninteresting question for people of any politicalpersuasion. But in debating what is lostand/or gained by interpreting historical andgeographical differences through the ‘time-less’ lens of Marxism’s concepts, we shouldremember what we are also trying to get at:how shall we account for and what shallbe done about the causes of extraordinaryinequality, cataclysmic boom and bust, andprofound uneven development?

Conclusion: Social Construction,Social Relations, and SocialDifference

Marx held that any mode of production is anessential shaper of the society where thatmode prevails. People make their worlds

(albeit not under conditions of their ownchoosing) and those worlds make them: ‘Bythus acting on the external world and chan-ging it, he [sic] at the same time changes hisown nature’ (1967[1867]: 177). There is inthat short passage great consonance betweenMarx’s ideas about society and the consider-able current interest in social construction-ism. On this basis we wish to make a case forMarx as a contemporary thinker, necessarythough not wholly sufficient for our times. Itis a truism that societies are not fixed entities.Paraphrasing Marx, nature does not makecapitalists on the one side and laborers onthe other’ (1967[1867]: 169). Marx’s emphasison the social aspects of individual being, andthe mutability of those social aspects, webelieve, make him a powerful intellectual andpolitical resource. This is not an unproblem-atic resource, however, for what are alsosocially constructed are the processes wherebyagents decide what dimensions of social lifeto politicize,and what scales of political practiceto engage in. History shows that it is nighimpossible to predict how politics arise andover what concerns. These are matters forsocial agents in their historical and geograph-ical contexts to decide.

Some human geographers have recentlyde-emphasized or even forgone analyses ofhow capital and class are formed, seeking totrain their vision on gender, race, sexuality,nationality, and/or ethnicity. It is vital tounderstand how these modes of differenceare wrought, through what mutual intersec-tions, and with what repercussions; it is just asvital to understand how they intertwine withalienation and exploitation. Marxism acceptsprima facie that capitalism and the socialpositions in and around commodity produc-tion and distribution are socially constructed,precisely through their intersection withmyriad social processes.Through their atten-tion to such intersections, geographers work-ing in or alongside the Marxist tradition haveilluminated a wide variety of social processes.These include such diverse examples as the



making of an African American industrialworking class in Birmingham, Alabama(Wilson, 2000a); the adjustment of civil rightsstruggles to rounds of capitalist restructuring(Wilson, 2000b); the devaluing of ‘women’s’labor in the maquiladoras of Ciudad Juárez,Mexico (Wright, 2001); the making of gen-dered labor in the banks of the City of London(McDowell, 1997); the spatial divisions ofgendered labor in Worcester, Massachusetts(Hanson and Pratt, 1995); and geographies ofmoney, nature, and race in rural California(Henderson, 1999).

Marxist geographers have even soughtto direct attention away from capitalism, aswhen Gibson-Graham’s (1996) poststruc-tural, anti-essentialist Marxism seeks to makevisible alternative modes of productionembedded in capitalism, in order to imaginenon-capitalist alternatives. While someMarxists and non-Marxists, alike, questionwhether such studies can be labeled‘Marxist’, the influence of Marx’s ideas, andthe vitality of Marxism, is clear in each case.There are indeed many arenas into whichMarxist work can extend: how specifics oftime and place determine the manner in

which capitalism fosters already ongoingforms and processes of racialization, sexuality,gender, and nationality (or some other geo-graphical allegiance); how resistance to capitalsometimes gains expression through non-capitalist social relations; and how politicalcoalitions and alliances may form aroundmultiple axes of oppression and domination.Such lists could be extended indefinitely, butgeographers interested in asking whether acapitalist earth can provide just conditions forhuman flourishing cannot afford to neglectthe Marxist approach.

NOTES1 Dialectical reasoning is also applicable to the

natural sciences (cf. Levins and Lewontin,1985; Smolin, 1997).

2 In nineteenth-century Europe and the con-temporary global south, reduced access torural land for food production has pushedpeople to join the urban industrial proletariat.

3 What is sufficient is the existence of a wagelabor market in particular. Slave societies maybe market societies, but they are not capitalistsocieties in Marx’s sense of the term, becauseslave labor is not wage labor.

72ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

ReferencesBrenner, N. (1999) ‘Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale

in globalization studies’, Theory and Society, 28: 39–78.Cassidy, N. (1997) ‘The return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker, 20 and 27 October,

248–59.Castree, N. (1995) ‘The nature of produced nature’, Antipode, 27: 12–48.Castree, N. (2003) ‘Geographers of nature in the making’, in K. Anderson, M. Domosh,

S. Pile and N.Thrift (eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage, pp. 168–83.Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Cosgrove, D. (1998) [1984] Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, WI:

University of Wisconsin Press.Crump, J. (2003) ‘Housing labor’s unrest: economic restructuring and the social produc-

tion of scale’, in W. Falk, M. Schulman and A. Tickamyer (eds), Communities of Work.Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 194–224.

Debord, G. (1970) The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red.Dwyer, C. and Jackson, P. (2003) ‘Commodifying difference: selling eastern fashion’,

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21: 269–91.


Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Know It). Oxford: Blackwell.Gidwani, V. (2000) ‘The quest for distinction: a re-appraisal of the rural labor process in

Kheda District (Gujarat), India’, Economic Geography, 76: 145–68.Gidwani, V. (2001) ‘The cultural logic of work: explaining labor deployment and piece-rate

contracts in Matar Taluka (Gujarat), India, Parts I and II’, Journal of DevelopmentStudies, 38: 57–108.

Goss, J. (1993) ‘The “magic of the mall”: an analysis of form, function, and meaning inthe contemporary retail built environment’, Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers, 83: 18–47.

Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995) Gender, Work, and Space. New York: Routledge.Harvey, D. (1972) Society, the City and the Space-Economy of Urbanism. Resource

Monograph 18. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.Harvey, D. (1982) The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (1985a) Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (1985b) ‘Money, space, time and the city’, in D. Harvey (ed.), Consciousness

and the Urban Experience. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–35.Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Henderson, G. (1999) California and the Fictions of Capital. New York: Oxford University

Press.Herod, A. (ed.) (1998) Organizing the Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.Herod, A. (2001) Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism.

New York: Guilford.Hugill, P. (1993) World Trade since 1431. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Hugill, P. (1999) Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Jessop, B. (1994) ‘Post-Fordism and the state’, in A. Amin (ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader.

Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 251–79.Jessop, B. (2002) ‘Liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: a state-theoretical

perspective’, in N. Brenner and N. Theodore (eds), Spaces of Neoliberalism: UrbanRestructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 105–25.

Katz, C. (2001) ‘On the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engage-ment’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26: 1213–34.

Lefebvre, H. (1974) [1991] The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.Levins, R. and Lewontin, R. (1985) The Dialectial Biologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Marx, K. (1967) [1867] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. New York:

International.Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.

Harmondsworth: Penguin.McDowell, L. (1997) Capital Culture: Money, Sex and Power at Work. Oxford: Blackwell.Mitchell, D. (2000) Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space.

New York: Guilford.



Mitchell, K., Marston, S. and Katz, C. (2003) ‘Introduction: Life’s Work: An introduction,review and critique’, Antipode, 35: 415–42.

Painter, J. (1997) ‘Regulation, regime, and practice in urban politics’, in M. Lauria (ed.),Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a GlobalEconomy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 122–44.

Peck, J. (1996) Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. New York: Guilford.Rushbrook, D. (2000) ‘Cities, queer space and the cosmopolitan tourist’, Gay Liberation

Quarterly, 8.Sayer, A. (2003) ‘(De)commodification, consumer culture, and moral economy’, Environ-

ment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21: 341–57.Sheppard, E. (2000) ‘Competition in space and between places’, in E. Sheppard and

T. J. Barnes (eds), Companion to Economic Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 169–86.Smith, N. (1990) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space.

Oxford: Blackwell.Smith, N. (ed.) (1996) The New Urban Frontier. New York: Routledge.Smolin, L. (1997) The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Swyngedouw, E. (1997) ‘Neither global nor local: ‘glocalization’ and the politics of

scale’, in K. Cox (ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local.New York: Guilford, pp. 137–66.

Tickell, A. and Peck, J. (1992) ‘Accumulation, regulation and the geographies of post-Fordism: missing links in regulationist research’, Progress in Human Geography, 16:190–218.

Walker, R. (1981) ‘A theory of suburbanization’, in M. Dear and A.J. Scott (eds),Urbanization and Urban Planning in Market Societies. London: Methuen, pp. 383–430.

Wilson, B. (2000a) America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformationin Birmingham. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wilson, B. (2000b) Race and Place in Birmingham: The Civil Rights and NeighborhoodMovements. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wright, E.O. (1985) Classes. London: Verso.Wright, M. (2001) ‘A manifesto against femicide’, Antipode, 33: 550–66.

74ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


PHILOSOPHICAL BASES OF BEHAVIORALRESEARCH IN GEOGRAPHY

Reginald G. Golledge

Perhaps much of the confusion that lies at theheart of geography today results from an aware-ness that there are simply many geographiesand many possible worlds. Uncertainty arisesbecause we know not which geographyto choose, nor which possible reality weshould aim for.We run the risk of becomingdogmatic by trying to force all worlds intoone very limited format, and in doing so weignore, belittle, or forget the others. (Golledge,1981: 21)

Introduction

Behavioral research in geography (I havenever liked the term ‘behavioralism’, for itleads to unthinking categorization) has beenone of the least understood and most misrep-resented fields of the discipline. The mostcommon misrepresentation (produced in partby a frenetic desire to label this work withyet another ‘ism’) has been to confuse theextreme ‘behaviorism’ of Skinner, Pavlov, andcompany with ‘behavioral’ research based onworks by Tolman (1948),Lewin (1951),Piaget(1950), Piaget and Inhelder (1967), and othersemphasizing perceptual- and cognitive-basedresearch.

Distinctive Features of BehavioralResearch

As opposed to geographic interest in themovement traces and physical characteristics

(e.g. distance, frequency, and volume ofmovement) of people as they performed activ-ities required for everyday living (such asshopping, recreating, journeying to work,changing residence, and migrating), behavioralgeographers evinced an interest in seekingprocess explanations for why specific spatialactions were undertaken.A first distinctive fea-ture of behavioral research, then, was that itemphasized process rather than form (Galeand Olsson, 1979). Rather than examining theform or pattern of spatial behavior, an empha-sis was transferred to examining the spatialcharacteristics of behavioral processes such asperception, learning, forming attitudes, mem-orizing, recalling, and using spatial thinkingand reasoning to explain variations in humanactions and activities in different environmen-tal settings. But there were no data sets forreference and use in these endeavors. Rather,primary data had to be collected by survey,interview, observation, or recall. Such datacould be either quantitative or qualitative (seePart 3), thus requiring behavioral geographersto move beyond the initial offerings ofthe quantitative revolution and its normativemodels and parametric, population-based sta-tistical analysis, to also include unidimensionaland multidimensional scaling, hierarchicalclustering, analysis of variance, and exploratoryanalysis generally. This required borrowingtechniques from other disciplines or modify-ing existing techniques for use in the spatialdomain.And, as a necessary adjunct, the needto evaluate results obtained from the newapproaches stimulated a search for new theories

6


and models that did not require economic andspatial rationality or assumptions that removedenvironmental and personal variation from theproblem space. Lastly, behavioral researchersfocused more on individuals than on groupsor populations, and this disaggregated researchdeparted markedly from the typical aggregatedanalysis of secondary data (e.g. censuses) thattypified much of the other research in humangeography (particularly economic and urbanresearch).

Epistemologies such as environmentaldeterminism, naturism, empiricism/positivism,rationalism, transactionalism, interactionalconstructivism, phenomenology, and post-modernism have all influenced behavioralresearch at different times. In particular, GaryMoore and I (1976) described how theform-oriented ideas of Kant (1724–1804)influenced the theoretical and quantitative‘revolution’ in the 1960s and consequentlyimpacted some emerging areas of behavioralresearch. We pointed out that, based on theKantian view, it was difficult to separate theprocess of knowing from the knowledgeitself. This confusion influenced a gradualchange among human geographers generallywho began emphasizing process approachesof neo-Kantian, cognitive behavioral, andphenomenological perspectives.

It is apparent that behavioral geographyemerged in response to a need to know moreabout human–environment relations thancould be obtained from the analysis of sec-ondary data on population attributes and posthoc examination of human movements. In thebalance of this chapter, I first examine howbehavioral geographers dealt with expandingtheir universe of discourse to include bothobjective and subjective reality. Thereafter,I follow a timeline, illustrating how this areaof interest has changed as the influence oftheories and concepts from spatial perceptionand spatial cognition became more marked,andas the tie between behavioral geography andcognitive psychology became stronger.

The Behavioral Geographer Looksat the Nature of Reality

Given a philosophy that emphasized humanthinking and behavior, then one wouldassume that, intervening between an externalworld and a mass of sensate beings trying toimpose structure on the chaotic mass of sen-sory messages that bombard them on a day-by-day basis, are our internalized reflectionsof this external flux.What challenged behav-ioral researchers was to find out the nature ofany isomorphisms between the flux of exter-nal reality and the realities constructed in theminds of sensate beings. It had to be recog-nized that our own constructions are notindependently invented, as on a tabula rasa,but derive from the concepts handed downto us in language, literature, image, gesture,and behavior.

Thus, relevant theory at that time sug-gested that, when we talk about a child learn-ing an environment, we recognize that thelearning process is constrained by languageperhaps as much as by experience, and that,probably, more or less traditional interpreta-tions of experience and easily identifiableobjects dominate what is coded and stored inthe early learning processes.The adult, havinglearned the language and other modes ofinformation processing and communication,lives and behaves in a world of concepts thatrelate both to real objects (which can bedirectly perceived) and to imagined or hypo-thetical constructs that can be identified andcomprehended (e.g. the concept of a cognitivemap). Perceptions provide intuitive data thatfacilitate interpretation. Reality to an adult,then, consists of experienced, perceived, andremembered features, objects, events, andbehaviors to which a person has been exposedor which she/he has experienced. Behavioralresearchers realized that, to deal with an envi-ronment that consists of objective reality, oneassumes (1) that each individual places them-selves and others in a common external world,

76ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


(2) that elements of this external world existand will continue to exist even after a person’sinteractions with them cease, and (3) thatobjects in external reality will continue toexist as part of a total external environmentquite independent of particular human aware-ness. Behavioral researchers also assumed(4) that knowledge of the existence of placesand features can be retained in memory evenafter interaction ceases and a person is physi-cally removed from the experienced place, and(5) that sensate beings function in objectiveenvironments by disengaging the objects ofsuch environments from their own actions(Golledge, 1979: 110). The adoption of suchpremises marks the beginnings of an approachthat goes beyond objectification and accounts,at least in part, for our joint or common abil-ity to specify the nature of objective reality as itappears to humans. It also underlies the premisesthat we can collect information about suchrealities and represent them in ways that allowmany different people to comprehend the rep-resentation, to reach a common level of under-standing of what an environment consists of,and to communicate about places, features,objects, and events.This foray into the humansenses thus assumed that objective worldsbecome ‘real’ to us when we add people intotheir setting.

Lee (1973) proposed that reality is any-thing that can be apprehended in perceptionand grasped in thought and understanding.In this view, experiences are real, concepts arereal, facts are real, and reality is essentially theongoing flux of process.The task of overcom-ing this ‘nature of reality’ barrier presented agreat conceptual problem for many behav-ioral researchers, for it involved accepting aworld of both objective and subjective reality.Being unable to justify such a reality –because of the difficulty of recovering andrepresenting it – some researchers becamedisenchanted with the potential utility of theapproach and, during the 1970s, moved awayfrom behavioral research.What was needed at

that time was a way of overcoming (or at leastbypassing) the barrier to thinking about andworking with the world in the mind andthe human–environment relations that helpedmake up that world. The need to provide aricher base for continued research meantexcursions into new theory and methods.The result was the development of what Ihave called a ‘process view of reality’ whichtranscends into a ‘process philosophy of every-day life’. In essence, this view is based onthe assumptions that we develop human–environment relational knowledge via aninteractional or experiential process, and thatour behaviors reveal how we have bridged thegap between information encoded and storedin long-term memory, our sensing of theworld around us, and the hard facts of objec-tive reality.This process philosophy of every-day life has justified many new directions forresearch and has provided a rationale forexploring subjective as well as objectiveworlds. For example, Susan and Perry Hanson(1993) have written a compelling work on‘The geography of everyday life’which derivesfrom a view that both naive and taught spatialknowledge derives from the processes of livingand interacting. It has provided the basis forrationalizing an interest in non-traditionalproblems (such as the spatial concerns of vari-ously disabled populations). And it has pro-vided a satisfactory way of understanding therationale behind daily, weekly, monthly, yearly,or longer episodic patterns of human activity.This process philosophy allowed researchers toassume that everything is real in some sense oranother, and the problem facing one is findingthe right sense in which something becomesreal. Essentially, it suggests that only by under-standing the processes that guide thinking,reasoning, and acting can we fully compre-hend the geospatial patterns found in human–environment relations.

This basis carries with it another set ofassumptions, this time about humans. Forexample, it assumes that each being has a

PHILOSOPHICAL BASES OF BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHÿÿ77


means of constructing a reality in a way thatfacilitates comprehension. This may involverecognizing systems of spatial relationsamong objects, between people, and amongpeople and objects. So, each being needs anunderstanding of itself in relation to externalobjects and settings in which the objects exist(i.e. must pay attention to the way our mindrelates to or reflects the flux outside itsboundary). People in general must have theability to form simultaneous spatiotemporalunderstandings that incorporate both physi-cal relations and the human interpretation ofthose relations.

In the decade following this search foridentity, psychologist Sholl (1987) suggestedthat spatial knowledge consists of self-to-object and object-to-object relations, both ofwhich are needed for environmental know-ing. Self-to-object (egocentric) understand-ings allow an individual to comprehendwhere he/she is in an environment, regardlessof scale, by relating environmental objects andfeatures to self in a vector-like manner. Self-to-object relations are dynamic and must bespatially updated after every spatial movementor turning motion. Object-to-object rela-tions, on the other hand, remain stable, evenafter human behavior has changed the self-to-object relations. This perspective has domi-nated geographic thinking and reasoning fordecades. Here people are treated as objects,just like other environmental features, and aregrouped and classified by objective factorssuch as location, age, sex, occupation, andincome. For example, the object-to-objectlocational arrangement of cities in the USremains the same, regardless of from where itis observed. Object-to-object relations formthe bases of communal understanding andallow us to ask and answer questions such as‘Where am I?’, ‘Where are you?’, ‘Where amI in relation to you?’, ‘Where are we in rela-tion to other things in the world?’, and ‘Whereare things located in the world?’Traditionally,the study of object-to-object relations has

been a significant part of both human andphysical geography. But it became apparent tobehavioral researchers that not only do wehave to assume that it is possible for a humanto develop this type of objective spatial under-standing, but we also have to assume thatinternalized reflections of the external fluxmight have a structure and a set of common-alities that differ from objective reality. This, inturn, implies that internalized spatial know-ledge structures must have constancy in theirimaging, sensing, and perceptions, and a rea-sonable degree of uniformity in terms of con-cepts that are constructed by mind so thatelements of the external flux can be recog-nized and elaborated within a personalizedcommunicable/information system. Behavioralresearchers thus began following a path whichassumed that conscious perception involvedan act of selecting from unconscious experi-ence those elements in which there is repeti-tion and similarity. Thus, percepts becomeclearer and more precise as the involved con-cepts become clearer and more precise.

Formalizing Behavioral Approachesover Time

By the early 1970s, behavioral researchers hadbegun asking perplexing questions – such as‘What is reality?’ and ‘What reality is relevant?’For some experts, it seemed that reality wassimply what most people recognized it to be.To philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, itwas the sum total of atomistic facts in the uni-verse. Reality as a collection of atomic factsseems to be behind what Wittgenstein dis-cussed as ‘what is the case’. As they acquiredmore knowledge about human–environmentrelations, behavioral geographers beganrejecting this atomistic view of reality as thesole basis for environmental knowing. Theyalso began suspecting the relevance of eco-nomic and spatial rationality to describe realhuman states. Thus began their shift from

78ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


normative theory to subjective reality. Thismove was facilitated by Simon’s treatise onModels of Man (1957), introduced to geo-graphers by Wolpert (1964). Simon offeredrealistic assumptions about human decision-making and choice behavior that quicklyproved to be more realistic than the simple-minded assumption of economic and spatialrationality that helped bring powerful nor-mative models into the discipline.

As early as 1967, Lowenthal had recog-nized three approaches that typified whatwas soon termed ‘environmental perceptionand behavior research’ in the discipline.Thesewere (1) a research theme based on humanattitudes to extreme environmental events(e.g. natural and technological hazards),(2) examination of spatial characteristics oflandscape aesthetics and perceived environ-ments (e.g. studies of landscape tastes andemotional states brought on by experiencingdifferent places), and (3) research on spatialdecision-making and choice behaviors. Thefirst of these divisions (hazard research) grewrapidly by focusing on the nature of hazardsand human reactions to them (e.g. in termsof attitudes and risk evaluation).The secondlinked to cultural and historical geography,emphasizing ‘in temporal context’ as a criticalconcept of environmental descriptions.The third began focusing on the cognitiveprocesses involved in spatial decision-makingand choice behavior.After the publication ofthe first collection of behaviorally orientedpapers by Kevin Cox and myself (1969) inwhich David Stea introduced the concept ofcognitive maps to geography, interest rapidlyexpanded beyond that which had previouslybeen due to the works of Lynch (1960) oncity images and Gould (1966) on space pref-erence surfaces. In particular, cognitivebehavioral research was influenced by RogerDowns’ (1970) paper on cognitive imagesof shopping centers which showed thatsubjective reality had recoverable dimensionsthat connected subjective and objective

worlds and could be used to help explainspatial actions.

There was, however, some holdover fromthe early 1960s in the philosophy behind thisresearch area.To achieve acceptable explana-tions, things being perceived and reactions tothem had to be placed in ‘the right category’,which would help introduce clarity, order,validity, and reliability into subjective experi-ences. On the surface, this appears to be aretreat into objectification. But, by under-standing that categorization is a cognitiveprocess that helps to impose order on whatmay sometimes be considered chaos, thisperceived retreat was turned into a vigorouspositive force. Adopting this perspective ledfurther to accepting notions that informationmust be transformed into knowledge beforeit is useful, and that knowledge must be com-municable and have some common base. Inother words, we must pay attention to theway our mind relates or reacts to the fluxoutside its boundary, and we must have oursenses select and send relevant messages to bestored in memory and manipulated by mind.This point of view thus recognized thatknowledge is created in the mind and resultsfrom the reaction between mind and mes-sages that emanate from the external universeand which are filtered through the humansenses. Our knowledge of a particular envir-onment or setting must therefore be com-posed of selections from the mass of messagesthat bombard a person’s senses. Only thoserecognized as personally relevant among themass of ‘to whom it may concern’ messagesbypass the sensory filtering, are encoded, andtake residence in long-term memory.

Transactionalism, InteractionalConstructivism, and CognitiveBehavioral Research

As a result of articulating these sentiments,one research stream (the cognitive behavioral)



began to be identified more with behavioralresearch than the other two segments. Hazardresearch branched into its own setting, even-tually separating somewhat into hazard andrisk segments. Landscape geography graduallybecame enmeshed in a new cultural geo-graphy that became more concerned withhuman values and beliefs. While both areasretain a substantial tie to behavioral theory,methods, and concepts, they also stand todayas separate specialties.

Cognitive behavioral researchers assumedthat mind orders its content and builds it intoa yet unknown structure. They assumed thatmind manipulates sensory experience andstores information via manipulation activitiessuch as ‘spatial thinking’ and ‘spatial reasoning’.Particular examples of how research was beingpracticed appeared in the early 1970s in ahighly influential book Image and Environment,edited by Roger Downs and David Stea(1973).This quickly became the bible for cog-nitive behavioral research and its contents werethe inspiration for two decades of research onspatial behavior.

The results of internal manipulationsof sensed and encoded data are inputs todecision-making and choice behavior and, assuch, influence human actions and activities.Accepting that knowledge is not immediateor innate assumes that it is constructed by themind, often as the result of experience dur-ing a learning process.

An interactional-constructivist view firstbegan to seriously influence ways of thinkingby behavioral geographers after Gary Mooreand I published an edited collection, Environ-mental Knowing (1976). In our introductionto this volume, we suggested that behavioralresearchers should adopt an interactional-constructivist perspective to guide their thinkingand reasoning activities. An interactional-constructivist view acknowledges that, whileeveryone may well live in the same externalworld, people may perceive it as a set of dif-ferent realities, and, consequently, because of

different transactional patterns betweenhumans and an environment, no two personsmay construct their reality in precisely thesame way. This does not mean we all existonly in unique realities, for we still haveto communicate and interact to survive.Thisrequires a base of some sort of commonstructure.

Finding out what is common and what isidiosyncratic in personal realities has alwaysbeen at the heart of the cognitive behavioralapproach in geography. Researchers examinedthe differently constructed realities to findwhat is common, constant, and communicableand to identify what is idiosyncratic, individ-ual reality dependent, and communicable toothers only after detailed explanation of theconstruct base. Having advanced this thesis ina joint introduction to Environmental Knowing,Gary Moore and I argued that it must beobvious that such a position is inconsistentwith pure objectification, extreme scientism,and other bogeymen and straw men that havebeen used to critique behavioral research.People still confuse the extreme Skinnerian-type behaviorism of stimulus–response, oper-ant conditioning, and behavioral modificationwith a cognitive or perceptual behavioralapproach to creating spatial knowledge. HelenCouclelis and I (1983) tried to rectify thesemisconceptions by detailing how behavioralgeography differed from behavior modifica-tion theories, but to this day there is stillsome residual confusion in texts examiningthe history of geographic thought. Part ofour thesis was that a ‘positivist’ (or scientific-experimentalist) view that stresses a need forvigorous knowledge discovery based on use ofscientific method to produce reliable and validstatements can also be a humane approach and,indeed, was an important part of the humanscience in which cognitive behavioral researchwas embedded.

In Chapter 2, Kitchin provided anoverview of positivism. In essence, this is a sci-entific and empirical philosophy that stresses

80ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


experimentation and empirical analysis as away of producing valid and reliable outcomes.Positivists engage in physical, natural, biotic,and human science.The positivist philosophythat underlies much behavioral geographyis not the stimulus–response, approach–avoidance, conditioned response or behaviormodification type of experimental researchthat is common in some areas of psycholo-gical research (particularly on animals).This isa classic misinterpretation by writers on thenature of geography who do not explorethoroughly the different forms of experi-mental research.Those conducting researchin behavioral geography have emphasizedcognitive and perceptual processes and variouslearning theories as the basis of their scienceand experimentation, not the stimulus–response models so often identified with it.Experiments with humans are not under-taken lightly or carelessly. This type ofresearch has always been subject to scrutinyby national and local human subject commit-tees who evaluate whether or not a particu-lar project will put a participant at risk in anypersonal, social, medical, psychological, oreven economic way.

Many filters, evaluations, and constraintsare placed on the behavioral researcher beforeany interaction involving data collection withhuman participants can be undertaken. Thisensures that participants are protected andtreated humanely and courteously, with greatconcern for their wellbeing. Factors such asboredom, mental and/or physical fatigue, andsafety are matters of supervisory importance.Few of these things are realized or acknow-ledged, especially by geography’s criticalthinkers who have never designed or carriedout such experimentation.

Because of this type of monitoring, therehas been a constant evolution of cognitivebehavioral research from a ‘hard’ base domi-nated by empirical research via experimentaldata collection and quantitative processing, toa base that involves collecting both ‘hard’ and

‘soft’ data and using quantitative or qualitativeexperimental procedures and methods ofanalysis. As we will see later, the result hasbeen that behavioral research has expandedinto many new areas.

How Philosophy has Enabled thePractice of Behavioral Research

The emphasis on personal data about know-ledge, perceptions, and actions required thedevelopment of experimental designs forlaboratory and field data collection. It should beno surprise that scientific methods and positivephilosophy were prominent.While still funda-mental in much cognitive behavioral research,the need to observe and examine people’s feel-ings and beliefs, as well as their reactions tostructured task situations, necessitated anexpansion of the epistemological bases and thedesign of data collection processes. Two suchbases were transactionalism and interactionalconstructivism.Transactionalism acknowledgedthe dynamic nature of human–environmentrelations, that most behaviors are in a state offlux and may change as environments changeor as time passes. It accepted that experiencewas the key to spatial knowledge acquisitionand directed attention away from static, cross-sectional experience to behavior that existedin space–time. Interactional constructivismlikewise focused on the dynamic nature ofhuman–environment relations, but emphasizedthat people live and interact in constructedrealities.The roles of perception and cognitionwere paramount in understanding why peopleperformed actions and selected activities.

The transactional and interactional-constructivist base for thinking about spatialbehavior raised questions as to how spatialknowledge accumulates, how spatial learningtakes place, and how age, sex, ethnicity, race,culture, or membership in social and eco-nomic groups influence human–environmenttransactions and impact the development and



comprehension of spatial concepts andconstructs. Pursuing answers to these questionshas taken behavioral geographers on a wildride. Forays have been made into the realmsof consumer behavior, housing markets,leisure and tourist activities, disaggregatebehavioral modeling of human activities,children’s environments, hazards, emotionalreactions to environments, environmental per-sonalities, human wayfinding, movies, risk,and many other areas. With each excursioninto a novel area, methodological changeswere necessary to suit the type of transactionsbeing examined.As these areas were explored,the methodological armory of the behavioralresearcher expanded.On the quantitative ana-lytic side, new representational and analyticalprocedures included things such as computa-tional process models for computer simula-tion of household movement; logistic modelsof mode choice for urban travel; and labor-atory experiments to clarify spatial abilities.Onthe qualitative analytic side, new approachesincluded the use of focus groups to clarifyknowledge, attitudes, and opinions; non-probability surveys such as ‘person-in-the-street’ interviewing, quota sampling, casestudies, and experimental observation; toy playthat revealed children’s latent spatial awareness;and photographing play and activity environ-ments to reveal customs and practices thatmight otherwise not be discovered.

Looking at Alternative Realities

Research sensitive to the existence and needsof special populations has portrayed a very dif-ferent reality from that experienced by thegeneral population. For example, persons withmental problems may construct realities thatare personally unique due to their limitedability to comprehend two- and three-dimensional geospatial concepts and constructs.Autistic children may construct realities thatare very different from those experienced by

others around them, such that communicationbecomes difficult if not impossible. Peoplewith limited intellectual development appearto create highly linear realities.The realities ofsome groups of disabled people (such as thosewho are vision impaired) likewise can be verylinear, and, consequently, appear to differ fromthe realities of many able-bodied people interms of far fewer known environmental fea-tures, less awareness of distant places and land-marks, and poorer knowledge of the numberof known routes. For a homeless person, theworld may shrink to a habitable neighbor-hood. For disabled people living in grouphomes, however, a hostile neighborhood filledwith NIMBY sentiments may surround themand restrict local movement. For a wheelchairperson, a curb without a curb cut may proveto be an impassable barrier that constrainsinteractions. For an able-bodied person, suchan environmental feature may be a negligibleone and not even be represented in memory,or be considered only as part of a ‘street’ con-struct. A blind person walking down a side-walk filled with street furniture and writtensignage constructs a reality that may be veryincomplete, fragmented, and linear comparedto the able-bodied person’s reality which,usingreadily available information from visualsources, may bear a much closer resemblanceto the objective physical world. Given such aperspective, it is reasonable to assume that somedisabled groups can only experience parts ofthe environment because of the existence ofwhat to them constitute barriers to travel or toexperience (e.g. people restricted in travel maynever know what is in the next block to theirright). Consequently, the information towhich they are exposed is but a fraction of theinformation to which an able-bodied person isexposed. The resulting memory structuresavailable for internal manipulation by the mindare consequently lean and limited comparedto the information available for manipula-tion by the mind of an able-bodied person,even though equivalent cognitive processes of

82ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


thinking and reasoning are available to bothgroups. In the past, some critics have failed tocomprehend this difference (Gleeson, 1996;Imrie, 1996). Understanding that some groups,because of disability, lack of education, lack ofexperience, or lack of language, may haveimpoverished memory sets has led behavioralgeographers to pursue burning questionsrelated to the nature of the realities constructedby members of such groups, the differencesbetween them, and the impacts that a relativelyimpoverished memory bank has on negotiat-ing a setting.

The Barrier of Methodology

The development of concept knowledgerelevant to spatial behavioral research at timesstumbled on the barrier of methodology. Forexample, the introduction of the concept ofa cognitive map necessitated considerableresearch about methodologies for recoveringthe content of such maps before the conceptcould become part and parcel of geographicthinking. The early attempts to use Lynch’s(1960) methods of compiling sketch mapswere criticized because they lacked the metricgeometry needed to allow cartographic inter-pretation (i.e. they lacked scale and a frame ofreference for checking direction and orienta-tion, and were dependent on graphic skills).The ‘mental maps’ methodology used byGould (1966) proved to be stated preferencesurfaces produced by trend surface analysisof communal rankings of places rather thanexternalizations of stored spatial memories.Demko and Briggs (1970) and Johnston(1972) showed the difference between these‘stated’ (i.e. ideal or preferred) evaluations and‘revealed’ (or actual) behaviors in the contextof predicting migratory movements.

The need to find appropriate methods forexternalizing information stored in the mindwas investigated from a variety of viewpointsusing statistics, diagrams, verbal descriptions,

model building, and metric and non-metricscaling procedures (procedures which weresummarized in Kitchin’s (1996) CMap soft-ware). While sketching and describing weredirect procedures for externalizing and repre-senting spatial knowledge, other methodsrecovered ‘latent’ spatial structures via indirectmethods of recovering these ‘spatial products’.Experimentation with these methodologiesdominated behavioral research in the 1970sand much of the 1980s.While some potentialresearchers were ‘turned off ’ by this method-ological emphasis, it was essential in that itenabled reliable and valid access to spatialinformation stored in long-term memory,and facilitated its representation and analysisin ways not previously possible. Dissolvingthe methodological barriers by constructingrelevant experimental designs and proceduresmade possible the next critical steps in behav-ioral research.

Summary

Experiences which pass sensory thresholdsand of which we consequently becomeaware are encoded, stored, and used in men-tal manipulations to assist in the ongoingprocess of interacting with and living in aneveryday environment.Thus, researchers havepursued answers to questions such as: whatrelationships exist between objective realityand the world constructed inside our heads?How can we determine the nature of therelationship between a human in the worldand the world in a human? What influenceswhether a message emanating from a com-plex external world is accepted as one worthstoring in long-term memory? How can wedetermine what people know about theworld they live in? How can we represent,analyze, and interpret the world existing inour minds? Do we construct experimentsthat are designed (like those in psychology)to find out how we think and what we think



about? Or do we follow geographic traditionby observing revealed actions, activities, andbehaviors, suggesting reasons for why theytook place? How best can we represent infor-mation obtained from individuals in forms sothat others can compare their own construc-tions with them? And what contribution inperforming these tasks is made to the accu-mulation of geographic knowledge?

Many of these questions have surfaced inthe writings of behavioral geographers at var-ious times over the last 40 years.The fact thatthey have surfaced time and again showssome constancy in the philosophy of learningand investigation and points to the serious-ness of the problems behind these musings.

The philosophies that at times haveunderlain behavioral research and thinking ingeography have included (and still include):the classic empiricism and scientific methodsof positivism; the philosophies of mind ofvarious cognitive thinkers; the transactional-ists and the interactional constructivists; andthe realists, the rationalists, and the natural-ists. Each has contributed to definingresearch questions, research methodologies,and research interpretations. Each has pro-vided a base for discussing the nature of real-ity, the confound between subjective andobjective realities, the mind–body problem,and modes of interpretation of findings. Wehave seen how rationalism and empiricismhelped develop the hazards/risks stream, howrealism and naturism helped the landscapeaesthetics stream, and how transactionalism,interactional constructivism and structuralism

helped define the cognitive behavioralstream. In particular, the latter focused atten-tion on cognitive behavioral processes,encouraged the search for primary data, andencouraged the use of a wide variety of quan-titative and qualitative methodologies, exper-imental designs, and analytical and inferentialprocedures.

But the essence of trialing these variousphilosophies boils down to how one inter-prets the concept of reality. The epistemo-logies that, to me, have given the greatestinsights into developing knowledge abouthuman–environment relations have been theinteractional-constructivist and transactionalapproaches.These emphasize the importanceof mind in making sense of objective reality,and also allow treatments ranging from con-trolled laboratory experimentation withpeople undertaking stringently controlledtasks, to the qualitative interpretation of sub-jectively acquired information about actions,beliefs, and emotions relating to specific orgeneral environmental settings.

To label this wide variety of ways ofthinking and reasoning with a simple ‘ism’(such as ‘behavioralism’) does not do justiceto the richness and complexity of the behav-ioral approach. In fact, there is not one‘behavioral approach’, but many. This diver-sity makes behavioral research in geographyappealing and potentially productive. Withthe ‘which ism’ categorization question outof the way, this stream of geospatial thinkingand reasoning could be a major focus in thefuture search for geographic knowledge.

84ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

References Couclelis, H. and Golledge, R.G. (1983) ‘Analytic research, positivism, and behavioral

geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73: 331–9.Cox, K.R. and Golledge, R.G. (1969) Behavioral Problems in Geography: A Symposium.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Demko, D. and Briggs, R. (1970) ‘An initial conceptualization and operationalization

of spatial choice behavior: a migration example using multidimensional unfolding’,Proceedings, Canadian Association of Geographers, 1: 79–86.


Downs, R.M. (1970) ‘The cognitive structure of an urban shopping center’, Environmentand Behavior, 2: 13–39.

Downs, R. and Stea, D. (1973) Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and SpatialBehaviour. Chicago, ILL: Aldine.

Gale, S. and Olsson, G. (1979) Philosophy in Geography. Boston, MA: Reidel.Gleeson, B.J. (1996) ‘A geography for disabled people?’, Transactions of the Institute of

British Geographers, 21: 387–96.Golledge, R.G. (1979) ‘Reality, process, and the dialectical relation between man and

environment’, in S. Gale and G. Olsson (eds), Philosophy in Geography. Dordrecht:Reidel, pp. 109–20.

Golledge, R.G. (1981) ‘Misconceptions, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations ofbehavioral approaches in human geography’, Environment and Planning A, 13:1325–44.

Gould, P. (1966) ‘On mental maps’. Paper presented at the Community of MathematicalGeographers, Michigan University, Ann Arbor, MI.

Hanson, S. and Hanson, P. (1993) ‘The geography of everyday life’, in T. Gärling andR.G. Golledge (eds), Behavior and Environment. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 249–69.

Imrie, R. (1996) ‘Ablist geographies, disablist spaces: towards a reconstruction ofGolledge’s “Geography and the Disabled’’’, Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers, 21: 397–403.

Johnston, R.J. (1972) ‘Activity spaces and residential preferences: some tests of thehypothesis of sectoral mental maps’, Economic Geography, 48: 199–211.

Kitchin, R.M. (1996) ‘Exploring approaches to computer cartography and spatial analy-sis in cognitive mapping research: CMAP and MiniGASP prototype packages’,Cartographic Journal, 33: 51–5.

Lee, H.N. (1973) Percepts, Concepts, and Theoretic Knowledge. Memphis, TN: MemphisState University Press.

Lewin, K. (1951) Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper.Lowenthal, D. (ed.) (1967) Environmental Perception and Behavior. Chicago, IL:

Department of Geography, University of Chicago.Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Moore, G.T. and Golledge, R.G. (eds) (1976) Environmental Knowing: Theories,

Research and Methods. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross.Piaget, J. (1950) The Psychology of Intelligence, trans. M. Piercy and D. Berlyne.

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B. (1967) The Child’s Conception of Space. New York: Norton.Sholl, M.J. (1987) ‘Cognitive maps as orienting schemata’, Journal of Experimental

Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13: 615–28.Simon, H.A. (1957) Models of Man. New York: Wiley.Tolman, E.C. (1948) ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men’, Psychological Review, 55:

189–209.Wolpert, J. (1964) ‘The decision process in a spatial context’, Annals of the Association

of American Geographers, 54: 537–58.



STRUCTURATION THEORY: AGENCY, STRUCTUREAND EVERYDAY LIFE

Isabel Dyck and Robin A. Kearns

Introduction

In this chapter we make a case for structurationtheory in geographical analysis. Rather thana theory to be applied, sociologist AnthonyGiddens (1984) sees it as useful in providing‘sensitizing’concepts in analysis of the constitu-tion of the individual and society.Geographers’engagement with structuration theory, ini-tially in the 1980s, signalled the intenseexploration of ways that social theory couldinform understandings of the ‘sociospatialdialectic’ (cf. Soja, 1980).As historical material-ism vied with humanism in theorizing therecursiveness of social relations and spatialstructures (see for example Gregory andUrry, 1985), concepts of structuration pro-vided an attractive entry point for geo-graphers entering the agency–structure debateprominent at the time. Giddens’ particularformulation of structuration theory prob-lematized human agency and dismantled thenotion of a ‘macro’/ ‘micro’ dichotomy in theprocess. Through this theorizing, he urged aconceptualization of the contextuality of sociallife that sat well with contemporary geo-graphical concerns and was taken up notablyby Gregory (1981; 1982; 1989), Pred (1984)and Thrift (1985).This enduring problematichas been taken up in different guises throughthe social sciences; here we make the case forthe ongoing relevance of structuration theoryin geographical work.

Attention to Giddens’ way of integratingagency and structure in ‘bridge building’

between humanism (see Chapter 3) andMarxism (see Chapter 5) initially remainedprimarily within debates in cultural and socialgeography, but notions of structuration nowinform, explicitly or implicitly, work in varioussubfields of geography. Interest in the complexrelationship between human agency andthe constraints of structure brings commonground to the domain of human geographyinquiry; while this problematic is taken up var-iously through different theoretical perspec-tives, Giddens’ highly focused explicationprovides a strong foundational statement fromwhich to examine processes of enablement andconstraint. Geographers working with notionsof structuration have emphasized the spatialityof such processes. In this chapter we use exam-ples from our work to show the value of struc-turation theory in pursuing the ongoinginterest in the mutual influences of society andspace in forging everyday geographies. Thechapter proceeds as follows: we first set outcentral concepts of Giddens’ structuration the-ory taken up in geographical inquiry; we thenbriefly signal other work by geographers usingconcepts of structuration, before going on todescribe in some detail how our own work hasbeen informed by structuration theory; lastly,we comment on structuration theory’s contin-uing utility and its reworking in the context ofother contemporary social theory that informsthe agenda of human geographical inquiry. Inthe course of the chapter we provide researchexamples to ‘bring to life’ some of the theoret-ical concepts that are presented.

7


Giddens’ Structuration Theory

Structuration theory, as developed by Giddens(1976; 1979; 1981; 1984), essentially viewssociety as neither existing independently ofhuman activity nor being a product of it.Rather, this theory suggests an inherent spa-tiality to social life. For Giddens the problemof order, central to the sociological projectof the time, was not one of discovering anunderlying pattern of social life but rather aconcern for how social systems are boundtogether in time and space.This concern wasin an attempt to provide a non-functionalisttheory of society in response to an orthodoxythat was unable to integrate face-to-face inter-action with institutional analysis. He intendedto sensitize social analysis through emphasiz-ing the knowledgeability of the individualagent in the reproduction of social practice,the time–space contextuality of social lifeand the hermeneutic or interpretive nature ofanalysis.

The notion of the duality of structure iscentral to Giddens’ structuration theory, inwhich neither the human agent nor society isregarded as having primacy. This duality is arecursive process in which ‘structure is bothmedium and outcome of the reproduction ofpractices’ (1981: 5) that are themselves fuelledby both the intended and the unintendedconsequences of human conduct. The con-cepts of social system and social structure areintegral to the notion of the duality of struc-ture. Social systems are, essentially, regularizedrelations between individuals and groups,comprising routinely reproduced social prac-tices situated in time and space. These socialsystems are grounded in the knowledgeabilityof actors and contain structured properties asunderstood through the concept of structure.

Structure is regarded as ‘rules andresources’, which only exist temporally when‘presenced’ by actors; that is, when drawnupon as stocks of knowledge in day-to-dayactivity. Structure, then, exists only through

the concrete practices of human agents,recognized as competent and knowledgeable,who reproduce social life through their rou-tinized day-to-day encounters. Institutions,from this position, are viewed as chronicallyreproduced rules and resources. Resourcesinclude both physical environments andsocial relations within such environments.Furthermore, rules are not static, but may beamended due to the negotiable quality ofmeanings, evaluations and even power. Animportant element of the notion of structura-tion is the major role played by the unintendedoutcomes of human activity, as well as thosethat are intended.Together these feed back into‘structure’ and further influence day-to-dayactivities as ‘the unacknowledged conditions offurther acts’ (1984: 8). ‘Constraints’, therefore,are not externally imposed on the flow ofaction; instead, the structural components ofsociety that are ‘embedded in an enduring wayin institutions’ are both enabling and constrain-ing (1983: 78). The discovery of structureexposes both constraint and empowerment.

A fundamental aspect of the dualityof structure is Giddens’ understanding ofhuman agency and the contextuality of sociallife.Agency is based on the idea that the indi-vidual is a perpetrator of events and he or shecould have acted differently.The issue is notthat ‘agency’ is a given quality, but how it ispossible for human beings to act as agents.Here, Giddens distinguishes between discur-sive consciousness – what people can putinto words about their actions – and practicalconsciousness – that is, what actors knowabout how to do things in a variety of con-texts of social life, but may not be able to putinto words. He sees the routine and reflexiveapplication of practical consciousness, byknowledgeable practitioners, in the chronicconstitution and reconstitution of social life.Actors may not know the meanings of rulesbut can use them skilfully in interaction withthe possibility of transformation, for rulesand resources are not static but the media of

STRUCTURATION THEORYÿÿ87


production and reproduction of practices.This transformative capacity is of enormousimportance in understanding the notion ofsocial power in relation to human agency, forsocial change can be generated through socialpractice as it grows out of the everyday activ-ities of individuals. The strategic conduct ofhuman agents, however, does not take placeunder conditions of their own choosing.Unintended consequences become condi-tions bounding further action, and the bind-ing of social systems through their extensionover time and space suggests that the struc-tured properties of social systems may bebeyond the control of individual actors.Thisextension, system integration, is achievedthrough technological means such as letters,print, the telephone and, more recently, theexplosion of electronic communication.

The contextualization of human interac-tion in time and space is central to Giddens’thinking, as suggested in this statement:

the settings and circumstances withinwhich action occurs do not come out ofthin air; they themselves have to beexplained within the very same logicalframework as that in which whateveraction described and ‘understood’ hasalso to be explained. It is exactly this phe-nomenon with which I take structurationto be concerned. (1984: 343)

As Thrift (1985) points out, the recognition ofthe contextuality of action in time and spaceis not to argue for localism, but rather toadvocate a concern with how social systemschange over time and space. He interpretsGiddens’ view as one that comprehends thespatial aspects of social experience by under-standing the intermingling of ‘presence’ and‘absence’ in everyday life, or in other wordsthe continual interplay of agency and struc-ture over time and space. Here the notion oflocale is significant. Locales occur at all phys-ical scales, from a room in a house to the

territories demarcated by nation-states, andare not just points in space, but rather havefeatures that are used ‘in a routine manner toconstitute the meaningful content of interac-tion’ (Giddens, 1985: 272). Further, suchlocales are ‘regionalized’, meaning that regu-larized social practices in a given location maybe ‘zoned’ through legislation or informallyshared understandings, in time and space. Forexample, the separation of home from work-place is a form of regionalization, just as theinternal divisions of halls, rooms and floors ofa home are zoned according to their use tem-porally and by type of activity.What becomesimportant is the implication of regionaliza-tion for power relations, as certain social prac-tices may be more or less visible; examplesinclude the sequestration, through spatial sep-aration, of insanity and crime (see Gleeson,1999). Following from this, the environmentcan logically be seen as a matrix of locales, orsettings for encounters, which contain partic-ular combinations of resources that may bedrawn upon in action. Resources includephysical attributes and people in a locale, butalso refer to stocks of knowledge. It is impor-tant to note within this conceptualization thatlocales are not ‘givens’ but are created – forhuman agency designates human beings asmakers of their milieu, albeit within unequalpower relations.What Giddens’ work empha-sizes is that there is a transformative capacityto all human action. Power is generatedthrough the expansion of social systems andstructure over time and space that are simul-taneously experienced and drawn upon as the‘rules and resources’ of particular locales.

Giddens’ Structuration Theory andEmpirical Work

It is important to note that Giddens viewshis explication of structuration as providing‘sensitizing concepts’ for informing research,rather than a set of concepts to be applied; as

88ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Fincher (1987) suggests, individual conceptscannot readily be extricated from Giddens’extensive treatment and total approach ofstructuration theory. Indeed, geographersinvestigating a variety of topics have employeddifferent emphases in working with notionsof structuration. Gregory (1982) and Pred(1984), for example, worked with Giddens’critical engagement with time geography intracing how the material contingencies ofeveryday life are fundamental to understand-ing place as unfolding process. An associatedattempt to achieve a firmer binding of struc-ture and agency occurred through the workof Michael Dear and Adam Moos (Moos andDear, 1986; Dear and Moos, 1986) who wereamong the first geographers to both unravelthe language of structuration theory andattempt to apply it in an empirical study (intheir case, of mental health care and theso-called ‘boarding house ghetto’). Giddens’ideas later emerged as a catalyst in a heatedarena of debate that reformulated medicalgeography into ‘health geography’ throughembracing a sociocultural framework (Dornand Laws, 1994; Kearns, 1993).The value ofembracing the tension between structure andagency, whether invoked through the lan-guage and concepts of structuration theory,or through a more generalized recognition ofthe complex links between the individualand society that operate at different, layeredscales, has continued to inform recent workon culture and health (Gesler and Kearns,2002). Other contemporary usage occurs inmigration research where the concept of‘structurated patriarchy’, drawing directly onGiddens’ work, is used in analyses of the gen-dering of migration processes and outcomes(Halfacree, 1995).A specific focus on rules andresources,within the context of the core struc-turation concept of the ‘duality of structure’,is used in theorizing community activismin opposition to school closures in Ontario,Canada (Phipps, 2000). Phipps developed atypology of rules and resources that could be

useful for communities to use in activism, andfound structuration theory vital to a reinter-pretation of educational and facility-closureliteratures.

In our own work we have also beeninfluenced by Giddens’ conceptualization ofthe integration of agency and structure inone framework. Specific concepts fromGiddens’ structuration theory provided ananalytical lens for the first author’s workwith women with young children, and theemphasis on the recursiveness of agency andstructure continues to inform her later workwith immigrant women.The second author’srecent work in health geography also carriesthe legacy of notions of structuration inanalysing relationships between health, placeand health care where the ongoing impor-tance of taking account of both structure andagency is recognized.

Structuration theory, mothering work,and creating ‘safe space’ for children

In the early 1980s women with young chil-dren were entering the paid workforce inunprecedented large numbers. In my researchI was interested in the suburb as a domesticworkplace, and in how women worked prac-tically and ‘morally’ through the conflictsarising from participating in paid employ-ment while continuing to be the prime carersof children. In the language of structuration,I was interested in where and how know-ledge, in the form of information, was sharedand circulated; that is, where and how under-standings, rules and stocks of knowledgewere both modified and reaffirmed in thiscontext of social change. The locales ofeveryday mothering work could be expectedto be laden with culturally and gender-specific meanings, to be ‘presenced’ throughsocial interaction.The sensitizing concepts ofstructuration theory helped me explicate notjust how ‘context’ was a backdrop againstwhich the lives of the women in the study



took place, but how it was actively implicatedin the ways they practised motherhood in aparticular locality.

In-depth interviews and diaries keptby study participants were used to explorevarious aspects of the women’s everydayroutines – their actions, concerns and inter-pretations of their mothering work as well asthe locales in which they took place. I thensketched these data utilizing Giddens’ time–space maps, which showed where womenwent, when, with whom and why (see‘Anna’s day’, Box 7.1).This mapping revealedthe opportunities and constraints of theeveryday locales of mothering work –homes, schoolyards, streets, parks, transporta-tion modes – that helped me examine theinterplay of agency and structure, includingthe capacity of women to transform themeaning and practices of mothering.That is,in the language of structuration, I observedthe regionalization of locales, the rules andresources that were drawn upon, and theunintended consequences of the women’sactions for how they were able to combinemothering work and paid labour. Undera rubric of ‘what’s best for the children’,practical examples of combining waged anddomestic labour were shared by women andthe meaning of a ‘good’ mother was renego-tiated.The spaces of the street, parks, school-yards – where women waited for their childrento come out of school – and preschool par-enting education sessions were all localeswhere such ‘mothering talk’ took place.Further, it was through such encounters inthe shared spaces of mothering work thatconditions allowing women to remain ‘goodmothers’ while participating in waged labourwere created. For instance, women createdflexibility in their use of time and spacethrough making arrangements for exchan-ging childcare and babysitting and constitutingthe street as a safe space for children throughshared ‘surveillance’ of street play. In short,children could be left under the care and

watchful eyes of other mothers while a womanwas away from home (Dyck, 1989; 1990;1996).

This work on suburban women, with itsfine-grained focus on the locales of rou-tinized quotidian life, and informed by sensi-tizing concepts of structuration, permitted anexploration of the circulation and negotia-tion of meanings and knowledge. The studybrought insight into how an array of ideasentered stocks of knowledge and becamepart of the complex recursive constitution ofspaces, identities, and transformation – as wellas reproduction – of cultural norms. Agencyand structure were commingled; women’severyday locales, and the routines of whichthey are a part, operated as sites for bothreproduction and change in mothering workand social identity.

Gender and migrant spaces

As in the study of suburban mothers, the firstauthor’s later work with immigrant womenshows them to be skilled, knowledgeableagents negotiating cultural knowledge invarious locales – the home, workplaces,immigrant education programmes, andneighbourhood spaces such as parks.A studyconcerning immigrant women’s manage-ment of health and illness found that tradi-tional healing and biomedical knowledgeswere negotiated and sometimes integrated ina way that suggested women were pragma-tists in the way they used traditional medi-cine and folk remedies in dealing with illness,using these approaches instead of, or in addi-tion to, biomedical strategies according tohow they best fitted in with the circum-stances of their everyday lives (Dyck, 1995).This work contests the commonly heldnotion that cultural beliefs act as barriers tosome minority populations’ use of westernmedicine.Another study is also showing hownotions of femininity and motherhood arebeing reworked in specific, neighbourhood

90ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES



BOX 7.1 ANNA’S DAY

Anna has two children, seven and four years old. While she had worked for short peri-ods of time since having children, she had decided not to return to paid employmentuntil both her children were attending school full-time. Her time–space map (Figure 7.1)illustrates her daily routine, indicating the places and sequencing of her activity ona day that she recorded and described in an interview. The home (represented bythe middle column of boxes) is the base from which her trips start and to where shereturns. The other columns of boxes indicate both everyday locales of activity, suchas the school and preschool, and those that may be less regular but constitute theroutinized activity of mothering work and home provisioning. The constant features ofAnna’s days during the week are the hours of her husband’s employment and thechildren’s school and preschool schedules. As can be seen from the time–spacemap, her more discretionary use of time and space is also centred around the chil-dren’s activities, such as soccer and swimming lessons, or other domestic activity,such as shopping for everyday needs and taking the family pet to the veterinarian.The mapping indicates the busyness of her days, as does her comment, ‘If it’s notone thing it’s another. I find it hard sometimes to keep track of what I need to do eachday.’ While her activity may seem mundane from the ‘outside’, the discussion of struc-turation theory you have read indicates how this everyday organization and use oftime and space is the very stuff of cultural continuity and transformation!

S

I

P

P

S

5

S

H

2

3

4

6

HSP

HomeSchoolPreschool

1 Home of child2 Veterinarian3 Grocery store4 Drugstore5 Swimming pool6 School − soccer practice

Figure 7.1


locales; here immigrant women negotiate notonly the taken-for-granted knowledge theybring from their countries of origin, but alsothe unfamiliar ‘ways of doing’ things theyencounter in Canada (Dyck and McLaren,2002; McLaren and Dyck, 2002). As in thestudy of mothering work, these two studiesdemonstrate that women’s everyday prac-tices, and the knowledge that guides these,are constituted through interactions in theeveryday locales making up quotidian lifewhere agency and structure ‘play out’.

In this recent work insights of Giddens’theory of structuration prevail, but through adifferent lens and a different set of sensitivi-ties. For instance, a gap in Giddens’ work wasa marginalization of culture and gender.Thisis not to say, however, that Giddens’ structura-tion theory has no currency for work con-cerning immigration and migration processesand outcomes. Halfacree (1995), for example,sees structuration theory useful in analysingthe gendering of migration through thenotion of ‘structured patriarchy’ together witha biographical approach (see also Halfacreeand Boyle, 1999). Here Giddens’ duality ofstructure is explicitly drawn on in demon-strating how differences in women and menmigrants’ labour market participation, framedby women’s usual status as the secondarymigrant, reconstitute structures of patriarchywhich are ‘both the medium and outcomeof the gendering of “labour migration”’(Halfacree, 1995: 173).

Notions of structuration, healthand place

The second author’s work illustrates the waysin which structuration theory is useful inanalysing various dimensions of the relation-ships among health and place. He traces aninterest in structuration ideas to his master’sthesis in which he grappled with the con-nections between individual behaviour, insti-tutional influences and community politics in

a rural New Zealand locality where therewere proposals for a large-scale irrigationscheme (Kearns, 1982).These concerns withthe links between geographic scales anddomains of action travelled with him toCanada where he joined an emergent tradi-tion of mental health care research atMcMaster University.To date, this work hadembraced two, largely separate, traditions ofpolitical-economic and behavioural workwhich loosely map onto the terms ‘structure’and ‘agency’. In other words, while somestudies of mental health care systems andusers operated at high levels of process andoutcome, emphasizing power and class(structure), others dealt with the (largely sta-tistical) detail of who was thinking or doingwhat, when (agency) (e.g. Dear, 1981; Dearand Taylor, 1982). Dear and Taylor’s (1982)work attempted to bring the political-economic and behavioural perspectivestogether in research on why some communi-ties reject the prospect of group homes formentally ill people, and was followed by Dear’scollaboration with Moos in thinking throughthe relationship between agency and structure.Working alongside people who were applyingthis theory inevitably impacted the secondauthor’s work. He was both fascinated with,and concerned for, the fragmented lives ofpeople with long-term psychiatric illnesseswhose world had become the so-called‘boarding house ghetto’. Disenchanted withboth the generalization of large statisticalsamples and the depersonalization of political-economic explanations for stigmatized poverty,he sought direct experience of the world ofthe drop-in centre and boarding house as away of informing the questions posed in, andthe analysis of, a small-scale survey (Kearns,1987). Ideas of sense of place were central tothe inquiry, but this construct itself wasreworked to include considerations of struc-ture and agency. For too much humanisticthinking threatened to leave people’s humanityunrealistically detached from societal and

92ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


material influence, and, in effect, displaced fromall that holds us in place.

In other health geography work thepioneering engagement with Giddens’ ideasby Moos and Dear has been followed, forinstance, by Baer et al. (2000) who useGidden’s notions of space and time con-straints to trace the influences on physicianrecruitment and retention. Indeed as geo-graphical work on health has embraced theblurred boundaries of social and culturalgeography, ideas drawn from structurationtheory retain their currency whether or notthe specific language of Giddens’ explicationof structuration is used. For instance, in aneffort to understand the influence of high

housing costs on family wellbeing, the notionof ‘discounting health’ was developed to sig-nal the way in which expenditure on notonly health care but also health practices isconstrained by the fixed costs of housing.Within a sample of racialized Pacific Islandmigrant families, in-depth interviewsrevealed that agency remained and decisionswere constrained not only by structures ofhousing and welfare provision, but also bycultural proscription (e.g. church donations)(Cheer et al., 2002). Elsewhere, in the ruralHokianga district of New Zealand, resistanceto health reforms and the potential loss of alocally owned health care system offered anopportunity to tease out the dynamics of


BOX 7.2 DAVID’S HOUSING

David lives in a boarding house on a street only a few blocks away from the poorerend of Main Street in the downtown area. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizo-phrenia seven years ago in the small town he grew up in and was hospitalized in theregional city. When discharged, he stayed in town, as that is where the best commu-nity mental health care service is, and where other former patients he got to knowduring his numerous stays in hospital live. He also feels safer in the city, away fromfamily friends and people who knew him as a teenager. His room is dark and musty,and barely large enough for a bed, a cupboard and a hotplate for cooking. It is oneof 18 rooms in the large rambling dwelling that has known better days. David has toleave the boarding house each morning after breakfast and cannot return until theafternoon. It is just the rules of the house, he says. There are not many options byday. He walks a lot. He could spend time at the ‘Care Centre’, a ‘drop-in’ run by thelocal mental health association. But David chooses to spend more time at the localdoughnut shop, where the owners turn a ‘blind eye’ to how long he takes to finish acoffee. His choices are limited, but he does have some agency: he opts to hang outin a less stigmatized place than among the other regulars.Yet in other ways his life ishighly structured at a number of levels. First, at the household scale, rules cast himout on the street to find places of respite by day. Second, at the urban level, bylawshave meant that boarding houses such as his are clustered into a few city streets,enhancing his chances of networking among former patients but heightening theirvisibility and contributing to the stigma of mental illness. Third, and beyond thespecifics of David’s here and now, the ‘place’ of the mentally ill has been structuredthrough generations of societal misunderstanding and marginalization in the healthcare system such that David’s day is characterized by coping rather than creativity.


structure and agency. In particular, the agencyof ‘social entrepreneurs’ was found to be cru-cial in challenging and transforming institu-tional structure that was anathema to whatGiddens might have labelled the long duréeof community tradition and history (Kearns,1998). Other research shows that just ashealth and place cannot be divorced inunderstanding health and illness experience,so too health care and its consumers – poten-tial or actual – should not be separated ana-lytically, for each constitutes and structuresthe other (Kearns and Barnett, 1997).

In sum, health geography has been morestrongly affected by the general influence,than by the concepts or language of struc-turation. It has sensitized health geographersto structure–agency ideas such that it is nowseldom that individual health experience orstructural preconditions for health and healthcare will be researched or theorized withoutreference to each other. In our view an ‘inter-nalized’ structuration perspective now pre-vails and this is evident in more recent healthgeographies in which structural constraintssuch as the ‘contract culture’ collide withindividual aspirations towards communitydevelopment (Kearns and Joseph, 2000).

Continuations and Conclusions

Giddens’ work has been valuable to geo-graphers in bringing together the social andthe spatial through a conceptualization of thecontextuality of social life that admits thehuman agent and structure in an integratedframework. Structuration concepts initiallyinformed a moment in cultural geographywhen social theory was seriously engaged inthe course of formulating the questions andtheoretical and methodological approachesof human geography (Gregson, 1987). Thenotions of locale and regionalization wereparticularly important in addressing issues ofscale and the concept of place. It is perhaps

the link between Giddens’ conceptualizationof time–space and the desire to move beyondthe underlying positivism of Hägerstrand’stime geography that acted as a catalyst forthe first consideration of Giddens’ work inthe 1980s. It is also noteworthy that personalconnections can lead to transformationswithin professions. In this respect, the colle-gial connections between Derek Gregory andAnthony Giddens at Cambridge were arguablyof great influence in facilitating the flow ofideas from sociology to geography. Certainlythe pioneering work on the relationshipsamong agency, structure and the recursiveconstitution of people and places has beenfundamental to a progression of inquiry inhuman geography. However, the rapid adop-tion of postmodernist ideas within humangeography’s cultural turn has diverted a con-centrated focus on notions of structuration.‘Third wave’ concerns with difference, identity,and uncertainty infuse work at the critical edgeof the discipline.

Our current work is located in this cli-mate of inquiry. So where do notions ofstructuration now fit? Poststructural concernswith difference and identity have tended todeflect attention away from material condi-tions and the ‘rules and resources’ throughwhich structure is realized, but the trickyproblematic of agency–structure remains.Wehave noted earlier some recent work in geo-graphy that directly draws on concepts fromGiddens’ structuration theory. In our ownwork, notions of structuration provide anecessary yeast to the dough: while we donot explicitly draw on Giddens’ concepts werecognize the ongoing theoretical importanceof the tension between structure and agencyin constructing explanations of everyday geo-graphies. Nevertheless, the globalization ofgoods and services, transnational movementsof people at unprecedented rates, enormousadvances in communication technology, andeconomic restructuring have shifted, if noterased, the agency–structure problematic.

94ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


This has been reformulated and extendedthrough an engagement with issues of powerrelations that stretch over time and spaceglobally, and create the conditions of westernindustrial ‘multicultural societies’ that arenow more prominent than in the early andmid 1980s. Since the 1980s the significanceof gender and ‘whiteness’ as structured rela-tions of power, and the instability of mean-ings, have become of central concern inunderstanding western postindustrial soci-eties; these are dimensions of structurationthat were not addressed in Giddens’ originalformulation of a non-functionalist theory ofsociety.Yet the insights from Giddens’ formu-lation of structuration theory remain invalu-able in retaining the crucial importance ofmateriality and issues of scale in analyses.

Notions of structuration also retain theircurrency in understanding how the spaces/locales of everyday life are both constitutiveof and constituted by meanings that arereproduced or reworked in small-scale ways.Grappling with the structure–agency debatealso endures in work concerned with theway that individual and collective action isinvariably constrained, yet holds the capacityto be transformative at the level of commu-nity politics and the experience of place.Recent work drawing specifically on struc-turation theory suggests there is considerableopportunity to employ its constituent notionsin new ways as a world predicated on the inter-locking scales of global and local processescontinues to unfold.


ReferencesBaer, L.D., Gesler, W.M. and Konrad, T.R. (2000) ‘The wineglass model: tracking the

locational histories of health professionals’, Social Science and Medicine, 50: 317–29.Cheer, T., Kearns, R.A. and Murphy, L. (2002) ‘Housing policy, poverty and culture: “dis-

counting” decisions among Pacific peoples in Auckland, New Zealand’, Environmentand Planning C: Government and Policy, 20: 497–516.

Dear, M.J. (1981) ‘Social and spatial reproduction of the mentally ill’, in M.J. Dear andA.J. Scott (eds), Urbanisation and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society. London:Methuen, pp. 481–97.

Dear, M.J. and Moos, A.I. (1986) ‘Structuration theory in urban analysis: 2. Empiricalapplication’, Environment and Planning A, 18: 351–73.

Dear, M.J. and Taylor, S.M. (1982) Not On Our Street. London: Pion.Dorn, M. and Laws, G. (1994) ‘Social theory, body politics and medical geography’, The

Professional Geographer 46: 106–10.Dyck, I. (1989) ‘Integrating home and wage workplace: women’s daily lives in a Canadian

suburb’, The Canadian Geographer, 33: 329–41.Dyck, I. (1990) ‘Space, time and renegotiating motherhood: an exploration of the domes-

tic workplace’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8: 459–83.Dyck, I. (1995) ‘Putting chronic illness in place: women immigrants’ accounts of their

health care’, Geoforum, 26: 247–60.Dyck, I. (1996) ‘Mother or worker? Women’s support networks, local knowledge and

informal childcare strategies’, in K. England (ed.), Who Will Mind the Baby?Geographical Perspectives on Child Care and Working Mothers. London: Routledge,pp. 123–40.

Dyck, I. and McLaren, A.T. (2002) ‘Becoming Canadian? Girls, home and school andrenegotiating feminine identity’. RIIM Working Papers (02–12), Vancouver.


Fincher, R. (1987) ‘Social theory and the future of urban geography’, The ProfessionalGeographer, 39: 9–12.

Gesler, W.M. and Kearns R.A. (2002) Culture/Place/Health. London: Routledge.Giddens, A. (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson.Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.Giddens, A. (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol 1. Power,

Property and the State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Giddens, A. (1983) ‘Comments on the theory of structuration’, Journal for the Theory of

Social Behavior, 13: 75–80.Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity.Giddens, A. (1985) ‘Time, space and regionalisation’, in D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds),

Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, pp. 265–95.Gleeson, B. (1999) Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge.Gregory, D. (1981) ‘Human agency and human geography’, Transactions of the Institute

of British Geographers, n.s. 7: 254–6.Gregory, D. (1982) Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution. London:

Macmillan.Gregory, D. (1989) ‘Presences and absences: time–space relations and structuration

theory’, in D. Held and J.B.Thompson (eds), Social Theory of Modern Societies: AnthonyGiddens and His Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185–214.

Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (eds) (1985) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London:Macmillan.

Gregson, N. (1987) ‘Structuration theory: some thoughts on the possibility of empiricalresearch’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 5: 73–91.

Halfacree, K. (1995) ‘Household migration and the structuration of patriarchy: evidencefrom the U.S.A.’, Progress in Human Geography, 19: 159–82.

Halfacree, K. and Boyle, P. (1999) ‘Introduction: gender and migration in the developedworld’, in P. Boyle and K. Halfacree (eds), Migration and Gender in the DevelopedWorld. London: Routledge, pp. 1–29.

Kearns, R.A. (1982) ‘Irrigation at Maungatapere: individuals, community and institutions’.MA thesis, Department of Geography, University of Auckland.

Kearns, R.A. (1987) ‘In the shadow of illness: a social geography of the chronicallymentally disabled in Hamilton, Ontario’, PhD dissertation, Department of Geography,McMaster University.

Kearns, R.A. (1993) ‘Place and health: towards a reformed medical geography’, TheProfessional Geographer, 45: 139–47.

Kearns, R.A. (1998) ‘ “Going it alone”: community resistance to health reforms inHokianga, New Zealand’, in R.A. Kearns and W.M. Gesler (eds), Putting Health intoPlace: Landscape, Identity and Wellbeing. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,pp. 226–47.

Kearns, R.A. and Barnett, J.R. (1997) ‘Consumerist ideology and the symbolic land-scapes of private medicine’, Health and Place, 3: 171–80.

Keaens, R.A. and Joseph, A.E. (2000) ‘Contracting opportunities: interpreting the post-asylum geographies of Auckland, New Zealand’, Health and Place, 6: 159–69.

96ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


McLaren, A.T. and Dyck, I. (2002) ‘‘‘I don’t feel quite competent here”: immigrant mothers’involvement in schooling’. RIIM Working Papers (02–12), Vancouver.

Moos, A.I. and Dear, M.J. (1986) ‘Structuration theory in urban analysis: 1. Theoreticalexegesis’, Environment and Planning A, 18: 231–52.

Phipps, A.G. (2000) ‘A structuration interpretation of community activism during schoolclosures’, Environment and Planning A, 32: 1807–23.

Pred, A. (1984) ‘Place as historically contingent process: structuration and the time-geography of becoming places’, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 74:279–97.

Soja, E.W. (1980) ‘The socio-spatial dialectic’, Annals, Association of AmericanGeographers, 70: 207–25.

Thrift, N.J. (1985) ‘Bear and mouse or bear and tree? Anthony Giddens’s reconstitutionof social theory’, Sociology, 19: 609–23.



REALISM AS A BASIS FOR KNOWING THE WORLD

Andrew Sayer

The name ‘realism’ might suggest it’s a philo-sophy that claims to have, unlike all the others,a ‘realistic’ view of the world, a privilegedaccess to some absolute truth about that world.Well, sorry, but that’s not what realist philo-sophy claims.1 In fact its most fundamental doc-trine should make us wary of such simplisticviews of knowledge and truth.The most basicidea of realist philosophy is that the world iswhatever it is largely independently of whatparticular observers think about it, and notsimply a product of the human mind. Peopleused to think the world was flat, but when theystarted thinking it was round, we don’t ima-gine that the earth itself changed shape too. Itsshape was unaffected by our ideas about it.Atthe same time, our ideas about the world arealways constructed in terms of various ways ofseeing – perceptual schemata, concepts anddiscourses.We cannot step outside these to seethe world directly as it is, for we need theseschemata etc. in order to see and think. So theworld exists largely independently of ourknowledge of it, but our descriptions of it donot, for they clearly depend on availableknowledge. Our accounts of the world arealways made in terms of available discoursesand these may vary in their ability to makesense of it, as they did in the case of differentdiscourses on the shape of the earth.There is anobvious caveat to make here, to do with thefact that knowledge is itself part of the socialworld, but I’ll come to that in a moment.

Most people – including most researchers –are realists at least some of the time, though

some researchers may be reluctant toacknowledge this and try to follow otherapproaches. Like all the ‘isms’ in this book,realism can be defined as much through whatit opposes as what it asserts.

Non-realists fail to make a distinctionbetween the world and our knowledge ofit, and so end up imagining either that thediscourses or types of knowledge are simplereflections of it (positivism), or that converselythe world is a product of our knowledge (idea-lism). Both these views make it difficult tosee how knowledge can be fallible. For real-ists, the fallibility of knowledge suggests thatthe world is not just whatever we care toimagine. When we make mistakes, are sur-prised by events, or crash into things, we sensethe ‘otherness’ of the world, its independencefrom our ideas about it. The implications ofthis are double-edged: on the one hand, thisotherness or independence of the worldimplies that the task of developing ideas thatcan make sense of it is going to be inherentlydifficult; on the other hand, the very fact thatwe can often realize when we have got thingswrong, through getting some negative feed-back from the world, implies that distinguish-ing among the various properties of the worldis not impossible. The very fact that we cansuccessfully do so many things through ourpractical interventions in the world suggeststhat the knowledge informing those inter-ventions has at least some ‘practical adequacy’.The flat earth theory was quite practicallyadequate for many activities, even though

8


we might want to say now that it was untrue.The round earth theory is more practicallyadequate than this, enabling us to do newthings like putting satellites into orbit, butit’s not perfect (the world seems not to beperfectly spherical).

Many readers may find this basic realistidea of the independence of the world fromour thought about it too obvious to be worthlabouring, and most advocates of other ‘isms’will accept it when pressed, though they oftenforget it, or conflate the world with our con-ceptions of it. However, it’s time to addressthat caveat. What about social phenomena?Aren’t they ‘socially constructed’, and there-fore dependent on our ways of thinking? Yesthey are, but not in a way that contradicts ourbasic realist proposition.The UK ConservativeParty is a social construction, but it is not mysocial construction; and though I may ‘con-strue’ – not construct – it in various ways, itwould exist even if I didn’t construe it at all.The discipline of geography is a social con-struction, a product of the interactions ofmany academics over long periods of time.Without that process of social construction itwould not exist as an object. But this lookslike a more difficult case: surely, the disciplineis our construction, that is, the social construc-tion of people like us. But here’s the qualifica-tion to the basic realist point: I said the worldcan exist largely independently of any particu-lar observers.Your doing a geography degreeand my writing this piece makes only a littledifference to the discipline of geography, for itis something that is already constructed, thoughit continues to be reproduced and transformedby many others.2

If we are not to reduce social constructionto mere wishful thinking – the social world iswhatever we care to suppose or construct itas – we have to bear in mind three points.First,we have to ask who is doing the constructing?In most cases it is not the geographer or socialscientist, who is merely doing some ‘constru-ing’ or observation and interpretation. Even if

our research has some influence on the socialphenomena under study – perhaps as theresult of our interviews influencing our inter-viewees – the changes are at any time usuallysmall, and they presuppose that there is some-thing independent of the researcher that canbe changed, thus confirming the basic realistpoint.

Second,we have to think about social con-struction as a process over time. Once thingshave been constructed, they gain a degree ofindependence from their constructors and fromsubsequent observers.

Third,we have to remember that attemptsat construction always use materials – notonly physical materials in this case, like con-crete, but ideational materials like people’sbeliefs and habits – and the attempts succeedor fail according to how they make use of theparticular properties of those materials. I mayimagine myself to be a brilliant entrepreneurbut fail to establish a successful firm becausemy attempts at constructing one failed totake into account the properties of the formsof social organization and activities I was try-ing to marshal. I may have underestimatedthe skills needed or be unable to pay workersenough to get them to work for me, or I mayfail to stimulate any demand for the product.At any specific time these properties existlargely independently of how I care to thinkabout them. Social constructions, like theknowledge that informs them, are fallible.Even when they succeed, they usually turnout to differ from what their authors orconstructors had intended. This volume is asocial construction but it may turn out dif-ferently from what the editors had wanted.

So yes, of course social phenomena aresocially constructed, but if we are to avoidimagining that this amounts to some kind ofautomatically successful collective wishfulthinking, and if we are to avoid confusingother people’s constructions with our ownconstruals of them, we need to remember thesimple realist point about the independence of

REALISM AS A BASIS FOR KNOWING THE WORLDÿÿ99


objects (including other people’s ideas) fromour thoughts about them.

This still allows us to acknowledge thatideas or discourses, ways of thinking, areextremely important and influential in shapingsocieties and their geography. Discourses ofracial superiority, for example, had majoreffects in the shaping of many countries, legit-imizing colonialists’ seizure of indigenousland, and domination. Ideologies of genderrestrict women’s movement in public space.Recent shifts in political discourses fromemphases on state support to individual entre-preneurship have influenced regional policy.All these discourses have had effects, but notonly the effects they intended or compre-hended: they also tend to have produced unin-tended consequences, including resistance.

This power of discourses is something thatpoststructuralists emphasize too,but they oftenlapse into a form of idealism in which it seemsthat anything can be constructed on the basisof any discourse, as if all discourses were infal-lible and hence all-powerful. People areindeed shaped by discourses, but as with anyform of social construction, just how they areshaped depends on their properties – proper-ties that at any particular time exist indepen-dently of or prior to the forces then impingingon them. If that sounds difficult, think of ordi-nary things that can be shaped.Wood is easierto shape in lasting ways than air because woodoffers particular forms of resistance and hasparticular kinds of susceptibility. People arenot infinitely plastic, and in so far as they canbe shaped this presupposes that they have cer-tain properties – certain powers and resis-tances. If we say simply that they are ‘sociallyconstructed’, we are liable to misunderstandhow the shaping of people and institutions attime t is constrained and enabled by theirproperties, which exist largely independentlyof the current shaping but were influenced bysocial forces at an earlier time t–1.

Like poststructuralists, we should bestruck by the enormous cultural variety of

human societies – something that ought tobe particularly clear to geographers. But notjust any object exhibits such variety; Russiansulphur dioxide is the same as British sulphurdioxide because sulphur dioxide lacks theproperties that enable it to take on culturalforms that people (and perhaps some higheranimals) possess. Culture doesn’t producevariety on its own, but requires beings whoare capable of being culturally influenced.Post-structuralists tend not to notice this but, underthe influence of a kind of sociological or cul-tural imperialism, try to reduce everything toculture and discourse. Geography, as a goodmaterialist subject, taking seriously people’sphysical as well as cultural properties and needs,ought to be able to see through and resist thisimperialism.When someone says something is‘socially constructed’, always ask ‘by whom,and of what, and with what effects?’

These, then, are the most basic ideas ofrealism. Let’s now move on to more specificones that have implications for how we studygeographical and other phenomena.

The first concerns causation.There was along debate in geography, which ran for mostof the twentieth century, between advocates of‘idiographic’ and ‘nomothetic’ views of thesubject. The former argued that subjects likegeography and history could study onlyunique events and places and were thereforeunlike science in being resistant to generaliza-tion. By contrast, the nomothetic schoolthought those disciplines could indeed findregularities and laws of behaviour and hencebecome sciences in their own right, ifthey only looked for them. The nomotheticgeographers saw the idiographic approach asunscientific, lacking in theory or systematicmethod, and producing unique results lackingin wider application, so that each researchmonograph amounted to no more thananother book on the shelf, in fact little morethan mere opinion. A nomothetic approachwould supposedly enable geographers gradu-ally to accumulate knowledge of laws of

100ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


behaviour, by systematically testing hypothesesabout regularities. This, it was hoped, wouldenable them to generalize and build up a sci-ence of geography through which one couldexplain and predict by reference to theories.This was most clearly evident in the positivistapproaches of the quantitative revolution.3

What has emerged in the last two or threedecades in geography differs from both thesemodels, and realism illuminates why this isthe case. Realists argue for a different concep-tion of science, one that doesn’t rest upon thediscovery of empirical regularities. Earlyattempts to find regularities have only thrownup approximate and temporary ones.The ten-dency of spatial interaction to decline with dis-tance, for example, is only approximate andunstable. The regularity is itself spatially andtemporally variable. More importantly, on itsown, it is not very interesting. It becomes moreinteresting when one focuses on the qualitativedifferences between various kinds of inter-action, their purposes and effects, and on whatkinds of things produce those regularities.

There has definitely been a considerableincrease in self-conscious theorizing aboutgeographical phenomena, but most of it isabout how to conceptualize them rather thanmerely for the purpose of generatinghypotheses about regularities or patternsamong events. There are things which geo-graphers and others make generalizationsabout, but they expect them to vary some-what over space and time.Thus, for example,in economic geography there has been a lotof interest in how to conceptualize globaliza-tion: researchers have evaluated differentconcepts of globalization and allied phenom-ena such as global media, cultural flows, and‘neoliberalism’. They know that while thesephenomena are widespread, they are unlikelyto be absolutely constant over time and spacebut will take various forms.To be sure thereare some interesting patterns or regularities,of at least an approximate and temporarykind, but researchers have also necessarily had

to take seriously certain unique events andobjects, such as changes in world trade policiesor changes of government. In either case –that is whether they are dealing with commonpatterns or unique events – they are moreinterested in the nature of the phenomena, themechanisms producing them and their effects,than in whether they form regularities or not.Unique events, no less than common ones, areproduced or caused by something and theyhave real effects. In either case we need toknow how this happens, and finding regu-larities is not strictly necessary for this. Inother words, the obsession with establishingsuch regularities – which is one of the charac-teristics of positivism – is not necessary forexplaining things.

By ‘cause’ we mean simply that whichproduces (or perhaps blocks) change.A causeis not, as positivism assumes, a consistent reg-ularity between one event and another, suchthat one is inclined to say, ‘if A, then B’.A cause is a mechanism that produces change.All objects – including people, institutionsand discourses – have particular ‘causal pow-ers’, that is, things they are capable of doing,such as a person’s power to breathe or speak.They also have particular ‘causal susceptibili-ties’ such as an individual’s susceptibility tocertain changes. Thus people are susceptibleto cultural conditioning and peer group pres-sure, whereas lumps of rock are not. Many ofthese powers and susceptibilities are acquiredthrough socialization, and while some of themneed to be exercised or performed frequentlyto persist, some can persist unexercised forlong periods of time, indeed some may neverbe exercised. Thus, fortunately, most of usrarely exercise or develop our powers to beviolent.

Whether these powers or susceptibilitiesare activated depends on conditions whosepresence is ‘contingent’, by which I mean notdependent but ‘neither necessary nor impos-sible’.These conditions, which form the con-text of any given action, have their own



causal powers and susceptibilities. Thus, forexample, you could terminate your studieshere and now but whether you do sodepends on many circumstances, which mayor may not be present. Furthermore, when acausal power or susceptibility is activated, theparticular consequences depend on the con-text, that is on the presence and placement ofthe conditions in which it is activated. Forexample, an important element in the opera-tion of housing markets is the formationof new households, as when children leavehome or people begin cohabiting or getmarried, or separate or divorce. But their suc-cess in getting housing depends on the hous-ing stock, on what’s available and on theprice. Thus, the consequences of actions are‘context-dependent’, so that the same actionmay produce different results in differentcontexts. The implication of this is that weshould not assume that the same cause willalways produce the same effects. Quite oftenthe effects will vary according to context,producing irregularities. Stable, exact regular-ities occur only when processes and contextsare stable, and it is significant that in naturalsciences, such regularities usually arise onlyunder experimentally controlled conditions,which are unavailable in social science.

However, the absence of these regularitiesneed not prevent us from explaining what ishappening.What we need if we are to under-stand the operation of causal mechanisms iscareful conceptualization of the objects con-cerned so as to identify their powers, andlikewise of their contexts, together with aprimarily qualitative analysis of how theyoperate, if and when they do. Quantitativeanalysis may also be useful, but the language ofmathematics lacks any notion of causation, offorcing, producing, qualitatively changingor shaping. The important questions for get-ting at causation are ones which ask: what is itabout this object (person/group/institution/structure/process/discourse) which enables itto do this thing? What is it about urbanization

that produces new kinds of social relationand experience? What is it about multinationalfirms and their contexts which enables themto change their internal geographies?

There is something else that is cruciallyimportant about social phenomena in addi-tion to how they are caused and what they arecapable of causing.This something else con-cerns meaning. Here, the situation in humangeography differs from that in physical geo-graphy. The latter, confronting objects likerocks, soils and slopes, has to develop a batteryof concepts for distinguishing them – conceptslike ‘periglacial’, ‘moraine’ and ‘chernozem’.These concepts simultaneously help physicalgeographers to understand both the physicalworld and each other through a shared set ofmeanings.These meanings are external to theirobjects. The stuff we call ‘moraine’ does nothave a discourse about itself; it does not haveits own language and self-understanding. Buthuman geographers are primarily interestedin things that do have such understandings.Concepts and meanings in society are notmerely externally descriptive of people andinstitutions but are ‘constitutive’ of what theyare.The meaning of a geography degree or aseminar or marriage or gender is not simplyexternal to its object, as the concept ‘moraine’is to its object, but internal; what these thingsare depends on what they mean to the peopleinvolved in them, because they reproduce andtransform them on the basis of their under-standing of them. A mass of people walkingdown a street in the same direction may be afuneral procession, a political demonstration, acarnival, or football supporters on their wayto a match.While there might be subtle dif-ferences among these in appearance andaction, what marks the event as one thingrather than another is the actors’ understand-ing of what they are doing, and what theirintentions are. Unless we understand thesethings, we could observe the outward behav-iour forever and still not know what wasgoing on.

102ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


This is something that positivism does notrecognize, even though positivists’ own under-standing of the social world and their ability tofunction within it unknowingly presupposes aknowledge of the constitutive meanings of thephenomena they observe and measure. Manyof these meanings are so familiar we may noteven notice them.Yet they are usually histori-cally, geographically and culturally fairly spe-cific, and they need analysing rather than takenfor granted.This is something that humanisticgeographers have emphasized, but I and otherrealists would argue all human geographersand social scientists need to do this; it isnot something that need be taken seriouslyonly by those interested in specifically ‘cul-tural’ phenomena like religions or lifestyles.Economic phenomena presuppose mutualunderstandings – e.g. common ideas about thefunction and value of money – about what itis to observe a contract, to be employed and soon, and these ideas are geographically and his-torically variable. Thus, the obligations ofemployers to employees vary between (andwithin) western and East Asian capitalism, forexample.

So social phenomena are ‘concept-dependent’, and some, like political ideas, orthe discipline of geography, are directly con-ceptual.Thus women’s and men’s life coursesand patterns of mobility are strongly differen-tiated by behaviour based on gendered normsabout what women and men ought andought not to do.To understand how their useof private and public space has changed weneed to study how the meanings of what itis to be a man or a woman have changed.Regardless of whether we find regularities orirregularities, the actions will depend at leastin part on what they mean for actors.

To acknowledge that social phenomenaare intrinsically meaningful or concept-dependent, however, is not to endorse thecontent of what people believe. People mayact towards one another on the basis of mis-understandings as well as understandings (for

example, imagining that gender differences inthings like housework and paid work derivefrom our genes), though a misunderstanding isitself a kind of understanding in that it ismeaningful. Hence to understand how menand women use space differently,we must cer-tainly attend to what they think and assumeabout what men and women should ‘natu-rally’ do, and cite this in our explanation oftheir behaviour, but it does not mean we haveto endorse these ideas. If we were to acceptthat these socially learned differences wereinnate, we would have misunderstood them.

It is for this reason that social science,including human geography, stands or needsto stand in a critical relation to its object ofstudy, for it must be prepared not only toacknowledge the real effects of common-sense understandings held by people it stud-ies, but to contradict them where they seemto be based on falsehoods.4 It is also for thisreason that I would advocate not merelya realist approach but a critical realist one.More generally, what would be the point ofthe study of society if it failed to evaluateeveryday understandings, that is, if it failed toevaluate what people already knew just fromliving in society?

I said earlier that realists stress the impor-tance of conceptualization in science – ofworrying about how to conceptualize theobjects we study instead of accepting every-day definitions and rushing on to gather datain the hope that we can get something mean-ingful by flushing the data through a statisti-cal package so as to find some regularities,without bothering with what they mean orstand for.We can now see, I hope, that con-ceptualization is important not only forallowing the qualitative analysis that is neces-sary for identifying causal powers and suscep-tibilities and the manner of their exercise, butfor getting at the meanings that actions andother social phenomena have for actorsthemselves – the meanings which make themthose kinds of phenomena rather than others.



Remember that many social phenomena areambiguous in terms of what they mean toactors. We therefore need to try to get atthose ambiguities. Is this Remembrance Daymarch just about mourning the war dead, oralso about celebrating the military? In whatways are people ambivalent about the placesin which they live? Does migration indicatethe freedom of the powerful or the despera-tion of the asylum seeker?

One more thing on causation and mean-ing in society.Although a lot of philosophershave assumed them to be radically differentand opposed, realists do not. If a cause issimply that which produces change, thanmeanings can be causal too, for we usuallycommunicate – share meaning – in order toproduce some change. I am trying to reasonwith you so as to cause you to change yourmind about approaches to geography. Whensomeone asks me a question or challengeswhat I say, they produce (i.e. cause) a changein my behaviour by making me respond tothem.When social scientists say discourses are‘performative’, or produce effects, this is justanother way of saying they are causal or‘causally efficacious’.5

I have already made a few comparisonsbetween realism and positivism, humanismand poststructuralism. What about anotherinfluential development in social and geo-graphical research – feminist approaches? Inrelation to feminism, there are points of bothsimilarity and difference, and such is the diver-sity of feminist thought that there are somerealist feminists.6 First of all, realism is a philo-sophy of social science, not a social theory;roughly speaking it is about how to approachsocial science, rather than a particular theoryabout what society is, or a theory looking atsociety from the point of view of a particularsocial group, as feminism does. However bothfeminism and realism share a critical stancetowards their objects of study; they agree thatsocial science needs to be critical of its objectsof study. Many feminists emphasize the way

that social science reflects the social positionof its authors or researchers, and hence haslargely reflected a white, middle-class view-point. Realists would agree that this has hap-pened, and that this has tended to restrict anddistort social research. Some feminists haveargued that, by contrast,members of oppressedgroups have a privileged standpoint such thatthey are able to see things that others cannot.As a realist I would say that while this is pos-sible, those in position of power are also ableto see other things that the dominated cannotsee.What is problematic in this situation is notonly that the male view is selective, but thatthere are patriarchal relations of dominationat all.

Some feminists, and indeed many non-feminists, argue that social scientific know-ledge is not objective, as often assumed, butsubjective, reflecting the views and values ofthe social researcher and his or her positionin the social field.This is often a thoroughlyconfused position. First, all knowledge isindeed subjective in the sense that it requiressubjects, beings who can think and makedecisions. This is a precondition of, not anobstacle to, the development of objectivityin the sense of learning about the world.Second, two different senses of ‘objective’ arewidely confused: objectivity in terms of valueneutrality is quite a different thing fromobjectivity in terms of truth.7 Although ourvalues can sometimes make us see only whatwe want to see, they don’t necessarily do this.Just because you feel that something is goodor bad, it doesn’t follow that you can haveonly a false (or practically inadequate) view ofit. We can sometimes acknowledge unpalat-able facts. Sometimes strong views about whatis good or bad can enable you to see thingsthat others who are less concerned fail to see;this is surely exemplified by feminism’s expo-sure of gender itself. Realists would be closerto those feminists and others8 who haveargued for a position – sometimes termed‘strong objectivity’ – that we are more likely

104ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


to achieve objective or adequate knowledgeof the world if we reflect carefully upon thedifference that our particular subjective stand-point makes to the kind of knowledge wedevelop (Harding, 1991; Haraway, 1991). Areresearchers projecting the special circum-stances of their own situation onto those theystudy? How can they try to correct for this?A greater social diversity among researcherswould help. So too would recognizing thatsocial research involves a social relationshipbetween researcher and researched.

The necessity of a subjective dimensionto all knowledge doesn’t mean that debates insocial research are reducible to clashes of sub-jective views among which there can be noadjudication or resolution. It doesn’t entail arelativist position in which truth is merelyrelative to your point of view. If they gen-uinely are debates rather than just differentlanguage games, they must be debates oversomething in common; there must be something over which they disagree, which, asrealists insist, has at least some independencefrom those views. ‘Malestream’ views arewrong not simply because they are male, butin so far as they misrepresent the world, forexample, by failing to note gender differ-ences. A feminist view is unlikely to makethat particular mistake, but by the sametoken, in as much as feminist views are right,it is not because those views are associatedwith women but because they adequatelyrepresent the world, for example, by explain-ing gender differences.

Note that I’m trying to steer a coursebetween two hopeless extremes here: oneextreme which imagines beliefs can be neatlysorted into those that are simply true in someabsolute sense and those that are simply com-pletely false; and another (called relativism,which is more literally ‘hopeless’) whichimagines that we can never even sort outsome better or more adequate beliefs fromothers.The otherness of the world from ourknowledge of it makes it hard to see what it

would mean to say that we knew the absolutetruth about it, for there will always be alter-native ways of describing it. But the obduratenature of the world, its failure to do every-thing we imagine or want it to do, suggestswe can at least sometimes sort out better ormore adequate/true ideas about it from lessadequate/true ones.

You might have hoped for somethingstronger from realism – perhaps a magic keythat would enable you to distinguish what is‘realistic’ from ‘unrealistic’ – but as I hope tohave shown, things aren’t that simple. But noris the situation hopeless. We can still makeprogress. Many researchers are realists inpractice, at least some of the time, eventhough they may not recognize themselves assuch. When they worry about how to con-ceptualize the things they are studying, inorder to decide what is and is not attributableto those things themselves; when they ask,‘What is it about this object (person, group,institution, practice, structure, etc.) that enablesit to do that?’; when they study how mecha-nisms or processes of change work over timeand space without expecting them necessar-ily to produce regularities; when they try toelicit people’s understandings of their actionsand situations, while retaining a critical dis-tance towards those understandings as regardstheir adequacy; they are practising realists.Youprobably do some of these things sometimes.As a realist, I urge you to try to do them allthe time.

NOTES1 It is, however, what ‘literary realism’ claims,

as in ‘realist’ novels or films, which (absurdly)purport to represent the world directly ‘as itis’, without any mediation of concepts, dis-courses or perceptual schemata.

2 Even in this case, mere observation on its ownis unlikely to change anything.Change requirescommunication and practical interventions.

3 The quantitative revolution and spatial analysiswere only partly and inconsistently positivist,



presumably because positivism is strictlyimpractical.

4 This critical stance is not something thathumanistic geographers tend to be happy with.

5 These are not causes on the positivist cause–effect regularity model, but that model cannotdistinguish mere regularities or coincidentalcorrelations from changes which the causeevent brought about. Note also that if I fail in

persuading you, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t trying;activation of causal mechanisms (arguing, rea-soning) doesn’t guarantee regular effects.

6 For example, New, Davies.7 A third meaning of objective is ‘pertaining to

objects’.This again is different from ‘objective’ asin ‘true knowledge’ or ‘Value-free knowledge’.

8 Something like this was argued by the Frenchsociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2000).

106ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

ReferencesBourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity.Davies, C.A. (1998) Reflexive Ethnography. London: Routledge.Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London:

Free Association.Harding, S. (1991) Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.New, C. (1998) ‘Realism, Deconstruction and the Feminist Standpoint’, Journal for the

Theory of Social Behaviour, 28(4): 349–72.New, C. (2003) ‘Feminism, Deconstruction and Difference’, in J. Cruickshank (ed.),

Critical Realism: The Difference it Makes. London: Routledge.


POSTMODERN GEOGRAPHIES ANDTHE RUINS OF MODERNITY

David B. Clarke

Introduction

The term postmodern burst unceremoniouslyonto the geographical scene in the mid tolate 1980s (though the word was used muchearlier in other contexts). Against the soberpromises of realism to rethink science forhuman geography (Chapter 8), and the wisecounsel structuration theory offered inattempting to resolve the long-standing familyfeud between structuralists and humanists(Chapter 7), the reckless, dizzying antics ofpostmodernists seemed to throw reason itselfinto doubt – and to care about the fact onlyas much as someone who has ceased tobelieve in God continues to worry aboutSatan.And they had a point, too: ‘what proofis there that my proof is true?’ asks Lyotard(1984: 24) in The Postmodern Condition. Thisdisarmingly simple question throws scientificcertainty into spiralling doubt, yet also makesyou feel – if it’s that easy to undermine – there’slittle point in worrying about it unduly any-way (Doel, 1993). Science is a matter of faithjust as much as anything else. It has its believ-ers, its unbelievers – and its fair share of guilttrips, too. Such is the non-committal credo ofthe postmodernist (though one would hardlyguess it from the uptight sermons TheDictionary of Humanist Geography delivers toenlighten its Ley readers: Johnston et al.,2000: s.v. postmodernism, postmodernity).

The very first thing to say about the post-modern wor(l)d is that it’s inherently confusing.(And postmodernists are wont to perform

cheap tricks like that, so we now no longerknow if we’re talking about words or worlds,and are left feeling thoroughly disorientedregarding their relationship – which we oncetook for granted as a straightforward matterof representation.) If this prevents us fromoffering a clear-cut definition at the outset,the following eloquent montage of meaningsshould set us on track:

Postmodernity means many differentthings to many different people. It maymean a building which arrogantly flauntsthe ‘orders’ prescribing what fits andwhat should be kept strictly out to pre-serve the functional logic of steel, glassand concrete. It means a work of imagi-nation that defies the difference betweenpainting and sculpture, styles and genres,gallery and street, art and everything else.It means a life that looks suspiciously likea TV serial, and a docudrama that ignoresyour worry about setting apart fantasyfrom what ‘really happened’. It meanslicence to do whatever one may fancy andadvice not to take anything you or othersdo too seriously. It means the speed withwhich things change and the pace withwhich moods succeed each other so thatthey have no time to ossify into things. Itmeans attention drawn in all directions atonce so that it cannot stop on anything forlong and nothing gets a really close look. Itmeans a shopping mall overflowing withgoods whose major use is the joy of pur-chasing them. It means the exhilarating

9


freedom to pursue anything and themind-boggling uncertainty as to what isworth pursuing and in the name of whatone should pursue it. (Bauman, 1992: vii)

‘Postmodernity is all these things and manyothers,’ Bauman adds,‘But it is also – perhapsmore than anything else – a state of mind.’Similarly, Eco suggests that ‘postmodernism isnot a trend to be chronologically defined,but, rather … a Kunstwollen, a way of operat-ing’ (1985: 66). Let’s simply log this thoughtfor now.

A second thing to say about the postmod-ern wor(l)d is that people are always comingup with conceptual schemata that are supposedto make everything clearer – the overall effectof which is often to make things even more con-fusing. Ordering schemes are always confusing,as Foucault (1974: xv) famously made clearwith reference to a passage in Borges on theclassification of animals offered by ‘a certainChinese encyclopaedia’ – to which Perecretorts with the following list, gleaned fromgenuine government documents:

(a) animals on which bets are laid, (b)animals the hunting of which is bannedbetween 1 April and 15 September, (c)stranded whales, (d) animals whose entrywithin the national frontiers is subject toquarantine, (e) animals held in joint own-ership, (f) stuffed animals, (g) etcetera(this etc. is not at all surprising in itself;it is only where it comes in the list thatmakes it seem odd), (h) animals liable totransmit leprosy, (i) guide-dogs for theblind, (j) animals in receipt of significantlegacies, (k) animals able to be trans-ported in the cabin, (l) stray dogs withoutcollars, (m) donkeys, (n) mares assumedto be with foal. (1999: 197)

This ‘perfectly astonishing miscellaneity’ (1999:167) is just as evident in the customary distinc-tions made between (1) ‘postmodernity’, a his-torical epoch or period, (2) the process of

‘postmodernization’, (3) ‘postmodernism’ as acultural current or aesthetic style, (4) et cetera:

Underwriting much of the literature …has been a conceptualization of post-modernity as an epoch progressively insti-tuted in space–time in accordance with alogic of de-differentiation, which explodesthe relative autonomy of the distinctspheres of economy, polity, civil society,and so on, through the negatory processof postmodernization; and from which acorrelative cultural logic or ‘structure offeeling’ (postmodernism) may be directlydiscerned. (Doel and Clarke, 1997: 145)

Such schemata invariably break down. Take‘dedifferentiation’, for instance. The basicidea is that modernity witnessed the separationof life into distinct spheres that had previ-ously been inseparable (i.e. unified), allowingfor their rational organization, monitoring,and surveillance.The way in which modernwestern society developed thus allowed thequestion of what makes ‘economic sense’, say,to be meaningfully disentangled from what is‘aesthetically pleasing’ or ‘morally right’.Thishad all kinds of (often contradictory) unin-tended consequences – but the modernprocess of differentiation has now, it seems,entered into a kind of postmodern ‘reversal’.Thisis not a straightforward process of ‘reintegra-tion’ and ‘reparation’, however, but rather a‘leaking’of different modern logics across intoformerly distinct modern spheres: politicalconcepts (e.g. ‘rights’) being applied to themarket (e.g. ‘consumer rights’); the aestheticdriving the political or the economic (think ofmedia-driven electoral campaigns or the con-sumer society); and so on. With the short-circuiting of formerly distinct spheres, ‘Wewitness ... the complete decentring of society. Ex-centric, dis-integrated, dis-located, dis-juncted,deconstructed, dismantled, disassociated,discontinuous, deregulated ... de-, dis-, ex-.These are the prefixes of today. Not post-,neo-, or pre-’ (Tschumi: 1994: 225). So, if this

108ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


is the case, how apt is the notion of a separatecultural logic, postmodernism? Such contra-dictions are par for the course because post-modernity is contradictory at heart. It’s nolonger strictly ‘modern’ – but it’s not some-thing entirely new and different either, formodern categories can still be seen at workeverywhere: ‘the term “postmodern” impliescontradiction of the modern without tran-scendence of it’ (Kuspit, 1990: 60). Or per-haps it’s ‘the continuation of the Modern andits transcendence’ (Jencks, 1986: 7). Suchcontradictions are, in fact, without possibilityof resolution.

A third thing to say is that geographers haveadded to the confusion more than most (Dear andFlusty, 2001; Minca, 2002) – for which wemay be justly proud! One of the most famousbooks on postmodernity was written bya geographer: Harvey’s The Condition ofPostmodernity (1989). But this, as we shall see,is actually a repudiation of the whole ‘post-modern’ affair from a Marxian perspective –more akin to the work of Habermas (1983),Jameson (1984; 1991) or, especially, Callinicos(1989) than to Lyotard (1984), whose titleHarvey mirrors (or is that parodies?).Likewise, Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1989)makes the case that postmodernity involvesthe ‘reassertion of space’ as modernity’s obses-sion with history begins to crumble under itsown weight – reworking Jameson’s (1984:83) argument that postmodernity rupturesthe ‘capacities of the individual human bodyto locate itself ... and cognitively to map itsposition’ in a fragmented world of mut(il)atedspace. Whilst there is something to this, onesenses that Soja’s thesis is unlikely ever to beentirely convincing. Space and time are nevercompletely separable. So it’s far more likelythat we’ll be able to speak of ‘modernspace–time’ and ‘postmodern space–time’ thanto suggest some linear historical narrativewhereby ‘time and history’ give way to ‘spaceand geography’ (Clarke, 2003). Finally, Dear’sThe Postmodern Urban Condition (2000) is

a later, more sober addition to the line-upof book-length treatments of postmoderngeography. As with Soja (1989; 1996), how-ever, Los Angeles is once more taken to bethe epicentre of the postmodern universe (cf.Davis, 1985; Gordon and Richardson, 1999).When Soja (2000: xvii), anticipating the criti-cisms of those who are sick and tired of hear-ing the LA story (Elden, 1997), says that ‘what’sbeen happening in Los Angeles can also beseen taking place in Peoria, Scunthorpe, BeloHorizonte, and Kaohsiung, with varyingintensities … and never in exactly the sameway’, I begin to suspect that he may not havebeen to Scunthorpe and wonder why hedenegates his claim, stressing a variety of inten-sities and highlighting ‘never’.

So, ‘never’ trust anyone’s arguments aboutpostmodernity. And be especially cautiouswhen it comes to geographers. Humanists,Marxists, and many others have used andabused the term willy-nilly (and who canblame them? – it’s in the spirit of the word,after all!).The purpose of this chapter, though,is to try to stamp some sense onto the notion,and to see how useful it might be – now thatmodish overuse of the word has finally fadedaway and we can at last get down to business.

Irresistible Force MeetsImmovable Object

To make headway here, we need to get togrips with what a better understanding of thepostmodern might entail. I’ve just noted thatthe line one gets from Marxists, humanists,and the like is typically unreliable. They allhave their axes to grind and there are manyfor whom ‘pomo’ remains a four-letter word.So, let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth andhear Lyotard’s (1984) argument.

The most frequently quoted line ofThe Postmodern Condition appears in theIntroduction, where Lyotard states, ‘I definepostmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives’

POSTMODERN GEOGRAPHIESÿÿ109


(1984, xxiv). By metanarrative (literally, ‘bigstory’) Lyotard means the kind of ‘overarch-ing principles’ that legitimated a certain kindof modern discourse – a discourse whichclaimed to be capable of disclosing the truth,hence guaranteeing the value and utility ofknowledge-based action to society at large.And let us note that scientists, radicals, politi-cians, moralists and countless others haveconsistently claimed the right to act on thebasis of the truth. Lyotard intends to arguethat this kind of situation no longer holdsgood; that we now find ourselves facing ‘theobsolescence of the metanarrative apparatusof legitimation’ (1984: xxiv). Nike logic: Justdo it! This, in a nutshell, is the postmoderncondition: we’ve lost faith in the ‘grand nar-ratives’ of modernity, just as we once lostfaith in God. (At this point someone willask who ‘we’ are supposed to be, since mostof us continue to act as if we believe. Goodquestion – but for now, simply suspend yourdisbelief: you can see what Lyotard’s getting at.See also Lyotard, 1992.)

Lyotard indicates that he’s using the term‘modern to designate any science that legiti-mates itself with reference to … some grandnarrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, thehermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation ofthe rational or working subject, or the creationof wealth’ (1984: xxiii).What he’s suggesting isthat before modernity, stories were simply sto-ries – fables or myths – which allowed us to getalong in the world. Modernity, however, pur-ported to introduce a new state of affairs. Itproclaimed its superiority by declaring that itsstories were more than stories: they could guar-antee the truth and produce the reality effectsthat would demonstrate as much (modernmedicine might provide a specific example).They would ultimately lead humanity on theroad to emancipation (with knowledge servingas a means to an end) and to a full and finalunderstanding of reality (knowledge, here,serving as its own, ‘speculative’ end). Now, forLyotard, there’s no question that knowledge

could ever really provide access to the real andemancipate humanity. Such metanarrativeswere simply invoked as a way of science legit-imating itself – of precluding other, potentiallycompeting ‘language games’ from measuringup against its declarative statements of authen-ticity. In fact, we only ever have access to real-ity through language; through particularlanguage games. We can never dive downbeneath language and see directly how well itmaps on to reality. But modernity got us allthinking that we could. Indeed, modernitymight well be defined in terms of an overrid-ing belief in the power of knowledge to grantprivileged access to the truth. And on thisscore, perhaps, modernity still sounds all welland good.

Modernity’s dream of universal know-ledge might sound all well and good – untilone recognizes some uncomfortable hometruths.The first is simply that the qualities ofscience in the information age bear littleresemblance to the original blueprint, andcontinue to accelerate away from the initialmodern vision at an alarming rate:‘postmod-ern science is discontinuous with the sciencethat preceded it’ (Lechte, 1995: 99).The pro-liferation of knowledge production has led toan ever-more complex set of incommensu-rate and incomparable knowledges, to theextent that no one can any longer regard thisas a temporary state of affairs, en route to somefuture final grand synthesis.The second thingto appreciate is that modernity’s dream ofuniversal knowledge could very easily turninto a totalitarian nightmare – and, in fact,did. It is not only in science fiction novelsthat modernist visions take on a sinister pall.After Auschwitz, modernity as a whole isflung into crisis – for the Holocaust was notsome kind of reversion to premodern barbar-ity, but a systematic deployment and imple-mentation of modern rationality. It evenexemplified modernity (Bauman, 1989; Lyotard,1990; Clarke et al., 1996). For Adorno (2003),Auschwitz induced a crisis of representation

110ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


within modernity:‘It is impossible to speak ofthe Holocaust and impossible to keep silent’(Easthope, 2002: 112). So, both the inaccuracyof the description and the evidence of its perversionhave served to undermine those self-same‘grand narratives’ that once held out the hopeof a happy future in utopia.The upshot is thedelegitimation of universal knowledge.Competinglanguage games are all we now have. Butthere is not necessarily anything to lament inthis state of affairs. As Lapsley and Westlakejoyously conclude,‘the postmodern conditioncan embrace inventive pluralism and prolifer-ate resistance to existing forms of oppression’(1988: 208). Only those caught up in theunhealthy grip of modernist nostalgia will seethe absence of metanarratives as one big prob-lem rather than an overwhelming opportunity –which, like Nietzsche’s death of God, opensup ‘Our new infinite’ (1974: § 374).

Or will they? Lyotard’s principal claimfor postmodernity is ‘incredulity towardsmetanarratives’. One does not have to delvetoo far within the covers of The PostmodernCondition to realize that the venerable tradi-tion of historical materialism looks suspiciouslylike a prize-winning specimen of a now out-moded modern metanarrative. For Harvey(1989), this is all a bit rich – to say the least.As a card-carrying Marxist, he can see per-fectly well where the condition of post-modernity has sprung from. His unfailingMarxian method offers a clear vantage pointfor spying out its origins. And no one isgoing to get away with declaring his vantagepoint null and void, not least when it offers aperfect view of why they should want to doso in the first place! Here, then, is where theirresistible force meets the immovable object.Lyotard (1984) claims that modernist meta-narratives have had their day: no one bothersto believe in such nonsense any more.Harvey(1989) demonstrates that his own favoured(Marxian) ‘metanarrative’ still works perfectlywell, thank you very much – and is quitecapable of exposing the sort of vacuous

discourse that would wish to undermine itscredibility (namely postmodernism). Harvey’sresponse to Lyotard – like that of Habermas(1987), who indicates just how much ofmodernity’s positive potential remains unful-filled – is underpinned by the serious concernthat, in practice, postmodernism ‘delegitimates’social critique (and progressive politics) rathermore than it ‘delegitimates’ venture capitalism(and neoconservatism). Postmodernity is, per-haps, ‘nothing more than the cultural clothingof late capitalism’ (Harvey, 1987: 279).

The polemical tone Harvey strikes in TheCondition of Postmodernity is highly effectivein portraying a whole panoply of Frenchphilosophers as a jilted generation of dis-affected erstwhile radicals. For example, itmakes one question the identity of the col-lective ‘we’ Lyotard implicitly invokes in ThePostmodern Condition: jet-setting,globe-trottingintellectuals fit the bill rather more than theworkers of the world, it seems. It also soundsa resounding rallying cry for continued mobil-ization around the Marxian metanarrative thatLyotard has supposedly ruled out of court –though Lyotard (1988: 92) himself has stressedthat his ‘strong drift away’ from Marxismstemmed from the suspicion that ‘by keepingto the question of realism, of true or falseknowledge’ one occludes the possibility ofsensing all those other injustices, which arenot permitted to appear within a given frameof reference. It is perhaps unsurprising, there-fore, that Harvey earned more than a fewbruises from people he might have expectedto recruit as allies; he received a decidedlyfrosty reception for characterizing feminismas a ‘local’ struggle (Deutsche, 1991; Massey,1991; Morris, 1992; Harvey, 1992). Harvey’scall to ‘keep the faith’ provoked such a back-lash by castigating postmodernism as inher-ently reactionary, for failing to bear witness toa ‘postmodernism of resistance’ that mightopen up a space for other voices, apart fromclass alone (Bondi, 1990; Bondi and Domosh,1992; Soja and Hooper, 1993).Yet despite all



the hubbub, The Condition of Postmodernity wasalso widely fêted, not least for its magisterialoverview of the changed experience of spaceand time accompanying postmodernity.Harveydeftly develops Jameson’s (1984) thesis thatpostmodernism has had fundamentally disori-enting effects, ranging over everything fromthe incredible shrinking world wrought by‘time–space compression’ (Kirsch, 1995) tochanges in the built environment that havebecome the talk of the postmodern town(Ellin, 1996).All these hallmarks of postmodernculture, Harvey maintains, can – and should –be traced back to the logic of capitalism.

Despite some slight differences betweenHarvey (1989) and Jameson (1984), the twoare united by a common method.For Jameson(1984), postmodernism is ‘the cultural logicof late capitalism’. Harvey’s (1987) ‘culturalclothing’ idea clearly follows suit – butwhereas Jameson draws on Mandel (1975)to explain how we’ve become cast adrift in‘hyperspace’, Harvey (1989) sees postmodernculture as a reflection of a new regime of‘flexible accumulation’ and its attendant ‘modeof regulation’ (Aglietta, 1979).These differinginflections aside,both authors offer restatementsof the classic Marxian ‘base–superstructure’metaphor. Marx reasoned that ‘The mode ofproduction of material life conditions thesocial, political and intellectual life process ingeneral’; the ‘economic structure of society’ is‘the real foundation, on which arises a legaland political superstructure and to which cor-respond definite forms of social consciousness’(1971: 20). This metaphor is justly notoriousfor the range of differing interpretations thathave been put on it – such as Althusser’s infa-mous remarks about economic determinationin the last instance, where ‘the lonely hourof the last instance never comes’ (1969: 111).Harvey, like Jameson, clearly regards the base–superstructure model as foundational forunderstanding the way in which capitalism hasspawned postmodern culture: ‘The odd thingabout postmodern cultural production is how

much sheer profit-seeking is determinant inthe first instance’ (1989: 336). Whilst Harveymight have a point – Bauman (1993a) raisesmuch the same issue in Postmodern Ethics –I’m afraid I think there is something seri-ously wrong with Harvey’s dogged insistencethat the conjugation of ‘economy’ and ‘culture’necessarily accords to a particular logic (Aminand Thrift, 2004).

No matter how far one might sympathizepolitically with Harvey, there are grave prob-lems with maintaining a staunchly moderniststance under postmodern conditions, whereonce-separate spheres have done away withthemselves as specific determinations. EvenJameson (1981) adopts a more reflexive con-ception of the Marxist (meta)narrative thanHarvey is willing to admit (though asEasthope (1999: 146) wryly observes, ‘what isleft of Marxism if it becomes merely the great-est story ever told’ is difficult to fathom).Likewise, however much one might worrythat Lyotard’s arguments delegitimate socialcritique, Lyotard can hardly be held personallyto blame. As Huyssen puts it, ‘No matterhow troubling it may be, the landscape of thepostmodern surrounds us. It simultaneouslydelimits and opens our horizons. It’s our prob-lem and our hope’ (1984: 52). Lyotard is anastute observer of modernity’s meltdown, andif he occasionally fiddles whilst Rome burns,he nonetheless puts his finger on somethingvitally important – to which Harvey’s responseseems, sadly, little more than wishful thinking.My diagnosis may well be wrong – but ifHarvey is in denial, wishful thinking is reallynot going to help. Failing to recognize some-thing for what it is can be comforting: itabsolves one from the task of straining todetect the unfamiliar amongst the outlinesof the familiar. But equally, ignorance is notnecessarily bliss. Not recognizing somethingfor what it is can be extremely hazardous. Itgrants one a decidedly false sense of security.This, I would contend, is the supreme dangerof Harvey’s take on postmodernity.

112ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Let us close this section by pressing thispoint a little further, since it will ultimatelyallow us to formulate a better understandingof the nature of postmodern geographies.Here, I take the liberty of quoting myself atlength:

[For Harvey,] the postmodern needs onlyto be brought to account before the estab-lished precedent of historical-materialistanalysis to be revealed for what itis. All fashionable pronouncements of‘incredulity towards metanarratives’(Lyotard, 1984, xxiv) dissolve into thecomfortingly familiar form of old-fashioned ideological rhetoric once theMarxian metanarrative is revealed as stillhaving teeth. The legitimacy of this argu-ment lies in the cogency of its demon-strable truth, and Harvey’s (1989) isindeed the most cogent demonstrationone could hope for. The problem, how-ever, is that the ‘incredulity towardsmetanarratives’ proceeds from the oppo-site direction: from the impossibility offinding anything solid enough into whichto bite. The question of legitimacy is,moreover, simply an unnecessary defencein the face of incredulity – incredulitybeing what it is. The only real response tosuch postmodern objections is to rejectthem out of hand, which Harvey (1989)manages with considerable aplomb. Thedanger, however, is that this can easilyamount to the theoretical equivalent ofwhistling through the graveyard ...Harvey’s repeated declaration of ‘businessas usual’ ... amounts to a blunt refusal toaccept the novelty of the postmoderncondition. Yet its novelty cannot be soeasily refuted. (Clarke, 2003: 177)

To change the metaphor only slightly, the post-modern world is not solid enough for anyoneto find the kind of foothold that Harvey wishesto find – in order to reach the luminous sum-mits and enjoy unrestricted panoramic views(Doel, 2005). Here we must take our leave

from Harvey, therefore, and consider what arange of other authors have said.

Modern Times, PostmodernGeographies?

What would a truly valuable conception ofpostmodern geography look like? It’s difficultto say, because despite the wealth of booksthat promise to map out the field, they almostinvariably adhere to the modernist principleswe have already had cause to dismiss. Onearguably gains a better sense of the postmod-ern world from so-called fictive literature,like Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987), thanfrom the majority of texts with ‘postmodern’in the title (see Jarvis, 1998). Soja’s (1989;1996; 2000) LA trilogy is a case in point. Itspins ever onward and outward from its auda-cious initial thesis – developed from the peren-nially unlikely coupling of an anti-structuralistMarxist (Lefebvre, 1991) and an anti-humanistpost-Marxist (Foucault, 1986) – that moderntimes (the cumulative progression of history)have given way to postmodern spaces (thesyncretic imbroglio of geography). Howeverentertaining all this may be, it exemplifiesthe most persistent error committed by self-professed postmodern geographers, namelythe theorization of ‘modern’ and ‘postmod-ern’ as epochal concepts, which take theirplace in a sequential narrative: we were oncemodern; we are now postmodern; how thingshave changed. But the future ain’t what itused to be. As Lyotard duly warns us, ‘Theidea of a linear chronology is itself perfectly“modern”’ (1992: 90). Instead, the ‘Post mod-ern would have to be understood according tothe paradox of the future (post) anterior(modo)’ (Lyotard, 1984: 81). Just as we havenever been modern (Latour, 1993), therefore,we will never have been postmodern.

One key text to provide us with a sophis-ticated sense of postmodern geography isDoel’s Poststructuralist Geographies (1999).



Citing Lyotard and Thébaud (1985: 16) to theeffect that the ‘Postmodern is not to be takenin a periodizing sense,’ Doel notes that mostaccounts of postmodern geography openlyflaunt their misapprehension by constructinglisty, ‘two-column, contrapuntal differentia-tions of the modern and the postmodern, inwhich there is a shift of dominance from, say,“reason, unity and order” to “madness, frag-mentation and disorder”’ (1999: 68). In theface of such widespread misunderstanding, it isimportant to recognize that ‘Postmodernism ...is not modernism at its end but in the nascentstate, and this state is constant’ (Lyotard, 1984:79). Here, we should revive the thought welogged earlier: that postmodernism is, if any-thing, a ‘way of operating’ (Eco) or a ‘state ofmind’ (Bauman) – in other words, a way ofgoing on.

To get ourselves in this particular frameof mind, let us begin by clarifying that post-modernity is not in opposition to modernity.Not only is it not a distinct epoch coming ‘aftermodernity’ – which would imply absolute his-torical discontinuity (a conception in evi-dence wherever hyphenation finds favour:‘post-modern’) – it is not even a shift in domi-nance (a relative discontinuity, which is whatall those tedious two-column lists imply).This latter case, as Doel maintains,

is easily unhinged through a dialecticalimage of thought that emphasizes howthe two apparently autonomous and self-sufficient sides of the diachronic breakare in actuality two mutually constitutiveaspects of a single synchronic structure.And since the negation of modernityalways already belongs to modernity, thepost-modern negation is an impostorbereft of either proper form or specificcontent. (1999: 68)

Unless we are careful, therefore,‘postmodern’can all too easily prove to be a contradictionin terms; a meaningless buzzword. So whatdoes postmodernity mean? As Doel insists,

‘Postmodernity is not an epoch, but theceaseless refusal, from within modernity, tosilence and forget what cannot be representedand remembered within modernity’ (1999:69). This is a significant formulation, so let’shear it once again, this time from Lyotard:‘The postmodern would be that which, in themodern, puts forward the unrepresentablewithin representation itself ’ (1984: 81). Thepostmodern is, on this understanding, a kindof sensitivity to the unrepresentable (Farinelli et al.,1994; Olsson, 1991). It is a recognition thatmodernity, with its penchant for representa-tion – for constructing the big picture, so that‘we’ can see that there’s a place for everythingand that everything is in its place – necessar-ily involved the denial or effacement of what-ever didn’t fit. The modern was hooked onthe Truth, and the ‘Truth – insofar as it existsat all – is first and foremost pictured’(Hebdidge, 1988: 209; cf. Heidegger, 1977).The postmodern, in contrast, is about remain-ing open to the other, not closing off possi-bilities, not airbrushing the unrepresentableout of the picture or off the map.And to thisextent it is inherently geographical – moresensitive to difference and differentiation, to(s)pace and (s)pacing, than geography everwas (Doel, 1999; Soja and Hooper, 1993).

On Doel’s poststructuralist account,therefore, postmodern geography ‘decon-structs the orderly lineaments of Euclidean,non-Euclidean, and n-dimensional spaces’, sothat rather than the unrepresentable otherremaining trapped within a restrictive schemeof representation or field of vision, ‘spaceresists unification and totalization and becomesdissimilatory – a conduit for difference, other-ness, and heterogeneity’ (1999: 70–1). LikeDadaism, postmodern space ‘marks a disjunc-tion, effecting a possible place of difference andalterity’ (Easthope, 2002: 4). It aims to open up‘a gap in signification’ – to resist the tendencyto try ‘to recuperate it into some form ofcoherent meaning’ (2002: 4). It is clear, fromthis kind of portrayal, why Harvey’s (1989)

114ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


work reads as a arch-modernist attempt toconserve a particular point of view under theguise of a universal struggle. So, if postmod-ernism casts Marxism’s modernism in a differ-ent light, this is not necessarily something toget uptight about. The postmodern is not atall inherently conservative: far from it, in fact.

The previously mentioned geographicalexpressions of discontent that greeted Harvey’s(1989) portrayal of feminism as a strictly ‘local’struggle, in contrast to the ‘universal’ historyof class iniquity, reflected a range of positiveengagements between postmodernism, femi-nism, postcolonialism, and an array of othermovements relating to a variety of marginalizedvoices (Benhabib, 1991; Bhabha, 1994; hooks,1990; Hutcheon, 1988;Young, 1990). Indeed,emphasizing the cultural politics of differ-ence roundly rejects the idea of privilegingclass. As Bhabha puts it, deliberately twistingHabermas’s (1987: 348) words, differences ‘nolonger “cluster around class antagonism, [but]break up into widely scattered historical con-tingencies”’ (1994: 171). Harvey’s (1993) con-sidered response to such points arguably scoresa tactical rather than a strategic goal, high-lighting consonant rather than dissonant polit-ical interests – but also points up once morethe difficulties of maintaining his default posi-tion. The Marxian metanarrative may be acracking good story, but maintaining its truth-value so doggedly serves merely to highlightits modernist streak.Yet perhaps there is alsosomething too easy about academics simplyprivileging difference instead (Strohmayer andHannah, 1992).This is the trenchant critiquemade by Easthope (2002) – not at all from areactionary position but as a gritty theoreticalintervention designed to point up that Marxismdoesn’t hold a monopoly on utopian wishfulthinking.

Amidst all these debates, perhaps one ofthe most remarkable aspects of the postmod-ern debate has been its perspicacious capacityto reconsider the modern – and to recognizewhat modernity was actually about all along.

A few pertinent remarks on modernityshould reveal the Möbius-like topology of the(post)modern. From its entry into the centreof western public discourse in the seven-teenth century, the term ‘modern’ took on asignificance far greater than its ostensiblemeaning alone allows (Bauman, 1993b). Itsignalled something vital about a society thatwas affording the ‘current’ or ‘new’ an elevatedsignificance – for the first time emphasizingthe possibilities of the future over the previouslyesteemed authority of the past. A modern,future-oriented society, however, necessarilycasts the present as inadequate, as in need ofperpetual improvement: hence the fundamen-tal dynamism of modernity as a social forma-tion. Yet ‘perpetual improvement’ covers amultitude of sins. In consistently attempting toachieve what might yet be achieved, modernitywaged a constant war against ambivalence.This war of attrition relied upon a powerfulordering zeal, which could not but define as‘irrational’ whatever stood in the way of itsprojected future accomplishments (Bauman,1991). With the uncanny knack of viewingnature as untidy possessed only by expert hor-ticulturalists, modern powers sought to pruneand trim society into shape, turning wild cul-tures into gardening cultures (Bauman, 1987).Indeed, as the Haussmanization of Paris(Harvey, 2003) or Robert Moses’ impact onNew York (Berman, 1982) impeccably attest,modernity was always a process of creativedestruction – ‘the immense process of thedestruction of appearances … in the service ofmeaning … the disenchantment of the worldand its abandonment to the violence of inter-pretation and history’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 160).

To all intents and purposes, says Bauman,such characteristics continue to mark allpresent-day western and westernized societies –with one significant difference:‘if throughoutthe modern era the “messiness”, ambivalence,and uncertainty inherent in social and indi-vidual life were seen as temporary irritants, tobe eventually overcome by the rationalizing



tendency, they are now seen as unavoidableand ineradicable – and not necessarily irri-tants’ (1993b: 596).This, for Bauman, is whatpostmodernity finally means. It is, accordingly,a fully modern development. Postmodernity ismodernity having irreversibly passed a criti-cal threshold, where the impossibility of itsgoals has become all too clearly recognizable,but beyond which its momentum is unstop-pable. If modernity is a juggernaut out ofcontrol (Giddens, 1990), therefore, post-modernity is ‘modernity minus its illusions’(Bauman and Tester, 2001: 75) – ‘the immenseprocess of the destruction of meaning, equalto the earlier destruction of appearances’(Baudrillard, 1994: 161).

This is why it is necessary to see the post-modern as, first and foremost, a way of oper-ating or state of mind; a way of carrying on.For whilst it is far from being detached fromevidence-based claims about the state of theworld, it is primarily an interpretation of thestatus of that world.And this interpretation iscertainly a long way from any literal readingof the term as ‘after modernity’. As Baumanreflects:

The ‘after’ bit which the concept of‘postmodernity’ entailed seemed to mesuspicious from the start ... It seemed tome that the ‘postmodern perspective’which allowed the scrutiny of moder-nity’s failures and the debunking of manyof its undertakings as blind alleys, farfrom being in opposition to modernity orgrowing on its grave, had from the startbeen its indispensable alter ego: that rest-less, perpetually dissentful voice thatenabled modernity to succeed in its crit-ical engagement with found reality andthe many realities sedimented by thatengagement. I liked Lyotard’s quip: onecannot be truly modern without firstbeing postmodern.

The ‘time of postmodernity’ is to methe time in which the modern stance hascome to know itself, and ‘knowing itself’

means the realization that the critical jobhas no limits and could never reach itsterminal point; that, in other words, the‘project of modernity’ is not just ‘unfin-ished’, but unfinishable, and that this‘unfinishability’ is the essence of themodern era. (in Bauman and Tester,2001: 74–5)

So much for the ‘time of postmodernity’,then – but what, finally, can we say about the‘space of postmodernity’? The paradoxicalanswer can only be that postmodern spacesand places as such are, in a sense, not going tolook very different from modern spaces andplaces. Yet in another sense, to paraphraseProust, we have been given new eyes to see spacesand places in other ways. This, I believe, is thelasting legacy of the postmodern debate ingeography.

To demonstrate as much, I will offer justone, brief example: Flusty’s virtuosic consider-ation of various forms of ‘interdictory space’in – yes, you’ve guessed it! – Los Angeles:

His [Flusty’s, 1994] taxonomy of inter-dictory spaces identifies how spaces aredesigned to exclude by a combination oftheir functional and cognitive sensibili-ties. Some spaces are passively aggressive:space concealed by intervening objects orgrade changes is ‘stealthy’, and spacesthat may be reached only by means ofinterrupted or obfuscated approaches[are] ‘slippery’. Other spatial configura-tions are more assertively confrontational:deliberately obstructed ‘crusty’ spacessurrounded by walls and checkpoints;inhospitable ‘prickly’ spaces featuringunsittable benches in areas devoid ofshade; or ‘jittery’ space ostentatiously sat-urated with surveillance devices. (Dear,2000: 146–7)

This is a wonderful example of the postmod-ern capacity to see with new eyes. It is cer-tainly possible to offer more thoroughgoing

116ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


theorizations of postmodern space–time – interms of its fluidity (Bauman,2000) for instance;or the obscene proximity of pornogeography,‘the total promiscuity of things’ (Baudrillard,1993: 60). But this more modest exampleadmirably serves our purpose. It gives a per-fect flavour of the possibilities of postmoderngeography.

The End

So, we must conclude.‘Must we conclude? Itis by no means certain that any definite con-clusion can be reached. Indeed, some areemphatic that it cannot’ (Benko, 1997: 27).Well, perhaps not, then – except to say thatthis high-speed summary of the develop-ment, significance, and legacy of geography’spostmodern turn has hinged on the attemptto cut through the confusion the term ‘post-modern’ initially delivered, especially regard-ing its ‘ironic’ stance (Rorty, 1989). Let ustherefore close by noting the deadly serious-ness of this irony, particularly in relation tothe end of modernity (Vattimo, 1988).Baudrillard cites as an epigram an idea fromCanetti’s (1986) novel, The Human Province:

A painful thought: that beyond a certainprecise moment in time, history is nolonger real. Without realizing it, thewhole human race suddenly left realitybehind. Nothing that has happened sincethen has been true, but we are unable torealize it. Our task and our duty nowis to discover this point or, so long as wefail to grasp it, we are condemned to con-tinue on our present destructive course.(1987: 35)

Now, Baudrillard takes the idea that we havedropped out of history entirely seriously. Buthe insists that Canetti is mistaken in thinkingthat we could ever go back and discover thepoint at which it happened, let alone putthings back on track. Passing beyond the end,we realize that the end itself no longer meansanything, and never meant anything in thefirst place.The end was always an illusion. Itwas one of modernity’s illusions.The meansmodernity developed in pursuit of its illusoryends were often painful, but were somehowjudged to be worth it (Freud, 1955).The endsseemingly justified the means. Today, how-ever, those means persist entirely in theabsence of the ends (Agamben, 2000).


ReferencesAdorno, T.W. (2003) Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed.

R. Tiedemann. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Agamben, G. (2000) Means without Ends: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.Aglietta, M. (1979) A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. London:

Verso.Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (eds) (2004) The Cultural Economy Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.Auster, P. (1987) The New York Trilogy. London: Faber.Baudrillard, J. (1987) ‘The year 2000 has already happened’, in A. Kroker and M. Kroker

(eds), Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America. New York: New World, pp. 35–44.Baudrillard, J. (1993) Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. M. Gane. London:

Routledge.Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan

Press.


Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity andIntellectuals. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity.Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity.Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge.Bauman, Z. (1993a) Postmodern Ethics. London: Routledge.Bauman, Z. (1993b) ‘Modernity’, in J. Krieger, M. Kahler, G. Nzongolap-Ntalaja,

B.B. Stallins and M. Weir (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World.Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 592–6.

Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.Bauman, Z. and Tester, K. (2001) Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity.Benhabib, S. (1991) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in

Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.Benko, G. (1997) ‘Introduction: modernity, postmodernity and the social sciences’, in

G. Benko, and U. Strohmayer (eds), Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernityand Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–44.

Berman, M. (1982) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London:Verso.

Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Bondi, L. (1990) ‘Feminism, postmodernism and geography: a space for women?’,

Antipode, 22: 156–67.Bondi, L. and Domosh, M. (1992) ‘Other figures in other places: on feminism, postmod-

ernism, and geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10:199–213.

Callinicos, A. (1989) Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge: Polity.Canetti, E. (1986) The Human Province. London: Picador.Clarke, D.B. (2003) The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London:

Routledge.Clarke, D.B., Doel, M.A. and McDonough, F.X. (1996) ‘Holocaust topologies: singularity,

politics, space’, Political Geography, 15: 457–89.Davis, M. (1985) ‘Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism’, New Left Review,

151: 106–13.Dear, M.J. (2000) The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell.Dear, M.J. and Flusty, S. (eds) (2001) The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human

Geography. Oxford: Blackwell.Deutsche, R. (1991) ‘Boys town’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 9:

5–30.Doel, M.A. (1993) ‘Proverbs for paranoids: writing geography on hollowed ground’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18: 377–94.Doel, M.A. (1999) Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Doel, M.A. (2005) ‘Dialectical materialism: stranger than friction’, in N. Castree and

D. Gregory (eds), David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 55–79.Doel, M.A. and Clarke, D.B. (1997) ‘From Ramble City to the Screening of the Eye: Blade

Runner, death and symbolic exchange’, in D.B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City.London: Routledge, pp. 140–67.

118ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Easthope, A. (1999) The Unconscious. London: Routledge.Easthope, A. (2002) Privileging Difference. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Eco, U. (1985) Reflections on The Name of the Rose. London: Secker and Warburg.Elden, S. (1997) ‘What about Huddersfield? Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to

Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places’, Radical Philosophy, 84: 47–8.Ellin, N. (1996) Postmodern Urbanism. Oxford: Blackwell.Farinelli, F., Olsson, G. and Reichert, D. (eds) (1994) Limits of Representation. Munich:

Accedo.Flusty, S. (1994) Building Paranoia: The Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the

Erosion of Spatial Justice. West Hollywood, CA: Los Angeles Forum for Architectureand Urban Design.

Foucault, M. (1974) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 16: 22–7.Freud, S. (1955) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Hogarth.Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.Gordon, P. and Richardson, H.W. (1999) ‘Los Angeles, City of Angels? No, City of

Angles’, Urban Studies, 36: 575–91.Habermas, J. (1983) ‘Modernity: an incomplete project’, in H. Foster (ed.), The Anti-

Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle, WA: Bay, pp. 3–15.Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures.

Cambridge: Polity.Harvey, D. (1987) ‘Flexible accumulation through urbanization: reflections on postmod-

ernism in the American city’, Antipode, 19: 260–86.Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural

Change. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (1992) ‘Postmodern morality plays’, Antipode, 24: 300–26.Harvey, D. (1993) ‘Class relations, social justice and the politics of difference’, in M. Keith

and S. Pile (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 41–66.Harvey, D. (2003) Paris, Capital of Modernity. London: Routledge.Hebdidge, D. (1988) Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge.Heidegger, M. (1977) ‘The age of the world picture’, in The Question Concerning

Technology and Other Essays. London: Harper and Row, pp. 115–54.hooks, b. (1990) ‘Postmodern blackness’, Postmodern Culture, 1. http://jefferson.village.

virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.990/hooks.990, accessed 9 May 2005.Hutcheon, L. (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London:

Routledge.Huyssen, A. (1984) ‘Mapping the postmodern’, New German Critique, 33: 5–52.Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act.

London: Methuen.Jameson, F. (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left

Review, 146: 53–92.Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.Jarvis, B. (1998) Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in

Contemporary American Culture. London: Pluto.



Jencks, C. (1986) What is Postmodernism? London: Academy.Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (2000) The Dictionary of Human

Geography, 4th edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Kirsch, S. (1995) ‘The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of

space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 529–55.Kuspit, D. (1990) ‘The contradictory character of postmodernism’, in H.J. Silverman (ed.),

Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Arts. London: Routledge, pp. 53–68.Lapsley, R. and Westlake, M. (1988) Film Theory: An Introduction. Manchester:

Manchester University Press.Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.Lechte, J. (1995) ‘(Not) belonging in postmodern space’, in S. Watson and K. Gibson

(eds), Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 99–111.Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester:

Manchester University Press.Lyotard, J.-F. (1988) Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University

Press.Lyotard, J.-F. (1990) Heidegger and ‘the Jews’. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Lyotard, J.-F. (1992) The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence

1982–1985. London: Turnaround.Lyotard, J.-F. and Thébaud, J.-L. (1985) Just Gaming. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.Mandel, E. (1975) Late Capitalism. London: Verso.Marx, K. (1971) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. London: Lawrence &

Wishart.Massey, D. (1991) ‘Flexible sexism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,

9: 32–58.Minca, C. (ed.) (2002) Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis. Oxford: Blackwell.Morris, M. (1992) ‘The man in the mirror: David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity’,

Theory, Culture and Society, 9: 253–79.Nietzsche, F. (1974) The Gay Science. New York: Random House.Olsson, G. (1991) Lines of Power/Limits of Language. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.Perec, G. (1999) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Soja, E.W. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social

Theory. London: Verso.Soja, E.W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined

Places. Oxford: Blackwell.Soja, E.W. (2000) Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford:

Blackwell.Soja, E.W. and Hooper, B. (1993) ‘The spaces that difference makes: some notes on the

geographical margins of the new cultural politics’, in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds), Placeand the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 183–205.

120ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Strohmayer, U. and Hannah, M. (1992) ‘Domesticating postmodernism’, Antipode, 24:29–55.

Tschumi, B. (1994) Architecture and Disjunction. London: MIT Press.Vattimo, G. (1988) The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern

Culture. Cambridge: Polity.Young, I.M. (1990) ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’, in L.J. Nicholson

(ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism. London: Routledge, pp. 300–23.



POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

Paul Harrison

‘All truth is simple’ – Is that not acompound lie?(Friedrich Nietzsche, 1990[1888]: 33)

Like all ‘isms’,‘poststructuralism’ is an awkwardterm and one which continues to generatemore confusion, frustration,argument and out-right anger than most.One of the main reasonsfor this is that it is often very unclear quite towhom or what the term refers.Unlike the pos-itivists of the Vienna Circle for example (seeChapter 2) or indeed the vast majority ofMarxists (Chapter 5), feminists (Chapter 4) andrealists (Chapter 8), the figures, works andviews gathered under the title ‘poststructural-ism’ are for the most part not self selecting; theydid not and have not signed up to a manifestoand do not share a credo. Indeed – and as weshall see below – considered at its broadest theterm ‘poststructuralism’ simply describes thestate of contemporary continental philosophy,a lineage of philosophical figures and textsstretching back approximately 220 years. In thiscontext the term ‘poststructuralism’ refers to amore or less loosely grouped collection of textsand philosophers which came to prominencein France during the 1960s.

Clearly 50 years of vibrant and challengingtheory and thought cannot be summed up ina chapter such as this, nor should one rush toattribute one view to what is a diverse and stilldeveloping body of thought. Having said this,at the outset of this chapter I want to suggestthree things which give poststructuralism itsunique place within the continental tradition.

First, there has been a revival of ontologicalquestioning; poststructuralism marks a returnto and a revitalization of ‘first philosophy’ – ofbasic foundational questions of being – thoughmore often than not by treating such founda-tional questions as contingent historical issues.Second, and following on, poststructuralism isradically anti-essentialist; for poststructuralism,meaning and identity are effects rather thancauses. Third, and following on again, it hasbecome increasingly clear over the past twodecades that poststructuralism has a major eth-ical aspect, particularly in its concern for radi-cal otherness and difference. If these pointssound somewhat obscure, hopefully this chap-ter will go some way to clarifying them; how-ever I cannot recommend strongly enoughthat anybody who is interested should engagewith the primary literature itself.

The chapter is divided into four main sec-tions.The first of these gives a brief introduc-tion to poststructuralism’s anti-essentialismvia reflecting on the method of genealogy.The second section moves on to give a some-what schematic history of poststructuralism,situating it in the wider continental tradition.The third section looks briefly to the futureand to the political and ethical demands onpoststructuralism.The final section considers anumber of further readings, and reviews twokey poststructural geography works. Runningthroughout the chapter is a rather blunt cri-tique of positivist approaches and of the tradi-tional philosophical and theoretical attemptto escape from history and situation – from

10


the ‘original difficulty of life’ as the Americanphilosopher John Caputo (2000) puts it – themain purpose of which is to simply raisequestions concerning the nature of certainassumptions about verification, representationand truth.

The Cold Truth of Genealogy

Talking about the giving of definitions theGerman philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche(1844–1900) claimed that only that which hasnever had a history can be defined with anycertainty. What does this mean? Nietzsche issuggesting that if someone, a philosopher per-haps, thinks that all we need for understandingare clear definitions – that one can get to theessence, identity or meaning of something bysumming it up in abstract or logical terms –they are badly mistaken:

There is their lack of historical sense, theirhatred even of the idea of becoming, theirEgyptianism. They think they are doing athing an honour when they dehistoricize it,sub specie aeterni [from the viewpoint ofeternity] – when they make a mummy ofit. All that philosophers have handled formillennia has been conceptual mummies;nothing actual has escaped from theirhands alive. They kill, they stuff, theyworship, these conceptual idolaters – theybecome a mortal danger to everythingwhen they worship. (1990: 45)

According to Nietzsche, when we think weare talking about essences, facts or things-in-themselves – anything that seems or should besimple, obvious, unproblematic or clear – weforget that everything has a history. Nietzscheis suggesting that those who believe Truth issomething that, like money or salvation, canbe gained or possessed, those who believe‘even to the point of despair, in that which is’(1990: 45), fail to grasp the shifting, becoming,

nature of existence. While a concept seemsto identify something certain and immutable,something common, like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ per-haps, or ‘human’ and ‘animal’, or ‘truth’ and‘error’, or simply ‘positivism’ and ‘poststruc-turalism’, it is rather the sedimentation of ahistory of mutations and conflicts over defin-ition, the strata of which outline attempts towrestle control of the term’s meaning.A con-cept has all the unity of a mole’s burrow and,like the needle vibrating on a speedometer, aword or a sign marks an ongoing relationshipbetween forces. Nietzsche is warning us to beparticularly wary of transcendental claims, bethey religious or philosophical-scientific: ofclaims which whisper the reassuring salvationof ‘now and forever’ – sub specie aeterni – undertheir breath; of claims which would directyou to Truth with a capital T, Reality with acapital R, the Good with a capital G. Whenyou hear claims like this Nietzsche advises tostart sniffing around, as for all this sweetnesssomething is rotten somewhere; a moral les-son is being instructed as identity is con-firmed and contingency disavowed: ‘Thisworkshop where ideals are manufactured seemsto me to stink of so many lies’ (1998: 47). AsCaputo writes:

Whatever is called ‘Truth’ and adornedwith capital letters masks its own contin-gency and untruth, even as it masks thecapacity for being-otherwise. For ourbeing human spins off into an indefinitefuture about which we know little ornothing, which fills us with little hope andnot a little anxiety, a future to come forwhich there is no program, no prepara-tion, no prognostication. (2000: 36)

This is the ‘cold truth’ of genealogy and ofpoststructuralism: its truth without Truth: itssecret which is not a secret; its foundationwhich is an abyss.

The French historian of ideas MichelFoucault (1926–1984), perhaps the most

POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIESÿÿ123


well known of poststructuralists, was deeplyinfluenced by Nietzsche’s work and by theinsights that could be gained by genealogy inparticular. Foucault practised genealogy as ahistorical-philosophical method, producingstudies of prisons and punishment (1977a) andof human sexuality and subjectivity (1978;1988; 1990). These studies were detailedgenealogies of the various ways in which bod-ies and minds were and are historically consti-tuted. In his 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, genealogy,history’ Foucault writes that:

Genealogy is grey, meticulous, andpatiently documentary. It operates on afield of entangled and confused parch-ments, on documents that have beenscratched over and recopied many times.(1977b: 139)

We tend to think that the purpose of histori-cal investigation is to trace the developmentof a phenomenon, be it morality, sexuality orpunishment, by working back towards its hid-den source or origin in order to discern theunderlying principle or cause – be it climatechange, human nature, the civilizing urge of apeople, a crisis in the mode of production, thewill to power of an individual or their trou-bled relationship with their mother. Andindeed this is how much historical researchhas been and is conducted. However, suchresearch both assumes and sets out to discoversome extrahistorical or transcendental struc-ture or mechanism standing behind, guidingand shaping phenomena, some mechanismwhich allows words to keep their meaning,desires to always point in one direction andideas to retain their logic. Genealogy does notseek to discover such a source or secret; rather‘the genealogist needs history to dispel thechimeras of the origin’ (1977b: 144).The aimis not recovery or restitution but dispersion.The aim of genealogy is not to institute adespotic aspatial and ahistorical sub specieaeterni in our thought and methods but tocatch a glimpse of life as it takes flight and to

be obligated by this movement; to understandhistory as a productive, differential field.Thusfor Foucault:

it is no longer an identity that we need torecover … but a difference. It is no longera positive ideal that needs to be restoredbut simply a certain capacity to resistidentities that are imposed upon us justto set free our capacity to invent suchnew identities for ourselves as circum-stances allow. (Caputo, 2000: 34)

If Foucault refuses to posit transcendental ormetaphysical causes to events, to give a sim-ple narrative to history and an explanationto the present, how does he construct hisaccounts? Again Foucault follows Nietzsche,stepping back from reason and towards sensa-tion, from theory to practice, from brain tonose. For Foucault, all we have to hold ontois the body in all its unforeseeable mutability:

The body is the inscribed surface of events(traced by language and dissolved byideas), the locus of a dissociated Self(adopting the illusion of a substantialunity), and a volume in perpetual dis-integration. Genealogy … is thus situatedwithin the articulation of the body and his-tory. Its task is to expose a body totallyimprinted by history and the process of his-tory’s destruction of the body. (1977b: 148)

Thus in his studies of disciplinary techniquesand confessional practices Foucault traces thelinking of networks of biopower across the west:the articulation of technoscientific discoursesand practices which call forth, shape, identify,classify, regulate and judge bodies. In particularhe focuses upon the creation of docile andproductive bodies which underlies the rise ofcapitalism: bodies trained and sorted throughthe emergent network of schools, workshops,prisons, barracks and hospitals in order to fitinto the new machinery of production.

Yet if Foucault argues that nothing isfundamental, if his argument is radically

124ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


anti-essentialist and if knowledge and truth arethemselves inseparable from power, how canhe make the historical claims he does and howare we to judge his work? Surely there is aperformative contradiction here or, as theGerman philosopher Jürgen Habermas(1929–) (1991) puts it, a ‘crypto-normativism’:in offering a philosophical-historical critiquesurely Foucault must be appealing to someexternal critical standards as well as to somestandard of truth and reason, if only impli-citly. For many Foucault’s writing demon-strates a double gesture common to most ifnot all poststructuralist thought: the denial ofany external standard of reason and truth onthe one hand while attempting to critique andconvince on the other.And hence the accusa-tions of irrationalism and nihilism which sooften accompany poststructuralism. Foucault’swork is certainly problematic in a numberof respects; however, on this key issue of thestatus of critique – and looking ahead to ourthird section – it is worth focusing briefly onhis essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in whichhe writes of the situation of his own workand of wider tasks of modern philosophy andtheory.

Foucault opens by commenting that:‘Modern philosophy is the philosophy that isattempting to answer the question raised soimprudently two centuries ago: Was isAufklärung? [What is Enlightenment?]’ (1984:32). It was the German philosopher ImmanuelKant (1724–1804) who first asked this ques-tion in an essay written in 1784. Foucaultnotes what could be called the standard inter-pretation of Kant’s essay: that Kant understoodthe Enlightenment as an exit from our self-imposed immaturity, from our willing accep-tance of ‘someone else’s authority to lead usin areas where the use of reason is called for’(1984: 34), examples being submission to mil-itary discipline, political power or religiousauthority. In place of such orders to ‘obeywithout thinking’Kant suggests the alternative‘Obey, and you will be able to reason as much

as you like’, and as an example he suggestspaying one’s taxes while being able to argue asmuch as one likes about the system of taxation(1984: 36). Foucault notes that Kant is actuallyproposing some sort of contract, that this is anissue of politics as much as of science: ‘whatmight be called the contract of rational despo-tism with free reason’ (1984:37) wherein thereis the free use of reason but only within cer-tain prescribed limits. Foucault breaks off fromhis reading of Kant’s essay at this point andbegins to focus less on what it says and moreon what it shows. For Foucault the crucial andradical point in the essay is how Kant takes thepresent moment as the object of his criticalreflections. Against the contract or settlementof reason within the limits of an arbitrary rea-sonableness, in this instant the critical ques-tioning is incessant: ‘What difference doestoday introduce in respect to yesterday?’(1984: 34). Here the Enlightenment is under-stood not as a threshold over which we passonce moving from subservience to freedomwithin certain limits, as one would graduatefrom school to work, but rather as a process ofcontinual questioning of such thresholds. Inparticular for Foucault it is a questioning ofthe geohistorical constitution of ideas, con-cepts and values which underpin the mostapparently unquestionable and normal of atti-tudes and assumptions;‘maturity’ is the unend-ing process of the production of autonomy andfreedom, not another settlement into anotherdespotism. Thus Foucault’s is a ‘practical cri-tique … a critical ontology of ourselves, whichopens the possibility of being otherwise bycalling into question through reflecting onhow we have become what we are’ (Owen,1999: 602). In this sense poststructuralismproduces immanent critiques, critiques in theabsence of an overarching explanatoryschema. For Foucault the Enlightenment is ‘aset of political, economic, social, institutionaland cultural events’ that linked the ‘progress oftruth and the history of liberty in a bond ofdirect relation’ and formulated ‘a philosophical



question that remains for us to consider’(1984: 43): what is Enlightenment? How have webecome what we are? What are the uses of reasontoday? The problem and question of reason isto be treated historically and not metaphysi-cally. In this way Foucault rejects the ‘“black-mail” of the Enlightenment’ (1984: 43) foundin critiques of his work such as those given byHabermas; one does not have to be ‘for’ or‘against’ the Enlightenment as if some clash ofcultures or civilizations were in the offing.Foucault’s analysis suggests ‘that one has torefuse everything that might present itself inthe form of such a simplistic and authoritarianalternative’ (1984: 43).

What is Poststructuralism?

What of poststructuralism then? As notedabove, the term ‘poststructuralism’ names oneof the most recent phases of continentalphilosophy. Following Foucault’s lead we cansay that the history of continental philosophyextends for roughly 220 years, beginningwith the publication of Kant’s critical philo-sophy in the 1780s. The British philosopherSimon Critchley provides a useful provisionalrundown of the phases and figures since thattime, as shown in Table 10.1.

Like Foucault, Critchley argues that it isthe reaction to Kant’s philosophy which con-tinues to inform current debate over (andmisunderstandings of ) poststructuralism. Aswe saw in the previous section, Kant’s philo-sophy crystallized the Enlightenment byclaiming the sovereignty of reason. Oneroute from this point to the present is viawhat has become known as the ‘analytic tra-dition’ in philosophy – which gave rise tological positivism and its offspring. On thereading of analytic philosophy Kant’s contri-bution means that the focus of thinking andtheory should be first and foremost on epi-stemological questions, i.e. questions concerning

validity, verification, and evidence, at theservice of reason. As the Viennese positivistOtto Neurath put it:

The representatives of the scientificworld-conception stand on the ground ofsimple human experience. They confi-dently approach the task of removing themetaphysical and theological debris.(quoted in Critchley, 2001: 96–7)

However this is not the only route from theEnlightenment to the present. As Critchleydescribes, for many the entire project of theGerman Enlightenment suffered an ‘internalcollapse’ soon after it was proposed:

The problem can be simply described:the sovereignty of reason consists in theclaim that reason can criticize all ourbeliefs … But if this is true – if reason cancriticize all things – then surely it mustalso criticize itself. Therefore there has tobe a meta-critique if the critique is to beeffective. (2001: 19–20)

And yet Kant’s philosophy was unable to pro-vide such a metacritique; in particular it couldnot link up theory and practice, reason andexperience, understanding and sensibility,nature and freedom, the pure and the practi-cal.Taking this last dualism – the pure and thepractical – we can return to Nietzsche’s com-ments near the start of this chapter. As we haveseen, Nietzsche takes the reified air of purityto task for its disavowal of the contingent, thesensible, the mutable and the becoming, itsdisavowal of the ‘original difficulty of life’ withwhich we started. Rather than taking the highroad to pure forms and essences, continentalthought took the low path becoming, paceMartin Heidegger (1889–1976), a radical onto-hermeneutics. Cutting lower perhaps thanNeurath thought possible, to the layer wheremost spades are turned, this tradition askedabout

126ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


‘the a priori conditions not only for thepossibility of sciences which examineentities as entities of such and such a type …but also for the possibility of those onto-logies themselves which are prior to theontical sciences and which provide theirfoundations. (Heidegger, 1962: 31)

Of course for many – in particular manywithin the analytic tradition – such question-ing is pointless, either having been answered orbeing unanswerable. As Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889–1951) commented in the TractatusLogico-Philosophicus – a work which was andoften still is taken as a programme for logicalpositivism – ‘The world is all that is the case’(1961: #1), meaning that we can answer allour speculative questions and propositionsby verifying them against the world, all otherpropositions being either analytic, in thatthey are self-referential and logical, or non-sense. Hence the final line of Wittgenstein’sgreat work, perhaps one of the most famousin recent philosophy:‘What we cannot speakabout we must pass over in silence’ (1961: 7).Any proposition or claim that is not analyticor cannot be verified is not strictly speakinga proposition or a claim at all but an opinionand, as such, something which you shouldperhaps keep to yourself. And yet it is

precisely the danger contained in this viewwhich motivates so much continental philo-sophy: the danger of the reduction and limit-ation of truth to questions of representation,calculation, measurement and correspondence,outside which everything else is condemned asmere opinion. However, doesn’t this mean thatcontinental philosophy and poststructuralismin particular are simply bad psychology dressedup as philosophy – that bête noire of the USculture wars, pseudoscience?

Not all of these worries are misplaced;certainly there are works labelled poststruc-turalist which are awry in their argumentsand convictions. Yet just because poststruc-turalism engages explicitly with the contexts,conditions of possibility, a prioris and aporias ofphenomena such as truth and error, presenceand absence, subjectivity and objectivity,testimony and fiction, representation andthe sublime, correspondence and communi-cation, that does not make it pseudoscience.The founder of phenomenology (see Table10.1), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), sawphilosophy’s role as the investigation into thenature and being of the lifeworld (Umwelt)from which theoretical and scientific thoughtemerges and within which it finds its signifi-cance and meaning. The phenomena, beingor givenness of the lifeworld is the condition


Table 10.1 Phases and figures in continental philosophy

1 German idealism and romanticism and its aftermath (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schlegel, Novalis,Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer)

2 The critique of metaphysics and the ‘masters of suspicion’ (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud,Bergson)

3 Germanophone phenomenology and existential philosophy (Husserl, Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers,Heidegger)

4 French phenomenology, Hegelianism and anti-Hegelianism (Kojève, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas,Bataille, de Beauvoir)

5 Hermeneutics (Dilthy, Gadamer, Ricoeur)6 Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School (Lukács, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse,

Habermas)7 French structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser), poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze),

postmodernism (Lyotard, Baudrillard) and feminism (Irigaray, Kristeva)

Source: Critchley, 2001: 13


of possibility for subjectivity and objectivityalike, being presupposed in any definition ofeither; quite simply there is nothing outside(this) context.As Adriaan Peperzak writes:

reason cannot prove its own beginnings.At least some beliefs, perceptions, feelingsmust be accepted before we can beginarguing. In order to avoid all arbitrariness,we must find out which basics, insteadof being ‘subjective’ in the subjectivistsense of the word, are so fundamentalthat they deserve our respect and eventrust. (2003: 3)

While for many poststructuralism is the epi-tome of contemporary nihilism, such a view isa serious failure to engage with its context andhistory for,with Nietzsche,poststructuralism isdedicated to resisting nihilism. Nothing evacu-ates potential meaning faster and in a moreunderhand manner than a simple presenta-tion of the facts as if this were all that couldor needs to be said. Nihilism is not due tobeing irrational or somehow ‘against’ theEnlightenment; rather it stems from the valu-ation of a purely calculative understanding oftruth irreversibly cut off from context – idealsseparated from their workshop. This is to saynot that truth is purely contextual or that it is‘situated’, ‘local’ or ‘relative’, but simply thatreason finds its rationale only in the ‘originaldifficulty of life’. If we forget to criticallyquestion our onto-hermeneutic situation wecannot begin to answer meaningfully thequestions ‘“why in this way and not other-wise?”, “why this and not that?”, “why some-thing rather than nothing?”’ (Heidegger,1998: 134): sub specie aeterni is the herald of anunresponsive and irresponsible despotism.

The Promise of Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism is often characterized as beingan overly negative critical stance. In its radical

anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism,poststructuralism seems unable to offer anyrecognizably progressive programme, be it interms of knowledge or politics. It is for thisreason that many accuse poststructuralists ofboth epistemological and political relativism.To counter such views, in this section I wantto bring out the affirmative nature of post-structuralism and to do so by turning brieflyto the writing of French-Algerian philo-sopher Jacques Derrida (1930–) and to themode of thought with which his name hasbecome synonymous: deconstruction.

We saw above how through his use ofgenealogy Foucault attempted to bring to thefore the extreme historical and geographiccontingency of apparently transcendentalforces, entities and concepts.Derrida employsa similar technique though his investigationstend to focus upon key concepts within thephilosophical, religious and political tradi-tions of the west. For example his bookPolitics of Friendship (1997) considers variousarticulations of the concept of politics andthe political from Plato (427–347 B.C.)through to Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995).Derrida shows how throughout this historythe concept of politics and of democracy inparticular

rarely announces itself without some sortof adherence of the state to the family,without what we could call some sort ofschematic of filiation: stock, genus orspecies, sex … blood, birth, nature, nation.(1997: x)

Democracy’s great force and claim are that ittreats all individuals singularly and withoutprejudice; however Derrida’s analysis claimsthat in being always defined in terms of mas-culine friendship, democratic thought andpractice consistently fall short of and indeedsystematically withdraw from such obliga-tions. Derrida demonstrates how the politicalimagination of the west has great difficulty in

128ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


imagining ways of being together and thesocial relationship per se otherwise than as areciprocal relationship between similar men.On the last page of the book Derrida asks thequestion which has motivated the study:

is it possible to think and to implementdemocracy, that which would keep theold name ‘democracy’, while uprootingfrom it all those figures from friendship(philosophical and religious) which pre-scribe fraternity: the family and theandrocentric ethic group? Is it possible,in assuming a certain faithful memory ofdemocratic reason and reason tout court …not to found, where it is no longer a mat-ter of founding, but to open to a future, orrather to the ‘to come’, of a certaindemocracy? (1997: 306)

From this quote it should be clear thatDerrida’s conceptual investigation is not asimple nihilistic assault on the concept ofdemocracy; rather, and like all deconstructivereadings, it is an attempt to open the conceptup to the possibility of being thought other-wise. Derrida is suggesting that we do notneed a new foundation of the political – anew programme or blueprint – as such foun-dations unavoidably put to work transcen-dental or metaphysical presuppositions.Rather we need an opening of the conceptof the political beyond its current imagina-tion and conceptualization:

The idea of such [deconstructive] analysisis not to level democratic institutions tothe ground but to open them to a demo-cracy to come, to turn them around fromwhat they are at present, which is the pre-vention of the other … Preparing for thein-coming of the other, which is whatconstitutes radical democracy – that iswhat deconstruction is. (Caputo, 1997: 44)

Since the early 1990s the deeply ethicalnature of poststructuralist theory and of

deconstruction in particular has come to thefore. In Derrida’s writing this ethical impulseoften revolves around the idea of the ‘to come’(l’à-venir). For Derrida and for poststructural-ism per se there ‘can be no future as such with-out radical otherness, and respect for thisradical otherness’ (Derrida in Derrida andFerraris, 2001: 21). Importantly ‘radical other-ness’ is not otherness considered in terms of anidentity but rather that which ‘defies anticipa-tion, reappropriation, calculation – any formof pre-determination’ (2001: 21). While wecannot but anticipate the future, prepare, makeplans, analyse, reckon and strategize, and wewould be highly irresponsible not to do so,Derrida suggests that the rationale for suchrationalization can only lie in our ‘relationship’to the incalculable ‘to come’ of the future.Wecalculate because of the incalculable; a future ispossible for us because of our relation to afuture always to come but never present. Inthis sense our plans, calculations and rational-izations have the form first and foremost notof grounded propositions, of proofs or certi-tudes, but of pledges and promises.As Derridacomments: ‘From the moment I open mymouth I promise’ (1987a: 14) – even if likeWittgenstein in the Tractatus it is to say thatthere is nothing else to say – for all thoughtand thinking ‘requires a yes more “ancient”than the question “what is?” since this ques-tion presupposes it, a yes more ancient thanknowledge’ (1992a: 296).Without a ‘relation-ship’ to the unknown in the form of an affir-mation and a promise, knowledge is notpossible. Hence, and to return to the exampleof Politics of Friendship, Derrida comments that

democracy remains to come; this is itsessence in so far as it remains: not only willit remain indefinitely perfectible, hencealways insufficient and future, but, belong-ing to the time of the promise, it willalways remain in each of its future times,to come: even when there is democracy, itnever exists, it is never present. (1997: 306)



Hence deconstruction is already pledged,already engaged, already obligated and, at thesame time, always to come, always promised,always possible.

Poststructuralism and Geography

Throughout this chapter I have been keen tostress that the term ‘poststructuralism’ coversa complex and diverse set of writings andideas and as such it has had many routes intohuman geography. In the companion chapterto this one, John Wylie (Chapter 27) providesa concise and well-informed overview ofpoststructuralism’s influence in geography;rather than replicate this account I want tofocus on just a few selected and, I believe,indicative texts which the reader interested inpoststructuralism and geography may want toconsider.

To begin with it is worth noting a num-ber of texts by (mainly) non-geographerswhich either come from or can serve toinform a poststructuralist understanding ofand approach to space. Edward S. Casey’s TheFate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997) isparticularly useful for its long view of think-ing on place and space. In a similar vain JeffMalpas’ Place and Experience: A PhilosophicalTopology (1999) is an interesting attempt by acontemporary philosopher to engage in theissues around space. While both Casey andMalpas have a distinctive phenomenologicaltenor to their discussions, David Farrell Krell’sArchitecture: Ecstasies of Space, Time and theHuman Body (1997) is more influenced byDerrida’s post-phenomenological decon-structive approach, though it is perhaps lesssuccessful than his other works. Coveringsimilar topics, though at a less frenetic pace, areRobert Mugerauer’s Interpreting Environments:Tradition, Deconstruction and Hermeneutics(1995), Karsten Harris’ The Ethical Function ofArchitecture (1998) and John Rajchman’sConstructions (1998). In many ways Derrida’s

key contribution for geographers is the ideaof spacing, and as such, Derrida’s own writingon the topics of space and place is minimaland somewhat oblique to say the least.However his substantive writing on the con-cepts of cosmopolitanism and hospitalityare significant (1992b; 2000; 2001; 2002), asare his reflections on language, translation,exile and distance (1987b; 1998).An excellentexample of deconstruction in a context rele-vant to geography is David Campbell’sNational Deconstruction: Violence, Identity andJustice in Bosnia (1997).As for Foucault, a greatdeal of his work can be understood at least inpart as an endeavour of ‘spatial history’; alongwith those primary texts noted previously,see in particular Stuart Elden’s Mappingthe Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Projectof Spatial History (2001), the geographerChris Philo’s (1992) important paper, andthe essays collected in Joanne P. Sharpeet al.’s Entanglements of Power: Geographies ofDomination/Resistance (2000). Some of thebest writing in poststructuralism and spacehas come from a feminist perspective; of par-ticular note in this context is the work ofElizabeth Grosz, including her books Space,Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics ofBody (1995), Architecture from the Outside:Essays on Virtual and Real Space (2001) and herinfluential Volatile Bodies: Towards a CorporalFeminism (1994).Of import for geographers isDonna Haraway’s work on rethinking human–nature relations; see in particular her landmarkcollection of essays Simians, Cyborgs andWomen: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).Finally, while not explicitly on the topics ofspace and place, of interest to many geo-graphers in recent years have been BrianMassumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement,Affect, Sensation (2002),William E. Connolly’sNeuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002)and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s radi-cal poststructuralist manifesto for the twenty-first century Empire (2001) and its sequelMultitude (2004).While all the texts listed here

130ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


will help any would-be poststructuralist ingaining a feel for the broad contours ofdiscussion and debate, it should come as nosurprise that these texts can be quite detachedfrom and seemingly lacking a context in cur-rent geographical thought.Again I would referthe interested reader to Wylie’s overview fora more extensive context. Here I want toconcentrate on two contributions by geo-graphers which attempt to bridge this gap:Marcus Doel’s Poststructuralist Geographies: TheDiabolical Art of Spatial Science (1999) and SarahWhatmore’s Hybrid Geographies: NaturesCultures Spaces (2002).

While certainly not the first to enquireinto poststructuralism and geography orto be avowedly poststructuralist in outlook,Doel’s book Poststructuralist Geographiesnonetheless in many ways represents the cul-mination of a ‘first wave’ of explicitly post-structural theorization from within humangeography. Doel’s central claim is that post-structuralism is already a thought about thenature of space, in particular about the natureof space as an event. According to Doel geo-graphy has suffered from ‘pointillism’, anoverly sure (and metaphysical) belief in thecommon-sense substantiality of ‘what is’ – ofthe kind critiqued by Nietzsche above – andthis has led to a failure to think about thenature and work of difference and differenti-ation or becoming. For Doel the realizationthat everything must take place, must – asDoel puts it after Henri Lefebvre – ‘undergotrial by space’, demonstrates that space is notso much a stage or thing but a happening, anevent. Things do not simply sit in space butrather are spaced out in various ways andconstitutively so; however, at the same timethis ‘spaceing’ or ‘(s)playing’ disturbs and dis-rupts any claim or semblance of solidity, per-manence, identity or transcendence. Theseinsights, developed and explored throughreadings of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida,Irigaray and Lyotard, lead to a critique ofboth humanist and Marxist approaches

within the discipline, both of which are takento task for their overly ‘sedentary’ modes ofthought, their unfounded belief in the foun-dations of place and thereby their failing to‘let space take place’. Played out across a widerange of references and through a prolifera-tion of quotes, jokes and neologisms, whatemerges from Doel’s account is an ambitiousand provocative attempt to rethink andrephrase our basic apprehension of spaceand so of geography itself. PoststructuralistGeographies has been critiqued on a numberof fronts, both by those broadly sympatheticto its arguments and by those opposed.Therecan be little doubt that Doel’s book is a chal-lenging read; it is densely written and pre-supposes some prior knowledge of thewriters of which he makes use. For some thisis symptomatic of elitist and exclusionarytendencies within poststructuralism; however,perhaps a more pointed criticism here is thatDoel’s book is indicative of ‘the central fail-ing of post-structuralism … that the onlything it is capable of saying anything about isitself ’ (Bancroft, 2000: 122). Less rhetorically,the geographer Jeffery E. Popke makes a sim-ilar criticism of Doel’s brand of poststruc-turalism in his article ‘Poststructuralist ethics:subjectivity, responsibility and the space ofcommunity’ (2003). While sympathetic toand welcoming of Doel’s rethinking of spacein terms of difference, Popke argues thatDoel ‘fails to offer us any means for thinkingthis opening in relation to responsibility andjustice’ (2003: 309).

Rather than being a poststructural medi-tation on the nature of space per se – or atleast not overtly so – Whatmore’s HybridGeographies takes as its central task a rethink-ing and exploration of the distinction andrelationships between nature and culture.Through a series of investigations Whatmoreexplores the vitalistic ‘topologies of wildlife’which emerge as this binary is deconstructed.Like Doel,Whatmore wishes to demonstratethe heterogeneous, processual and emergent



complexity of the world which underlies andis hidden in our inherited representations andassumptions. Hence the word ‘hybrid’ in thetitle: for Whatmore it is relations which areimportant and not essences, again a shift frombeing to becoming.This approach leads to a‘mapping’ of various decentred or networkedphenomena, exploring how various ‘things’ –from elephants to genetically modified crops –are constituted through diverse encounters,processes and performances and as such arealways partial, provisional and incomplete. Asmuch as it embodies the affirmative anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism of post-structural thought, Whatmore’s writing alsodraws on distinctive feminist and environ-mentalist traditions; and it is perhaps thecombination of these three strands whichleads to a more explicit thinking of the ethi-cal than that found in Doel. For Whatmorethe exposure of the relational and opennature of existence demonstrates the need fora ‘relational ethics’ concerned with ways ofliving, folding and becoming with ‘more-than-human’others. In many ways – and not unlikeDoel – Whatmore’s text performs this com-mitment, attempting to embody the vital andpolyvalent ethos of which she speaks.A con-sequence of this joining of saying and doing isthat Hybrid Geographies is another challengingread which, like Doel’s work, can be disori-enting. However this is a productive disorien-tation, aimed at dispelling arbitrary or divisiveconceptual formulations and naive methodo-logical and empirical strategies. ArguablyWhatmore’s relational ethics – while moreexplicit than Doel’s – remains somewhatambiguous, perhaps indicative less of a lackof thinking about otherness than of the con-flict between an ontological monism and apassionate commitment to difference. Despitethese comments Hybrid Geographies is at thecutting edge of geographical thought, com-bining the theoretical and the empirical seam-lessly in an incisive and affirmative immanentcritique.

Summary

The aim of this chapter has not been so muchto give an overview of poststructuralism as togive a brief indication of some of its directionsand concerns. In so doing many bodies ofworks have been passed over, not least those ofGiorgio Agamben (1942–), Judith Butler(1956–), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), JeanBaudrillard (1929–), Hélène Cixous (1937–),Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), Félix Guattari(1930–1992), Luce Irigaray (1932–), JuliaKristeva (1941–), Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard (1925–1998) and Jean-LucNancy (1940–), to name only the most promi-nent – all of whom could be classified as post-structuralist, at least at some stage in theirwork. The point here is not to try to over-whelm but rather to highlight again that ‘post-structuralism’ is an awkward term and oftenone of limited value. Still, within this diversityof works I wish to reaffirm and add to thethree points raised in the introduction. Inreviving onto-hermeneutic questioning (ifonly to reject it), poststructuralism criticallyaffirms our uncanny lack of foundations andessence. In this radical anti-essentialism, post-structuralism denies any short cuts to simpletruths and the construction of accounts whichwould seek to reduce the phenomena underinvestigation to either ahistorical or aspatialcauses or to simply the effect of context. In sodoing, poststructuralism presents a relationaland open movement of thought, one which ispermanently under revision, undergoing ‘trialby space’.

The chapter has sought to engage a num-ber of the main criticisms of poststructuralthought. Most generally, I have tried to showhow the apparent obscurity of what is namedby the term ‘poststructuralism’ stems fromthe fact that poststructuralism is the tip ofthe iceberg of continental philosophy. Oncethis is understood, it should be clear thatpoststructuralism is not simply the ‘latestfashion’ or ‘elitist jargon’; indeed, trying to

132ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


engage the term without respect for or inignorance – wilful or otherwise – of this con-text is responsible for the vast majority of suchmisunderstandings and misrepresentations.A more telling criticism of poststructuralistthought is that it can become overburdenedby its historical self-consciousness such that allthat is produced in its name are commentarieson its own canonical and marginal texts. Morespecifically the chapter has engaged withclaims that poststructuralism is nihilistic, anti-Enlightenment, irrational, pseudosciencenonsense, and epistemologically and politi-cally relativistic. Taken together these criti-cisms claim that due to its anti-essentialismand anti-foundationalism poststructuralistwork is incapable of producing insightfulanalysis or socially progressive and morallyinformed critique. Indeed, many take post-structuralism as an extreme and frivolousform of linguistic scepticism, preoccupied withsplitting etymological hairs and bewitchedby undecidability and obscurantism. In thisunderstanding, poststructuralism’s apparentobsession with concepts and language betraysits apathy in the face of real-world problems.And yet this is to ignore the incessant urgencywhich pulls poststructuralism along, its

unfounded commitment to difference; to thesingular, the marginal, the exceptional, the ‘tocome’.While thinking under the influence ofpoststructuralism does not guarantee insightfulanalysis or progressive critique – how couldany philosophy, ontology or epistemology? –neither does it rule them out in advance.Indeed if any philosophy, ontology or epi-stemology claimed such a guarantee it wouldbe the least insightful and progressive thought,being itself nothing more than an efficiency, aprogrammability, a calculability, or an automa-tion of thinking.

In the end it is perhaps poststructuralism’sgeneral refusal to provide ‘simple truths’ andoptions which condemns it in the eyes ofmany; and yet, as Derrida writes,‘There is nomoral or political responsibility without thistrial and this passage by way of the undecid-able’ (1988: 116). Only a thought and athinking which seeks to prepare and main-tain a relationship with the unknown can becalled thinking.As Nietzsche wrote:

I mistrust all systematizers and avoidthem. The will to system is a lack ofintegrity. (1990: 35)


ReferencesBancroft, A. (2000) ‘Review of Marcus Doel’s Poststructuralist Geographies’, Social and

Cultural Geography, 1: 120–2.Campbell, D. (1997) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia.

London: University of Minnesota Press.Caputo, J.D. (1997) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.

New York: Fordham University Press.Caputo, J.D. (2000) More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, Casey, E.S. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. London: University of

California Press.Connolly, W. (2002) Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. London: University of

Minnesota Press.Critchley, S. (2001) Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Derrida, J. (1978) Of Grammatology. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.


Derrida, J. (1987a) ‘How to avoid speaking: denials’, in S. Budick and W. Iser (eds),Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 3–70.

Derrida, J. (1987b) The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. London:University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1988) Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Derrida, J. (1992a) ‘Ulysses gramophone: hear say yes in Joyce’, in D. Attridge (ed.),

Acts of Literature. London: Routledge, pp. 253–309.Derrida, J. (1992b) The Other Heading: Reflections of Today’s Europe. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.Derrida, J. (1997) Politics of Friendship. London: Verso.Derrida, J. (1998) Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.Derrida, J. (2000) On Hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Derrida, J. (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge.Derrida, J. (2002) ‘Hospitality’, in Acts of Religion. London: Routledge, pp. 358–420.Derrida, J. and Ferraris, M. (2001) A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: Polity.Doel, M. (1999) Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Elden, S. (2001) Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of Spatial

History. London: Continuum.Foucault, M. (1977a) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin.Foucault, M. (1977b) ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language,

Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, pp. 139–64.

Foucault, M. (1978) History of Sexuality: An Introduction. London: Penguin.Foucault, M. (1984) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin,

pp. 32–50.Foucault, M. (1988) History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. London: Penguin.Foucault, M. (1990) History of Sexuality, Volume 3:The Care of the Self. London: Penguin.Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporal Feminism. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Body. London:

Routledge.Grosz, E. (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space.

Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.Habermas, J. (1991) ‘Taking aim at the heart of the present’, in D. Hoy (ed.), Foucault:

A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:

Free Association.Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2001) Empire. London: Harvard University Press.Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.

London: Penguin.Harris, K. (1998) The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell.Heidegger, M. (1998) Pathmarks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

134ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Krell, D.F. (1997) Architecture: Ecstasies of Space, Time and the Human Body. Albany,NY: SUNY.

Malpas, J. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topology. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. London: DukeUniversity Press.

Mugerauer, R. (1995) Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction andHermeneutics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1990) Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. London: Penguin.Nietzsche, F. (1998) On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks.Owen, D. (1999) ‘Power, knowledge and ethics: Foucault’, in S. Glendenning (ed.), The

Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, pp. 593–604.

Peperzak, A. (2003) The Quest for Meaning: Friends of Wisdom from Plato to Levinas.New York: Fordham University Press.

Philo, C. (1992) ‘Foucault’s geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society andSpace, 10: 137–62.

Popke, J.E. (2003) ‘Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space ofcommunity’, Progress in Human Geography, 27: 298–316.

Rajchman, J. (1998) Constructions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Sharpe, J.P., Routledge, P., Philo, C. and Paddison, R. (2000) Entanglements of Power:

Geographies of Domination/Resistance. London: Routledge.Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: Sage.Wittgenstein, L. (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.



ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY, NETWORKS, ANDRELATIONAL APPROACHES IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Fernando J. Bosco

What is Actor-Network Theory?

There are many ways to describe actor-network theory (ANT) and much has beenwritten about the perspective in recent years.ANT is an approach to sociology that has itsorigins in studies of the sociology of scienceand technology, mostly associated with thework of Bruno Latour, John Law, and MichelCallon, among many others, beginning in1980s. ANT is about uncovering and tracingthe many connections and relations amonga variety of actors (human, non-human,material,discursive) that allow particular actors,events and processes to become what theyare. The original concern of ANT was withunderstanding the construction of scientificknowledge as a product of all kinds of things(e.g. academic journals, a test tube in a lab, aca-demic presentations, skills embodied in a scien-tist) coming together in different ways througha process of ‘heterogeneous engineering’ (Law,1992). Since its original focus on the construc-tion of scientific knowledge, ANT has gonemuch further and transcended disciplinary fields(Law, 1991; Law and Hassard, 1999). Today,scholars, including geographers of course, followa similar route – that of tracing heterogeneousassociations among things – to understand theconstruction of the social in general.

Any discussion of ANT requires somebasic understanding of poststructural thinking,but ANT does not equal poststructuralism.Rather, ANT is one of several perspectives thatshare some of the anti-essentialist sentiments of

poststructural thinking. In effect, ANT can bepositioned together with other theoretical andmethodological efforts in the social sciencesthat are attempting to better capture the com-plexity of our world today. As Law and Urry(2002) have recently argued, current social sci-ence methods are not well equipped to under-stand the realities of the twenty-first century.According to them, social science to date hasdealt ‘poorly with the fleeting – that which ishere today and gone tomorrow’ and it has alsodealt ‘poorly with the distributed – that is to befound here and there but not in between – thatwhich slips and slides between one place andthe other’ (2002: 9).ANT is thus an attempt todeal with the complex and the elusive.

How can ANT tackle the analysis of manydisparate research concerns? How can ANTclaim to uncover the relations that give rise tosuch different arrangements of things as yuppierestaurants in New Zealand (Latham, 2002)and global terrorist networks? ANT (Etringerand Bosco, 2004) is a framework that suggeststhat knowledge, agents, institutions, organiza-tions, and society as a whole, are effects, and thatsuch effects are the result of relations enactedthrough heterogeneous networks of humansand non-humans.ANT tells us that such effectsare just as much a part of the network as theactors that we are interested in studying. AsLaw (1999: 4) explains, actors are network effectsthat take the attributes of the entities whichthey include; entities and things are producedor ‘performed’ by and through relations.Thus,when one reads about ‘performativity’ in ANT,

11


what scholars mean is that things are producedby relational effects, facilitated and enactedthrough networks.

The actor-network approach tells us thatsuch effects can be analyzed and understoodby tracing the networks they form and thechanging relations that emerge and developonce heterogeneous things (both human andnon-human) become related to each other.One of the most controversial points advancedby ANT is that the ‘actors’ in such hetero-geneous networks of relations (again, bothhumans and non-humans) have the capacityto act.This requires some clarification, for ifone attempts to interpret this statement in thelanguage of more traditional social theory,one could be led to believe that everythingin the world (a government official, an emptybuilding, a law, a tree) had ‘agency’. In otherwords, one could be led to assume that every-thing in the world was equivalent to an inten-tional individual actor. From the perspectiveof social theory, this would not make muchsense.

However, ANT asks us to think aboutactors and agency differently. Specifically, andaccording to Latour, from the perspective ofANT an actor is something better describedas an actant, ‘something that acts or to whichactivity is granted by others … [An actanct]implies no special motivation of human individ-ual actors, or of humans in general. An actantcan literally be anything provided it is grantedto be the source of action’ (1996: 373, originalemphasis). It is not as if ANT does not see adifference between humans and non-humans.Rather, as Adam explains,when we work withANT ‘humans and non-humans are treatedsymmetrically in our descriptions of the world,especially with regard to the agency of non-humans, an agency which may or may not havebeen designed or inscribed by human actors’(2002: 332).

Latour’s discussion and definition ofactants take us back to the discussion of net-work effects, a key notion in ANT. From the

perspective of ANT, agency is a distributedeffect and the result of relations enactedthrough networks of heterogeneous thingsand materials. Agency is, in fact, decentered –i.e. it is not specifically centered or located inhumans or in anything else (see Whatmore,1999). For example, from the perspective ofANT, I would no longer be a geographerwith the ability to write papers and produceknowledge if my computer, my colleagues,my books, my job, my professional network,and everything else in my life that allows meto act as what I am were taken away from me.ANT tells me that if this were to happen tome, I would become something different thanwhat I am right now. Law (1992) makes thissame case (about his identity as a sociologistbeing dependent on a particular actor net-work) and summarizes such a decenterednotion of agency by defining agency as net-work.Thus, from such a point of view, thingssuch as scientific knowledge, the governmentof a nation, and even what counts as a personare no other than network effects. Accordingto Law, this implies that ultimately one is anagent because one ‘inhabits a set of elements(including, of course, a body) that stretchesout into the network of materials, somaticand otherwise, that surrounds each body’(1992: 3). Ultimately, once we conceptualizeagency as a network, uncovering the hetero-geneous ‘actor networks’ of associationsallows us to explain the mechanics of powerand organization in society, and to understandhow different things (from knowledge toinstitutions to material artifacts and techno-logies) come to be,how they endure over time,or how they fail and exit from our lives andour world (Law, 1992).

Like other relational approaches in socialtheory (such as social-network analysis, dis-cussed in relation to ANT in the next sec-tion), ANT is an attempt to overcome someof the most enduring dualisms in contempo-rary social theory, such as the structure–agency debate or the distinctions typically

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORYÿÿ137


138ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

BOX 11.1 ACTOR NETWORKS: TRACING ‘TOPOLOGIES OFWILDLIFE’

What happens if we begin to analyze ‘nature’ and what we often consider to be‘wildlife’ from the perspective of ANT? According to geographer Sarah Whatmore, theanswer is that instead of seeing nature in relation to pristine, bucolic, and utopianimages of animals and plants in the wild, one begins to see wilderness and wildlifeas ‘a relational achievement spun between people and animals, plants and soils, doc-uments and devices in heterogeneous social networks which are performed in andthrough multiple places and fluid ecologies’ (2002: 14). Whatmore constructs such arelational view of nature by tracing two different ‘topologies of wildlife’: the networksof ancient Roman games (involving animals chosen to compete in bloody publicgames against other animals and humans) and the contemporary species inventoriesbuilt around the science of biodiversity (where, motivated by conservation efforts,certain animals are protected and their reproduction and use by humans are scien-tifically managed). Each of these two wildlife networks occupies its own time andplace(s), but the building process behind each of them – the assembling of diverseelements through networks – is similar. For example, a leopard that used to take cen-ter stage in a Roman arena during gladiatorial games was merely one piece in anelaborate set of procurement networks involving military supply lines and politicalpatronage that connected Rome with China, India and Africa. As Whatmore explains,the leopard that spectators saw in a Roman arena was the incarnation of a leopardsomewhere in Africa. Leopards that made it to gladiatorial and wild animal combatswere often starved, abused and/or diseased. Their characteristics had changedthrough their circulation in networks that involved their hunting and capture, trans-portation in wooden crates through land and over water (in carts and Roman mer-chant vessels), training, and storage in underground dens where they awaited theirfinal performance day. By circulating through elaborate networks of heterogeneouselements, a leopard would become what the Romans called leopardus – a perfor-mance of wildlife. Similarly, wild animals today are part of complex and hetero-geneous networks, not simply as ‘unitary biological essences, but [as] a confluenceof libidinal and contextual forces’ (2002: 14). Currently, many wild animals are scien-tifically classified according to biodiversity principles in a system of taxonomies bornout of, and very similar to, the colonial drive to subject the world to systematic scien-tific account. For example, through local, national and global institutions that regulateinternational wildlife trade, such as the Convention on the International Trade inEndangered Species, a particular kind of South American broadnose crocodile(known to locals as the yacare) has become classified as Caiman latirostris and asan endangered species. The naming and classification of the South American croc-odile has effectively enrolled the animal in scientific networks of biodiversity that pro-mote managed conservation approaches. Such approaches include the ‘regulatedsale of crocodile body parts [to] provide incentives to local people to ensure thespecies’ survival’ (2002: 27). This ‘sustainable’ use of the crocodile positions the ani-mal in a complex network that includes the collection of eggs, their breeding in spe-cial stations where animals are marked and where hatching takes place, the return


made between macro-level and micro-levelanalysis of social phenomena. But the mainproponents of ANT ask that those workingwith the approach do not attempt to frameANT under the typical categories of socialtheory. For example, reflecting on (andmaybe lamenting) the way in which somescholars have been mobilizing the ideas ofANT in their research, Latour (1999)explained that the ‘actor’ (in actor network) isnot supposed to play the role of ‘agency’, andthat the ‘network’ (in actor network) is notsupposed to play the role of structure or soci-ety. Instead, according to Latour, ‘the social isa certain type of circulation that can travelendlessly without ever encountering eitherthe micro-level or the macro-level’ (1999:19).ANT asks us that we do not think abouthierarchies or categories, but rather thinkabout constant circulations and flows.

In sum, ANT attempts to explain whathappens in the world by exploring the myr-iad connections of actants in networks ofassociations. It does not make privileged dis-tinctions between humans and non-humans.It asks us to consider what we see, the phe-nomena out there in the world that interest usand that we want to study, as performances, asthe effects of relations that come about

through connections and through networks.It tells us that to understand things, we mustunearth the actor networks.

Networks in Geography andthe Place of ANT

ANT is not exclusively a geographic theory,philosophy or perspective, since its originslie outside the boundaries of contemporaryhuman geography. Some could also say thatthere is nothing necessarily geographic aboutANT – unless of course one is a geographerand therefore thinks geographically about theworld in general. Thus, in thinking aboutANT, geographers would also add that howthe actor networks that give rise to know-ledge, institutions and organizations cometo be (and the reason for their success ortheir failure) is also related to a spatiality thatis embedded in the actor networks. Forexample, in the topologies of wildlife tracedby Whatmore (2002), the actor networksdepended on (and were built upon) the spe-cific geographic settings where wildlife couldbe performed, such as the Roman arena andthe nature reserve. In other words, the spa-tiality of the actor networks is part of the


BOX 11.1 (continues)

of some juvenile crocodiles to their habitat, and the breeding and fattening of othersfor commercial purposes. The process of becoming Caiman latirostris (a wild animal?an exotic leather?) continues as the network expands to include slaughtering andtanning. Finally, the skins are certified and enter the international reptile leathermarket. Through its enrolling in scientific networks of biodiversity, conservation andwildlife management, the broadnose crocodile paradoxically becomes the endan-gered Caiman latirostris and, at the same time, one of the most commonly tradedcrocodilian skins worldwide. Together, the examples of the leopard and the crocodileindicate how playing the part of and becoming a wild animal are the result of theenrollment of a multitude of human and non-human actors in actor networks thatspan the local to the global.


explanation for their presence and it cannotbe separated from or conceptualized outsidethe actor networks (Murdoch, 1997).

In recent years, many scholars have beenthinking geographically about actor networks.In fact, ANT has informed the research pro-jects of many human geographers and the per-spective has quickly established its presenceamong other theoretical frameworks in thediscipline, even displacing some older estab-lished ones. And the work of geographers hasalso been noticed by some of ANT’s mainproponents, who credit geographers withcontributing to challenge conceptions of theworld that rely too much on Euclideanism(Law,1999). Evidence of the rising importanceof ANT includes the increasing number ofresearch articles (e.g. Murdoch and Marsden,1995; Murdoch, 1997; 1998; Woods, 1998;Olds and Yeung, 1999; Dicken et al., 2001),special issues in well-established journals (e.g.Hetherington and Law, 2000 and their editedspecial issue in Environment and Planning D:Society and Space, 2000, entitled ‘AfterNetworks’), and books and book chapters inedited collections (e.g.Thrift, 1996;Whatmore,1999; Latham, 2002; Whatmore, 2002), toname but a few. Similarly, the entry of ANTinto the theoretical landscape of human geo-graphy is evident from the number of presen-tations in geography academic conferences inEurope and North America that invoke oracknowledge ANT as part of the frameworkthat guides different research projects.1 This isevidence of the increasing importance of ANTas an accepted and valuable approach in humangeography. The main point is that, as exem-plified by the number of books, articles andconference presentations, the conceptualizationof networks provided by ANT has surpassedother more traditional ideas and theories aboutnetworks that have been around in geographyfor more than four decades, particularly inhuman geography.

Throughout the twentieth century, geo-graphers have been interested in networks

and their geographies. Networks permeategeographic thinking, even though geographershave different empirical concerns, think differ-ently about networks because of different andmany times conflicting theoretical perspec-tives, and pursue different analytical approachesto analyze the networks they are interested in.Networks as empirical phenomena and net-works as a trope are both powerful notions thathave entertained and informed geographers’research agendas across geographic subdisci-plines.For example, transportation geographersand spatial analysts think about railroad andhighway networks, about hub and spoke net-works in airline traffic, and about Internet con-nectivity and flows, and attempt to modelthem mathematically. Economic geographerswork on networks of production throughstudies of agglomeration of firms and othernetwork-inspired concepts such as learningregions,untraded interdependencies and globalcommodity chains. Social, political, and cul-tural geographers are interested in global flowsand connections among distant humans andapproach such issues through studies ofnetworks of ethnicity, immigrant flows, thecreation of transnational identities, and theemergence of global social movements andresistance networks.A flurry of recent researchon the World Wide Web, and the myriad con-nections and flows and cyber- and other alter-native spaces that are being produced by theintersections of technology and society,has alsobeen inspired by ideas about networks (perhapsmost notorious here is Castells’ 1996 notion ofthe ‘network society’ and ‘space of flows’,whichhas inspired much debate).

In some way, we should see the incorp-oration of ANT in geography as another in aseries of approaches to analyzing and studyingnetworks by geographers.ANT is perhaps thefirst approach since spatial network analysis ingeography from the late 1960s and 1970s thatmakes networks the explicit focus of attentionfor the study of all phenomena. Let me clar-ify this. The spatial analysis of networks in

140ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


geography developed in tandem with thequantitative revolution and attempted to ana-lyze and model networks mathematicallythrough methods such as graph theory. In thequantitative and spatial analysis view of net-works, geographers were attempting to over-come the dichotomy between human andphysical geography and thus argued that, forexample, streams of migrants and streams ofwater within a drainage basin could be inter-preted as networks and analyzed using com-mon mathematical models (Hagget andChorley, 1969).

In this sense, the network project of thequantitative revolution shared somethingwith ANT.There was an attempt to analyzeall geographic phenomena in terms of net-works and an effort not to make a distinctionbetween networks in human and physicalgeography. But the similarities ended there,really. ANT is very different from the spatialanalysis of networks that was common in the1960s, and is much more interested in powerand on how things come to be – rather thanon establishing precise measures of connec-tivity and the like. Additionally, ANT goesmuch further than traditional spatial analysisof networks and other network approaches ingeography in calling for the theorization ofsociety, nature, space and everything elsefrom a relational perspective.

ANT’s entry into geography also came ata time when social-network analysis, anotherinfluential network approach in geography,was beginning to be scrutinized more closelyas a result of the cultural turn in geographyand the social sciences. Many network con-cepts from the social-network perspectivewere (and still are) very popular among geo-graphers.A good example of this is the conceptof embeddedness, which in geography hasalways been thought about in terms of integ-ration or participation in local, territorialnetworks.2 Like ANT, social-network analysisand interest in processes such as embedded-ness have not been exclusively geographic

approaches. Rather, the literature on socialnetworks comes from a federation of perspec-tives concerned with understanding the socialin terms of a system of changing patterns ofinteractions occurring among actors whooften participate in one or more social net-works (Nohria and Eccles, 1992;Bosco,2001).At this level, social-network analysis shareswith ANT similar concerns with networksand relations and with overcoming the dividebetween micro- and macro-level analysis. But,as was the case with the first round of networkanalysis in geography, social-network analysisdoes not go as far as ANT because ANT is amore comprehensive approach.

Specifically, as the name of the approachimplies, in social-network analysis the focus ison social networks. This concentration runscontrary to one of the most important lessonsfrom ANT, that is, that what we typically seeas ‘the social’ is constituted by relations amonghumans and non-humans, and that the dividebetween the natural and the social sciencesshould be broken down.Second,because of thefocus on the social, agency in social-networkanalysis continues to be centered on the per-son and the human body, contrary to theaccount of agency offered by ANT discussedin the previous section and exemplified byWhatmore’s (2002) accounts of how a SouthAmerican Caiman latirostris or an African leo-pard are both subjects and objects of the net-works they help fashion.Third, most studies inthe social-network perspective are limited toanalyses of structural forms, i.e. the forms andshapes of networks based on the number andtypes of connections which give a networkdifferent degrees of connectivity, centrality andso on.This is symptomatic of what Emirbayerand Goodwin (1994) have called the ‘struc-tural determinism’ of social-network analysisas well as of what Law and Urry (2002) havecalled the Euclideanism of traditional socialscience,which is characterized by the presenceof hierarchical orderings, divisions into levelsof analysis and the use of metaphors of size,



order, and proximity.This, again, runs contraryto ANT because ANT is not concerned withactual network structure as given by differenttypes of connections.ANT is more concernedwith accounting for how varieties of differentactants (human and non-human) emerge outof different relations and give rise to con-stantly changing actor networks and differentrelations of power. Therefore ANT is morecapable of accounting for fluidity and move-ment between the micro- and the macro-levels of analysis (Law and Urry, 2002). As anon-linear and non-representational approach(Thrift, 2000) ANT is superior to social-network analysis and other current relationalapproaches in being able to uncover the com-plex relations that shape our world.

In sum,ANT shares only a few similaritieswith the traditional spatial analysis of networksin geography and with social-network analy-sis. Overall, ANT offers a much more com-prehensive view of networks and relationsthan either of those two approaches. ANTprovides a framework that takes into accounta multiplicity of actors and that permitsaccounting for the fluidity of multiple types ofrelations. ANT also provides a very differentview of the spatiality of network relations, onethat is not limited by a Euclidean view ofspace. However, some today would argue thatANT is analytically less precise in establishingwhy different kinds of network relations ina network might matter and that, as a result,ANT leaves us with a thin notion of spatiality.This is one often-cited limitation of ANT asan approach, and the reason why a few schol-ars argue that ANT might also be seen as anapolitical perspective. It is to a discussion ofthese issues then that this chapter now turns.

ANT, Spatiality, and Difference:Limitations or Advantages?

In recent years, several geographers havebegun inviting us to see the spatiality of social

relations not as fixed, essential, or reducible toconsiderations of distance or hierarchies ofscales. Instead, we have been encouraged tosee place and the connections between soci-ety and space relationally, as constantly pro-duced and situated (Massey et al., 1999). AsAmin (2002: 389) has recently put it, spatial-ity from a relational perspective is constitutedthrough the folds and overlaps of differentpractices. The notion of spatiality that isemerging in human geography is very muchinspired by network thinking, and the projectof ANT has much to do with it. It is a notionof spatiality that is embedded in relationalideas about space and place as the result ofinterrelated processes rather than the productof Cartesian geometries and homogeneousconsiderations of society.

The fact that current thinking in humangeography has begun to displace fixed, essen-tialized, and hierarchical notions of place andspace is consistent with the project of ANT.The view of place as open and porous and asthe product of the spatiality of networkedrelations can perhaps first be traced back tothe notion of ‘power geometry’ introduced byDoreen Massey (1991; 1993; 1999a; 1999b).In recent years, relational ideas of spatialityhave been further developed by other schol-ars, giving rise to spatial imaginings that high-light, as Whatmore put it, ‘the simultaneity ofmultiple and partial space–time configurationsof social life and the situatedness of socialinstitutions, processes and knowledges’ (1999:31).This now includes geographic interpreta-tions of ANT that direct our attention to theeffects produced and generated by the fluidityor mutability of different spatial assemblagesof actors (Murdoch, 1997; 1998; Sharp et al.,2000).

All relational approaches to spatiality alsohave implications for accounts of power rela-tions. Power is enmeshed in networks of rela-tions and has different expressions – dominatingpower, resisting power (Sharp et al., 2000) –and it is also related to the positions that

142ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


individuals occupy in such networks(Sheppard, 2002).This indicates that relationalunderstanding of power also cannot be sepa-rated from relational understandings of, forexample, place. If places are constructed bythe workings of intricate networks of socialrelations, then places should also be seen assolidifying intricate entanglements of power(Sharp et al., 2000). As a relational approach,ANT is very helpful here as well. From theperspective of ANT, thinking about power,networks, and place leads us to consider theways in which different actors,who are placedand positioned differently in networks, areable to construct and enact different relationsand forms of power, and to ponder how suchrelations and forms of power solidify bothmaterially and discursively in places and flowsthrough space–time.

ANT is an ideal framework to deal withthe spatialities of power because ANT clearlydirects our attention to the effects producedby the fluidity of spatial configurations of avariety of actors.Yet, some would argue thatANT as an analytical perspective can only bestretched so far in the treatment of the geo-graphies of power and difference. ANT is anexcellent framework to describe the complexand mutable composition of networks ofheterogeneous actors. But what if our researchinterests also include the desire to recognizeand evaluate how a range of types of relationsin an actor network – connecting differentactors/actants – are related to different out-comes and events? Some have argued thatwhen it comes to recognizing different peopleand different voices and the politics associatedwith them (i.e.‘the other’or ‘otherness’),ANTcan almost be seen as a colonial framework(Lee and Brown, 1994). If everything isincluded, connected and ordered throughactor networks, then ANT might leave ‘nospace outside the network … no room foralterity … nothing outside the relation itorders’ (Hetherington and Law, 2000: 2).In other words, ANT might be valuable as a

general framework that allows us both tothink about configurations of power and toovercome the dualism between nature andsociety by following different configurationsof relations and network effects. However,analytically ANT could also obscure difference(i.e. the different types of relations within andamong different actors and processes) and thuscould be considered an apolitical perspective.Such a limitation, however, is not uniqueto ANT and it is certainly dependent onhow one approaches the perspective throughresearch. For example, the task of tracingtopologies of wildlife, as Whatmore has donewith currently endangered animal species suchas the Caiman latirostris, has important politicaland ethical implications because it demon-strates the ways in which animals becomeobjectified under the auspices of wildlife man-agement. Such a research project asks that werethink the politics of current biodiversity andconservation efforts.

A critical view could be taken also in rela-tion to ANT’s conceptualization of spatiality.Some scholars have argued that ANT doesnot seem to recognize explicitly that differentrelations may have different spatial expres-sions. As a result, in some ANT-inspiredresearch in geography the lines between net-works and spatiality have been blurred exten-sively. For example, some geographers haveargued that ‘any assessment of spatial qualitiesis simultaneously an assessment of networkrelations’ (Murdoch, 1997: 332) and offeredviews of space and scale that seem to dissolveinto networks. Such moves can lead to vaguespecifications of spatiality and this has beenone of the main criticisms directed towardsANT.As Sheppard (2002: 317) has explained,the concern with representing networks asnon-hierarchical spaces where all the actorsinvolved have significant power has resulted ina lack of attention to their internal differenti-ation. Relations in a network are not all thesame, and their differences will inevitablyproduce different spatialities (Hinchliffe, 2000).



Geographers are certainly right in pointingout this tendency of ANT to erase differencewithin networks. The point should be taken,but it should also not be overemphasized andwe should not dismiss ANT too quickly.3 Onthe contrary, valuable insights into the consti-tution of different geographic processes andpractices can be gained from the perspective;Lawrence Knopp’s contribution in this volume(Chapter 20), in which he uses ANT to thinkabout placelessness, is an excellent example.Weshould therefore approach ANT from a criticalperspective and utilize its valuable insights tospecify geographies more richly – without for-getting that ANT is inclined to utilize a vocab-ulary that evades recognitions of difference.

Summary and Conclusion

Geographers have brought ANT into theirresearch agendas and made ANT one of themost sophisticated approaches to relationalthinking available today. ANT has emergedas a perspective that allows the framing ofresearch concerns about networks, relationsamong humans and non-humans, and spatial-ity through the lens of a flexible and malleabletheory. Many see ANT as a poststructuralapproach to power relations that can beadapted, transformed, and modified to fit theirresearch concerns and at the same time as anapproach that can be ‘grounded’ and madepolitically relevant. It is an approach thatencourages thinking about the fluidity of thesocial, the natural, and very importantly, ofspace, place and scale.

The flexibility and malleability of ANT ata perspective have created some confusion.Atthis point in time ANT means different thingsto different people and, despite the popularityof the approach, many remain very unclear asto what ANT is, what ANT can do and whatit should not be called upon to do. Manythink that ANT is about networks.While thisis true, this chapter has shown that it is toosimplistic and reductionistic to talk about

ANT only in terms of networks withoutqualifying what is meant by ‘networks’ inmore specific terms.There is even an ongoingdebate among some of ANT’s main propo-nents regarding the status of the approach.Bruno Latour (1999) has argued that ANT isnot a finished theory; he has even claimedthat the use of the words ‘actor’, ‘network’,and ‘theory’ to name the approach in Englishhas contributed to the confusion about whatthe project of ANT is really about. Manyother scholars are vocal about the limitationsof ANT relative to other more traditionalapproaches in social theory, and criticize ANTfor being apolitical and for offering a view ofthe world that ignores the real material con-sequences of actions of agents and institutionsthat are claimed to be actually operating ‘outthere’ in the world.Yet, the project of ANTcan have politically progressive implications,as indicated above in the discussion ofWhatmore’s (2002) topologies of wildlife.

In the end, many of those who are vocalabout some of the problems with ANT can-not but acknowledge the utility of the per-spective and be seduced by some of its mainpropositions. Thus many geographers con-tinue to rework and reinterpret ANT byapplying it to new contexts and new situa-tions in different places – which after all is avery geographic thing to do. Overall,ANT ispositioned to become an even more valuableapproach in human geography as morescholars begin to adopt and refine the per-spective through different research projects.ANT is a sophisticated way to deal with net-works and relations among actors, objects,and processes that geographers typically careabout in their research, from economic geo-graphy to urban, political and cultural geo-graphy. There is much room to furthertheorize and synthesize by using ANT as apoint of departure, and therein lies the powerand seduction of ANT for geographers today.We must engage ANT through research andlet the challenge of tracing the actor networksand of unearthing complex relations begin.

144ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


NOTES1 For example, the 2003 annual conference of

the Association of American Geographers inNew Orleans included 53 papers where ‘net-work’ was one of the keywords listed in theabstract. Of those papers, more than half dealtdirectly with or were inspired by actor-network theory (the other 20 or so papers dealtwith networks in other ways and included bothhuman and physical geography). A similarnumber of papers dealing with ANT wereevident in the annual meeting of the same pro-fessional association in Los Angeles a year earlier.

2 Examples here include the work of economicgeographers such as Amin and Thrift (1994)and Storper (1997), who focus on the territo-rial embeddedness of firms and markets insocial and cultural networks of relations byplacing emphasis on localities or regions.

3 Even Bruno Latour has recognized that ANT ‘isa bad tool for differentiating associations[because] it gives a black and white picture, nota colored and contrasted one … [thus] it is nec-essary, after having traced the actor networks, tospecify the types of trajectories that are obtainedby highly different mediations’ (1996: 380).


ReferencesAdam, A. (2002) ‘Cyborgs in the Chinese Room: boundaries transgressed and bound-

aries blurred’, in J. Preston and M. Bishop (eds), Views into the Chinese Room: NewEssays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence. New York: Oxford.

Amin, A. (2002) ‘Spatialities of globalization’, Environment and Planning A, 34: 385–99.Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (1994) ‘Living in the global’, in A. Amin and N. Thrift (eds),

Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Bosco, F. (2001) ‘Place, space, networks and the sustainability of collective action: theMadres de Plaza de Mayo’, Global Networks, 1: 307–30.

Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.Dicken, P., Kelly, P., Olds, K. and Yeung, H. W.-C. (2001) ‘Chains and networks, territories

and scales: towards a relational framework for analyzing the global economy’, GlobalNetworks, 1: 89–112.

Emirbayer, M. and Goodwin, J. (1994) ‘Network analysis, culture and the problem ofagency’, American Journal of Sociology, 99: 1411–15.

Ettlinger, N. and Bosco, F. (2004) ‘Thinking through networks and their spatiality: a cri-tique of the US (public) war on terrorism’, Antipode, 36: 249–71.

Hagget, P. and Chorley, R. (1969) Network Analysis in Geography. New York: St Martin’s.Hetherington, K. and Law, J. (2000) ‘After networks’, Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space, 18: 1–6.Hinchliffe, S. (2000) ‘Entangled humans: specifying powers and their spatialities’, in

J. Sharp, P. Routledge, C. Philo and R. Padisson (eds), Entanglements of Power:Geographies of Domination/Resistance. New York: Routledge.

Latham, A. (2002) ‘Retheorizing the scale of globalization: topologies, actor networksand cosmopolitanism’, in A. Herod and M. Wright (eds), Geographies of Power:Placing Scale. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Latour, B. (1996) ‘On actor network theory: a few clarifications’, Soziale Welt, 47: 360–81.Latour, B. (1999) ‘On recalling ANT’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network

Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.Law, J. (ed.) (1991) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and

Domination. London: Routledge.


Law, J. (1992) ‘Notes on the theory of the actor network: ordering, strategy andheterogeneity’. http://tina.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc054jl.html, accessed 14 August 2003.

Law, J. (1999) ‘After ANT: complexity, naming, and topology’, in J. Law and J. Hassard(eds), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.

Law, J. and Hassard, J. (eds) (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.Law, J. and Urry, J. (2002) ‘Enacting the social’. Centre for Social Science Studies and

Sociology Department, Lancaster University. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc099jlju.html, accessed 19 August 2003.

Lee, N. and Brown, S. (1994) ‘Otherness and the actor network: the undiscovered conti-nent’, The American Behavioral Scientist, 37: 772–90.

Massey, D. (1991) ‘A global sense of place’, Marxism Today, June: 24–9.Massey, D. (1993) ‘Power geometry and a progressive sense of place’, in J. Bird,

B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Ticker (eds), Mapping the Futures: LocalCultures, Global Change. New York: Routledge.

Massey, D. (1999a) ‘Philosophy and politics of spatiality: some considerations’,Geographische Zeitschift, 87: 1–12.

Massey, D. (1999b) ‘Imagining globalization: power-geometries of time–space’, inA. Brah, M. Hickman and M. Mac An Ghaill (eds), Global Futures: Migration, Environmentand Globalization. New York: St. Martin’s.

Massey, D., Allen, J. and Sarre, P. (eds) (1999) Human Geography Today. Cambridge:Polity.

Murdoch, J. (1997) ‘Towards a geography of heterogeneous associations’, Progress inHuman Geography, 21: 321–37.

Murdoch, J. (1998) ‘The spaces of actor network theory’, Geoforum, 29: 368–80.Murdoch, J. and Marsden, T. (1995) ‘The spatialization of politics: local and national

actor-spaces in environmental conflict’, Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers, 20: 368–80.

Nohria, N. and Eccles, R. (eds) (1992) Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form,and Action. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Olds, K. and Yeung, H. (1999) ‘(Re)shaping “Chinese” business networks in a globalizingera’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17: 535–55.

Sharp, J., Routledge, P., Philo, C. and Padisson, R. (eds) (2000) Entanglements ofPower: Geographies of Domination/Resistance. New York: Routledge.

Sheppard, E. (2002) ‘The spaces and times of globalization: place, scale, networks, andpositionality’, Economic Geography, 78: 307–30.

Storper, M. (1997) The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy.New York: Guilford.

Thrift, N. (1996) Spatial Formations. London: Sage.Thrift, N. (2000) ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18: 213–55.Whatmore, S. (1999) ‘Hybrid geographies: rethinking the human in human geography’,

in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today. Cambridge: Polity.Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: Sage.Woods, M. (1998) ‘Researching rural conflicts: hunting, local politics, and actor networks’,

Journal of Rural Studies, 14: 321–40.

146ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


POSTCOLONIALISM: SPACE,TEXTUALITY, AND POWER

Clive Barnett

12

Postcolonialism and the Critiqueof Historicism

As a field of academic inquiry, postcolonialismhas its intellectual origins in the writings of anumber of intellectuals who came to promi-nence in the middle part of the twentiethcentury, the period of intense anti-colonialstruggles against formal European territorialcontrol, especially in Africa and Asia (seeYoung, 2001). These include writers such asC.L.R. James, who recovered the forgottenhistory of Haitian rebellion in the FrenchRevolution;Amilcar Cabral, the leader of themovement against Portuguese colonialism inGuinea and Cape Verde; and Aimé Césaire, apoet from French Martinique who becamean important theorist of the Negritudemovement, which asserted the value of previ-ously denigrated African cultures. Each ofthese writers shared two common concerns.First, each emphasized that colonialism con-sisted of more than economic exploitationand political subordination; colonialism alsoinvolved the exercise of cultural power oversubordinated populations. Culture is under-stood to have been wielded by colonialistpowers to denigrate the traditions of non-western cultures, and to celebrate the superi-ority of particular versions of western culture.

If these writers understand culture tobe an instrument of domination, then regain-ing control over the means of collective self-definition is regarded as an important strategyin the political struggle for emancipation. One

good example of the analysis of this relationshipbetween culture, domination, and resistance,is James’ account of the history of cricket inthe Caribbean. In Beyond a Boundary (James,1963), the cricket field is refigured as an arenain which relations of racial superiority areasserted and subverted during colonialism, aswell as one in which the continuing tensionsbetween newly independent states and theformer colonial power are played out after theend of formal colonialism. This leads us onto the second emphasis that this generationof anti-colonial writers share, which is a pre-monition that in so far as relations of colo-nial subordination are embedded in culturalsystems of identity and representation, thenthe formal end of European colonialismwould not necessarily mean the end of colo-nial forms of power.The clearest link betweena generation of anti-colonial writers andthe emergence of postcolonialism in the late1970s and 1980s is, then, this shared concernwith the conditions for the ‘decolonization ofthe mind’. This process of decolonizing themind is concerned with working through theembedded modes of reasoning, thinking, andevaluating that secrete assumptions aboutprivilege, normality, and superiority (Sidaway,2000).

The emphasis upon the destruction ofnon-western cultural traditions during colo-nialism might appear to imply that the workof decolonizing the mind requires the recov-ery and revaluation of these traditions. Butthis understanding of the cultural politics of


postcolonialism can easily reinscribe a binaryopposition between modernity and traditionthat is itself a key ideological device used inthe denigration of non-western societies.Theinvocation of ‘authentic’ traditions has, infact, been one of the most problematic waysin which postcolonial elites have continuedto wield political power over their citizens.A more complex way of understanding therelationship between the modern and thetraditional is illustrated by the career ofNgûgî wa Thiong’o. His early novels werepublished in English under the name JamesNgûgî, but in the 1970s he became involvedin the production of popular theatreexpressed in the most widely used indi-genous language in Kenya, Gikiyu. Ngûgî wasimprisoned because of this involvement, andout of this commitment emerged his deci-sion to write original works in this language,rather than in English. In principle, this is anattempt to make his work available to localaudiences, in a much broader way than ispossible through the use of English (seeNgûgî, 1986). At the same time, however,Ngûgî’s strategy is not straightforwardlyaimed at recovering a lost tradition of indi-genous, authentic narrative. It is, rather,more anact of postcolonial invention, fusing togethergenres and forms from different narrative tra-ditions, both western and non-western. It is,then, a distinctive effort to inscribe an alter-native modernity into global networks ofcultural representation.

The most significant intellectual influenceconnecting anti-colonial writing to postcolo-nial theory is Franz Fanon.Fanon was born inFrench Martinique, and educated and trainedin Paris. He spent much of his life working inAlgeria at the height of the anti-colonial warbetween French and Algerian nationalists(the FLN) in the 1950s and early 1960s.Fanon came to identify strongly with the FLNstruggle, and this infused his analysis of thepsychological dimensions of colonialism.Thisis laid out in his two classic works.Black Skins,

White Masks (Fanon, 1991) is an analysis ofthe impact of racism on the subjective identi-ties of both dominant and subordinategroups. The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon,1967) is one of the classics of modern politi-cal thought, a manifesto for the liberation ofoppressed peoples around the world. Onereason why this book is important is becauseof its prescient critique of the ideology ofanti-colonial nationalism. Fanon suggestedthat nationalist ideologies were an essentialelement of anti-colonial struggle, but foresawthat once formal, political independence waswon, this same ideology risked becoming anew mechanism for elites to exercise powerover dissenters or marginalized populations.This critique of ideologies of nationalism isone crucial link between Fanon’s work andthat of various writers central to the emer-gence of postcolonial theory since the 1980s.Another link is a more directly theoreticalone. Fanon was not just a practising psychia-trist, an experience that infused his analysis ofthe personal and group psychologies of bothcolonizers and the colonized. His writing wasalso informed by the main lines of moderncontinental philosophy, including Hegel’saccount of the master–slave dialectic, Marxiananalysis of political struggle, and psycho-analytic theories of subjectivity. It is this lastdimension in particular that makes Fanonsuch an important reference point for post-colonial theory: this line of work is concernedwith rethinking the cultural legacies of colo-nialism and imperialism through a psycho-analytical vocabulary of subject formation.

One of Fanon’s strongest assertions wasthat the so-called ‘developed’ or ‘First World’was, in fact, the product of the ‘Third World’.By this, he meant that it was through theexploitation of non-Europeans that thewealth, culture, and civilization of the Westwere built. This was more than an empiricalobservation, however. It was meant as a chal-lenge to a whole way of understanding thedynamics of historical development. One way

148ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


in which European colonial and imperialexpansion was legitimized was through aclaim that European culture was the primemover of historical progress itself. Non-European cultures were denigrated as beingeither historically backward or, worse, whollyoutside history.This same pattern of thoughtpersists in central categories of twentieth-century social science, including ideas of mod-ernization, of development, and of developed andless developed. All of these ideas presume oneparticular set of cultural values and practicesas the benchmark against which to judge allothers. In so far as they presume an idealizedmodel of European history as the single modelfor other societies to emulate, these notions areoften described as Eurocentric. Eurocentrismcombines a strong sense of the particularity ofEuropean culture with a strong claim to theuniversality of these values.The seeming con-tradiction within the claims for the superiorityof particular cultural values which are nonethe-less held to be valued precisely because of theirsupposed universalizability is finessed by theprojection of a linear model of historicalprogress onto the spaces of different societies.On this understanding, the assumption is thatEurope is the core region of world history, outof which spreads all important innovations –science, capitalism, literature, and so on (seeBlaut, 1993). This combination of culturalparticularism and universalization thereforeworks through the spatialization of time: dif-ferent parts of the world were ranked as beingat different stages of a process of historicalprogress that assumed a single path of devel-opment, or modernization. This pattern ofthought is known as historicism.

The biggest challenge of postcolonialism,as a tradition of critical thought, lies in ques-tioning the legacies of this historicist way ofthought (see Young, 1990). It is this critiqueof historicism that Fanon presaged in hiswork, by arguing that the history of the Westwas a not a hermetically sealed story of secu-larization, modernization, and accumulation.

Rather than thinking of colonialism andimperialism as marginal to the history ofEurope and North America, postcolonialismasserts the centrality of colonialism andimperialism to appreciating the intertwinedhistories of societies which, from a historicistperspective, are presented as separate entitiesdifferently placed on a scale of progress. So, ifpostcolonialism challenges a particular nor-mative model of linear historical progress, itdoes so by also challenging the geographicalimage of distinct, self-contained societiesupon which this model depends.

On the basis of these introductoryremarks, the rest of this chapter will explorethree dimensions to the field of postcolonial-ism. First, it will consider the ‘origins’ of thisfield of academic inquiry in the seminal workof Edward Said. Second, it will elaborate onwhat is perhaps the most significant contribu-tion of this whole field. This is a particularmodel of power, one which connects ideasabout discourse and textuality to more worldlyissues of institutions, organizations, economiesand markets.Third, the chapter will reflect onsome of the broader moral and philosophicalproblems raised by postcolonialism,particularlyas these concern issues of universalism, culturalrelativism, and how to approach the task ofcross-cultural understanding.

The Imaginary Geographies ofColonial Discourse

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is the singlemost important reference point for the emer-gence of postcolonial theory. In this book,Saidargued that western conceptions of identity,culture, and civilization have historically beenbuilt on the projection of images of the non-West, and specifically of images of the so-called‘Orient’.These images could be negative andderogatory, or positive and romantic. In eithercase, the identity of the West has been definedby reference to the meanings ascribed to what

POSTCOLONIALISM: SPACE, TEXTUALITY, AND POWERÿÿ149


is presumed to be different from the West, itsnon-Western ‘other’. Said provided one of themost influential accounts of a more generaltheory of cultural politics understood as aprocess of ‘othering’, an understanding that hascome to define a whole range of academicresearch in the social sciences and humanities.According to this understanding, identity issocially constructed in relation to other iden-tities, in a simultaneous process of identifica-tion with certain groups and differentiationfrom certain other groups. At the same time,this process of construction is hidden or dis-avowed,so that it is common for identities to bepresented as if they were natural. If identity isrelationally constructed, then it works primar-ily by excluding some element that takes onthe role of the other, an image of non-identitythat confirms the identity of the self or thecollective community. For geographers inparticular, this theory is influential because itpresents identity formation as a process ofcontrolling boundaries and maintaining theterritorial integrity of communities or selves.

One reason why Said’s argument provedso influential was his use of Michel Foucault’snotion of discourse to explain the power ofcultural representations in laying the basis forcolonial and imperial domination. Said pro-vided one of the first fully worked out appli-cations of Foucault’s ideas, arguing that ideasand images were not free-standing, but werepart of whole systems of institutionalizedknowledge production, through which peopleand organizations learnt to engage with theworld around them. Orientalism has come toact as the focal point of discussion preciselybecause it is a text in which the critique ofcolonial and imperial knowledge is broughtinto uneasy communication with poststruc-turalist theory. One way in which postcolo-nial theory emerged was therefore throughincreasingly sophisticated theoretical debatesover issues of representation, identity andpower.Another is through a process of empir-ical application of Said’s original emphasis

on knowledge and power. Said’s analysis oforientalist discourse implied that a whole arrayof institutions produced different forms ofknowledge through which the non-Europeanworld was discursively produced for Europe.Colonial and imperial power was inscribed inand through administrative and bureaucraticdocuments, maps, romantic novels, and muchelse besides. The critical force of Said’s bookwas to make a strong connection between theideals of high culture and learning – literature,theatre, science, and so on – and the worldof grubby politics, power and domination.Orientalism provided a theoretical templatethrough which a diverse set of institutions andrepresentations could be given coherence asobjects of analysis – as examples of colonial dis-course – by being subjected to interpretiveprotocols loosely drawn from literary studies.All sorts of things could be understood interms of discourse and the production of colo-nial subjectivity – scientific writing, historicaldocuments, official reports, literature andpoetry, the visual arts, as well as academic dis-courses such as anthropology,geography,or lin-guistics.The range and diversity of sites throughwhich colonial subjectivities were constructedand contested is the condition for the interdis-ciplinary impulse of colonial discourse analysis.

In Orientalism, Said referred to oriental-ism as a form of ‘imaginative geography’. Hisclaim was that orientalist representationswere really self-generating projections ofWestern paranoia and desire, and were notbased on any detailed knowledge of differentcultures and societies. As Said describes it,orientalism has two dimensions. There is astore of ideas about the Orient which havebeen produced over centuries through whichthe Orient was staged for the west. In turn,from the late eighteenth century onwardsthis reservoir of images and knowledges isdrawn upon to direct the actual course ofEuropean territorial expansion and appropri-ation.Young (1990) identifies this as the cen-tral tension in Said’s account. On the one

150ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


hand, Said holds that the ‘Orient’ is essentiallya misrepresentation, which reflects projec-tions of fear and anxiety but which bearslittle relation to the actualities of the complexsocieties it purports to name and describe.Yet, on the other hand there is the suggestionthat such misrepresentations become effec-tive instruments of colonial power andadministration. Said does not adequately the-orize the means by which knowledge aboutother cultures becomes effective as an instru-ment in the exercise of power over those cul-tures. His only gesture in this direction is thedistinction between ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ ori-entalism, the latter presented as the means bywhich a static and synchronic essentialism isnarrated into practical historical situations. Insuch a formulation, Europeans always findwhat they expect in the Orient, and the actu-alities of colonial contact and administrationdo not fundamentally interrupt the structuresof understanding that frame any encounterwith the ‘real’ Orient.

Said’s original formulation of orientalismas a form of imaginative geography thereforebestows two theoretical dilemmas upon theanalysis of colonial discourse.The first is theproblem of how to account for the transla-tion of ‘knowledge’ which is purely imagina-tive and non-empirical into knowledge thatis practically useful in administering complexsocial systems like colonial bureaucracies,markets, and so on. The second problem ishow to conceptualize anti-colonialist agencyfrom within this understanding.The idea thatcolonial discourses are entirely the product ofcolonizers’ imagination implies that thereexists some pristine space, untouched by theexperience of cross-cultural contact, fromwhich authentic agency and resistance mustemanate.But it is precisely this sort of ‘nativist’understanding that Said has been consistentlyopposed to. Both of these dilemmas can betraced back to the theoretical model of colo-nial discourse sketched in Orientalism, andspecifically to the unresolved problems

inherent in Said’s original formulation oforientalist discourse as a form of ‘imaginativegeography’ which produces the Orient as theprojection of a western will to mastery. Saidargued that colonialism is discursively prefig-ured in the various representations throughwhich the Orient as an imagined location isfirst constructed. It is this strong sense of pro-jection and prefiguration that is most problem-atic, because it implies that colonial discourseswere self-generating. And this tends to runcounter to the strongest critical impulse ofSaid’s work, which is the decentering of self-enclosed narratives of Western progress byshowing the ways in which societies are theproducts of a constant traffic of cultural prac-tices and traditions.

It is worth noting that there are, in fact,two overlapping tropological schemata throughwhich the relationship between culture,identity and space is presented in Said’s orig-inal formulation of ‘imaginative geography’.The first trope one finds is the psychologisticone of the west projecting its anxieties andparanoia onto another spatial realm, throughwhich the ‘Orient’ is constituted as the fullyformed mirror image of western self. Thissuggests that the essentials of colonial know-ledge are formed prior to and in the absence ofthe actual event of colonial contact. InvokingGaston Bachelard to describe how distantplaces are invested with significance from afarby the ‘poetic’ ascription of meaning, oriental-ist discourse is presented as producing mean-ing from a ‘here’ about a ‘there’ in advance ofactually going ‘there’. In his eagerness to stressthat colonial discourse involves a misrepresen-tation of complex realities, Said is forced toposit a core of orientalist knowledge whichescapes the principle of inescapable entangle-ment of peoples and places. The Orientthereby emerges as the fantasy projection of anautonomous will to power.

There is, however, a second tropologicalschema at work in Said’s original account.This presents orientalism as a discourse which



stages its own performance, and throughwhich orientalist representations were pro-duced for a European audience. It underlinesthe sense that actual colonialism is prefiguredat the level of culture, in such a way that theactual encounter with the ‘real’ Orientappears as a carefully directed and minutelyorchestrated mise-en-scène, involving a pre-established script faithfully followed by eachand every actor. Such an understanding stillrequires that the texts of such a ‘discursive for-mation’ be read as the expressions of a para-noid group psychology produced wholly in ametropolitan context and having no purchaseon any ‘real’ Orient at all. The theatricalmetaphor thus remains subordinated to theemphasis on poetic projection. However, per-haps we can free this second, theatrical tropefrom this overriding emphasis on the imagi-native prefiguration of actual events. Ratherthan thinking of colonial practices as more orless perfect performances of already highlyrehearsed scripts, we might instead read thecolonial archive as made up of the traces ofextensive exercises in improvisation. If thediscursive production of colonial space is tobe fruitfully understood on analogy with adramatic production, then we should notthink of the scenes so produced as realizationsof a single autonomous ur-script which is themodel for each of its own performances. Ifthese performances have a script, then it isone whose existence resides nowhere otherthan in the contingencies of its repeated(re)enactments. Such a metaphorical flightmight lead us towards new ways of readingthe textual artefacts of the imperial archive,ones which do not rely on positing of asingle coherent will animating each utterance,and which are able to think of colonial dis-courses as the products of the contingenciesand contestations of the ongoing reproduc-tion of colonial and imperial relations. Thisimplies reading textual materials as a reflec-tion neither of an imperial will to power, norof the popular mood, nor of the intentions of

ruling powers.Rather, it implies reading themas traces of the wider practices, institutions,and routines of which they are often the onlysurviving remnants. It is an understandingthat directs attention away from the contentsof texts, towards a concern with what they arepractically used to do.

The reason for thinking of colonial dis-course along these more ‘performative’ linesis that this answers to an important criticismof the standard model of colonial discoursederived from Orientalism. This is the com-plaint that colonial discourse has too oftenbeen theorized as a coherent product ofcolonializing powers.This tends to hide fromview the mediations and relations throughwhich colonialism and imperialism devel-oped (Thomas, 1994). This criticism impliesthe need to shift away from a strong emphasison irredeemable Manichaean conflict betweencolonizer and colonized, towards conceptswhich focus upon processes of cross-culturalcommunication. This is the task undertakenby Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) work on colo-nial representations. In her notion of the‘contact zone’, one finds a strong empiricaland theoretical argument for relocatingthe site of production of knowledge intoan interstitial zone of colonial contact, nego-tiation, and contestation, which enables theconstitutive role of non-western agency andknowledge in the production of such dis-courses to be acknowledged. Pratt’s work isjust one example of the shift in colonial dis-course analysis and postcolonial theorytowards a strong emphasis on the fully rela-tional constitution of representations andidentities. In Homi Bhabha’s (1994) work,the emphasis is upon colonial subject forma-tion as an inherently ambivalent process ofemulation, mimicry, and subversive trickery,giving rise to forms of hybrid subjectivities.

This shift in the ways in which identity,geography, and power are conceptualizedis also evident in Said’s own work, whichafter Orientalism came to focus much more

152ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


explicitly on the interconnections andentwinements of different societies and cul-tures (Said, 1993). Said constantly emphasizesthe moral imperative of asserting that differ-ent cultures, peoples, and societies both didand could coexist in the same spaces andtimes, and that the critical task was to findroutes to this form of non-exclusivist accom-modation as a means of reckoning with theshared histories of colonialism and imperial-ism.1 A crucial dimension of Said’s originalargument in Orientalism was the importanceof knowledge in staking claims to territory.Colonial discourse can be understood asrevolving around a three-way relationship inwhich relations between European or west-ern colonizers and non-western ‘native’subjects is mediated by representations ofland, space, and territory. Characteristically,this relationship involved representing non-western spaces as empty, or inhabited only byghostly subjects, or untended, in ways thatlegitimized colonial and imperial interven-tion in the name of proper stewardship ofpeople and land. One of the strongest lega-cies of colonialism, Said argued, is a clearconnection between ideas of exclusive pos-session of territory and exclusivist concep-tions of cultural identity. Authentic andessentialist conceptions of identity are oftenassociated with exclusivist claims to territoryand space. In turn, this geographical imagina-tion of identity leads to the persistent under-standing of colonialism in terms of simpleoppositions between colonizers and colo-nized. It is a consistent theme of Said’s aca-demic and political writing to contest both theconnection between identity and territory,and simple notions of colonizer and colo-nized.The postcolonial world is, in his view,much more messy, messed up and compro-mised than this simple opposition suggests.

I have dwelt at length on Said’s work, andin particular Orientalism, because it is hard tounderestimate the significance of this work inthe development of postcolonialism as a strand

of academic interdisciplinary work. Said’swork has offered an important route throughwhich geographers have been able to engagein broader cross-disciplinary debates with his-torians, anthropologists, cultural theorists andothers with similar interests in questions ofspace, territory and identity. As a central ele-ment of postcolonial theory more generally,theories of colonial discourse analysis havecontributed to the process of ‘decolonizingthe mind’ by challenging the self-image ofthe west as a self-determining, self-containedentity which is the unique origin of a univer-salizing history and culture. I now want toturn to a consideration of what is perhaps themost misunderstood issue in postcolonialism,namely the question of how the power ofrepresentations is theorized in this field.

Representation, Subjectivityand Power

Said’s critique of Western representationalsystems raises a fundamental issue of whetherand how it is possible to represent other cul-tures, other identities, or other communities.The answer to this question depends on tworelated questions. First, should cultural differ-ence be conceptualized according to animage of discrete spatial entities? I shalladdress this question in the next section.Second, should practices of representation beconceptualized in zero-sum terms? I shalladdress this question in this section. If colo-nialism and imperialism involve the denial,denigration, and negation of the cultural tra-ditions of subjugated groups, then politicalopposition to these processes can be charac-terized in part as a set of struggles for theright of communities to represent themselves.But the concept of representation has becomea recurrently problematic theme in culturaltheory. Social constructionist argumentsdepend on a particular epistemological argu-ment about the active role of representations



in constituting the realities they purport torepresent. The critical force of this sort ofargument – as a critique of racist stereotyping,or of patriarchal gender stereotypes, forexample – actually depends on a ratherunstable combination of two related argu-ments about representation.On the one hand,there is the general epistemological positionthat all knowledge is constructed throughrepresentations. On the other hand, there isthe specific argument that some representationsare misrepresentations, implying that certainrepresentations are actually better than others.

Rather than getting caught up in inter-minable debates about whether cast-ironaccurate descriptions of the world are actuallypossible, postcolonialism asks us to keep inmind the intimate relationship between rep-resentation in an epistemological sense andrepresentation in a political sense, where thisrefers to a set of practices of delegation, sub-stitution, and authorization.The real thrust ofthe critique of representation is to throw intoquestion the modes of authority throughwhich particular styles, forms, or voices cometo be taken as representative of whole tradi-tions, communities, or experiences. Whenthought of in political terms, there is animportant distinction between thinking ofrepresentation as speaking for others and speak-ing as another. The latter notion supposescomplete substitution for the other, a claim toauthority on the basis of identity. In this sec-ond model, representing is understood inzero-sum terms: speaking on behalf of othersis akin to usurping their own voices as one’sown. The critique of representation in post-colonial cultural theory is primarily animatedby a deep-reaching critique of identity think-ing, and of associated norms of immediacy,authenticity, and spontaneous expression. Inthis respect, the former practice – speaking forothers – keeps in view the contingent author-ity upon which such delegation depends forits legitimacy. In postcolonial theory, GayatriChakravorty Spivak’s (1988) essay, ‘Can the

subaltern speak?’, takes up precisely this setof arguments. It makes a clear distinctionbetween two senses of representation: repre-sentation as depiction, and representation as del-egation. Both of these senses of representationimply a process of substitution between therepresented element and the representativeintermediary: for example, a painting in agallery stands in for a landscape it depicts, anda member of Parliament stands in for the con-stituents who elected him or her. But thesecond example immediately raises a set ofquestions about the authority of delegativerepresentation: who voted for the MP, and towhat extent do MPs faithfully represent thewishes of the voters. Representation in thissense is not a zero-sum game, but one whichproliferates claims and counterclaims. Spivak’sargument is that these sorts of questions alsopertain to representation in a depictive sense.The argument is not that one can never haveaccurate depictions – of landscapes, voters’preferences, and so on – but that there is adegree of partiality involved in any represen-tation that is not an error, but marks the pointat which questions of authority and legiti-macy proliferate (see Barnett, 1997).

The implication of this reconceptualiza-tion of representation is that critical attentionshould be focused on questions of whospeaks, or to put it another way, on questionsof agency. Now, agency is not simply a syn-onym for individual free will. It is, rather, aterm that implies a set of relations of delega-tion and authorization; it combines a sense ofself-guided activity with a sense of acting onsomeone else’s behalf, or as their agent.Postcolonial theory’s close association withthe idea of discourse is often thought to be alimitation. The idea of the ‘discursive con-struction’ of subjectivity seems to imply thatpeople’s agency is wholly determined by thesystems within which they are placed. Ideasof discourse are often associated with ‘entrap-ment models’ of subjectivity, in which peopleare seen either as wholly determined by

154ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


discourses, or else as heroically resisting theirplacement within them. In postcolonial the-ory, this contrast leads to an interpretivedilemma for academics: ‘You can empowerdiscursively the native, and open yourself tocharges of downplaying the epistemic (andliteral) violence of colonialism; or play up theabsolute nature of colonial domination, and beopen to charges of negating the subjectivityand agency of the colonised, thus textuallyreplicating the repressive operations of colo-nialism’ (Gates, 1991: 462). This dilemmaderives from different ideas of just what thepurpose of academic analysis is. Some peopleconsider the aim to be one of recovering andasserting the ‘voices’ of the oppressed orsilenced. On these grounds, postcolonial the-ory is expected to offer a theory of resistance,gleaned from the evidence of colonial sourcesand archives. Now, this is a perfectly legitimateaim, and even a rather noble one. But it is notthe only purpose that can guide analysis andinterpretation. I would argue that what is mostdistinctive about postcolonial theory is that itis less interested in reading representations asevidence of other sorts of practice, and moreconcerned with the actual work that systemsof textual representation do in the world.

This argument is likely to raise some eye-brows. It has become common to argue,particularly in geography, that postcolonialtheory spends too much time with texts andrepresentations, and that more attention needsto be paid to ‘material practices’. Invokingfigures of the ‘material’ world has a sort ofmagical cachet in the social sciences, but weshould be a little wary of this sort of knock-down criticism of postcolonialism, and fortwo reasons. First, postcolonial theory’s cri-tique of representation should lead us to besuspicious of arguments that appeal to somesort of unmediated access to the ‘material’world that does not have to pass through thehoops of particular idioms, vocabularies, andrhetorics. Second, it is an argument that failsto acknowledge that postcolonial theory’s

focus on textuality is neither an index ofbeing interested in ‘just texts’, nor an indica-tion of a grander argument that the ‘world islike a text’. Rather, this tradition of thought isconcerned with thinking through the quitespecific sorts of power that can be deployedby the use of textual apparatuses like books,printing presses, reading practices and so on.In this respect, what is most distinctive aboutpostcolonial theory is a particular conceptionof power.Terms such as ‘representation’, ‘dis-course’, and ‘textuality’ all converge arounda shared sense that knowledge is a criticalresource in the exercise and contestation ofpolitical authority. Perhaps for disciplinaryreasons, postcolonial theory has tended tofocus on particular sorts of knowledge – ‘soft’knowledge contained in literature and otheraesthetic forms. But it is worth noting thatthis focus has helped to transform literarystudies itself. It is hardly adequate to present itas a discipline concerned only with intensivereadings of the hidden meanings of texts. It isjust as likely to be concerned with the eco-nomics of publishing, the politics of educa-tion policy, or the social relations of reading.In each of these sorts of critical endeavours,the interest is with the ways in which texts getused to particular effects in a broader web ofsocial relations – used to make friends, to trainexperts, to convert people, and so on. The‘work’ that texts, or discourses, or representa-tions do is not, from a postcolonial perspec-tive, imaginary or ideological; it is not aboutmaking people think certain things, believe incertain values, or identify with certain subjectpositions. It is practical: above all, it is aboutuneven access to literacy, and by extension, tovocabularies of self-definition, practices ofcomportment, and rituals of distinction. It isconcerned with how people are made andmake themselves into subjects and agents whocan act in the world. Embedded in widerpractices, texts enable certain sorts of agency,in the double sense described above, by pro-viding a mediated source of knowledge



through which people can act as subjects oftheir own actions. In this focus on the powerof textually mediated subject formation, post-colonial theory therefore acknowledges thedensity of representations and the durabilityof texts; it does not look through them toanother reality or inside them for layers ofmeaning, but takes seriously the weight thatthey carry in the world.

Geographies of Understanding

In concluding, I want to consider the otherquestion that was raised at the start of theprevious section – the question of how toconceptualize cultural difference with theaim of fostering cross-cultural understanding,or what David Slater (1992) has called ‘learn-ing from other regions’. Understood as a ver-sion of social constructionism, postcolonialcriticism leaves us with a dilemma: in so faras its critical edge comes from arguing thatrepresentations of non-Western societies arejust that – representations – then the questionarises whether it is possible to ever accuratelydescribe unfamiliar cultures and societies. Astrong social constructionist would appear todeny this possibility, in so far as all descriptionis held to be context- and culture-specific.But the question of cross-cultural interpreta-tion remains central to the postcolonial pro-ject.The strong impulse of Said’s work is toaffirm the value of robust empirical know-ledge as a basic premise of interpretation andevaluation. Similarly, Spivak has consistentlyasserted the importance of empirical know-ledge to the work of interpretation, and hasgone so far as to affirm the importance of arevivified area studies.

This call for robust area-based knowledgeis interesting precisely because geography isone of the disciplines associated with the pro-duction of area-specific knowledge of regions,cultures and societies. But what is notableabout the encounter between postcolonialism

and geography is the extent to which thecritique of colonialist paradigms and legacies,when made through epistemological argu-ments about the construction of truth claims,has reinforced an interpretive turn in thediscipline that promotes a general aversiontowards values of objectivity, empirical validity,and explanation. This interpretive turn,marked by a set of scruples about representingother cultures and societies, is in danger of jet-tisoning one of geography’s most enduringpopular legacies, which is a sense of worldlycuriosity:‘any sense of Western scholars claim-ing to represent, claiming to know, “othersocieties” has become dangerous territory’(Bonnett, 2003: 60). The problem with thisseemingly impeccable respect for the particu-larities of other traditions is that it threatens toinstall an oddly indifferent attitude of toler-ance towards other perspectives. By supposingthat any judgement as to the validity of know-ledge claims is itself suspect, the common-or-garden variety of social constructionism investsspecific persons, styles, or practices from otherplaces with the status of being representativeof whole cultures. It therefore promotes a styleof cultural relativism that, in its suspension ofjudgement, makes cross-cultural learningimpossible by presenting any and all forms ofgeographical curiosity as morally suspect (seeMohanty, 1995).

My argument is that this style of tolerantindifference or cultural relativism manages tomiss the real challenge of postcolonialism. Ifone of the ways of ‘postcolonializing geo-graphy’ is to address a set of embedded insti-tutional practices of teaching, writing, andpublishing (see Robinson, 2003), thenanother is to follow through on the implica-tions of the postcolonial critique of histori-cism for the ways in which we imagine thegeographies of cultural difference. In particu-lar, postcolonialism should not be understoodas a simple, all-encompassing dismissal of theuniversalistic aspirations of modern humanis-tic culture. In large part, writers like Said and

156ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES


Spivak criticize Western traditions for theirfailure to be adequately attuned to the formsof communication through which a genuinepluralistic universalism might develop; theseforms involve developing an ear for otherways of apprehending the world, opening upto other ways of knowing.

There are two points worth making inrespect to this challenge of reconstructing apluralist universalism, an attitude whichwould be less focused on the scruples of rep-resenting other cultures, and more open tothe styles of sharing that come from areworked style of geographical curiosity. First,it is worth reminding ourselves that culturesor societies are not arranged as if they aretight, concentric circles (Connolly, 2000).Postcolonialism teaches us that coming fromone place, belonging to a particular culture, orsharing a specific language does not encloseus inside a territory. Rather, it implies beingplaced along multiple routes and trajectories,and being exposed to all sorts of movementsand exchanges. The tendency to conflatethe affirmation of cultural pluralism with anassertion of incommensurable values in factmisses the real force of postcolonial criticism,which takes as its target ways of thinkingabout difference in territorialized ways – interms of them and us, inside and outside, hereand there. The master tropes of postcolonialtheory – of hybridity, syncretism, diaspora,exile, and so on – are not only all geographi-cal metaphors.They are, more specifically, allmetaphors of impurity and mixing. Theytherefore retain a strong sense of the impor-tance of thinking about the geography ofidentity, but do so without modelling thisgeography of identity on an image of clear-cut and indivisible demarcations of belong-ing. Difference is not a barrier to relating andunderstanding, but is their very condition.

Second, one of the key insights of post-colonial criticism is that ‘the West’ is not a self-enclosed entity, but is made ‘from the outsidein’.This is one of Fanon’s key arguments, but

taken to its logical conclusion by postcolonialtheorists, it implies that supposedly ‘Western’forms (democracy, or rationality, or individu-alism) are not straightforwardly Western at all.Rather, they have multiple origins and path-ways, and are formed out of the amalgama-tion of various practices and strands ofthought.This is a fundamental issue, becauseit indicates the way in which postcolonialcriticism takes as its target not just Westernparadigms, but also the dominant critical par-adigms of modern anti-colonialist national-ism, which still often appeal to images ofauthentic culture, and thereby reproduceforms of ‘nativism’ that can be deployed byauthoritarian regimes to justify the authori-tarian usurpation of power.

The relativist interpretation of postcolo-nial theory promoted by some of its championsas well as criticized by many of its detractorstherefore needs to be contrasted to a readingthat is at once more radical and more liberalin its implications. This alternative readingstarts from the observation that postcolonialtheory has engaged in a sustained criticism ofa dominant imagination of space, one whichrenders cultures and societies as enclosed,territorialized entities with clear and tightboundaries. It is from this image of space thatall the dilemmas, scruples, and reassurances ofcultural relativism arise. It is no accident thatan alternative imagination of space – in termsof movement, mobility, translation, andporosity – should have arisen out of a field ofwork that is prevalently populated by literaryscholars. As we have already seen, postcolo-nial theory is often taken to task for beingtoo textual. I have already suggested that thiscriticism might be missing an importantpoint about how power works through insti-tutionalized practices of subject formation.But another reason why we need not acceptthis criticism at face value cuts to the heartof geography’s favoured subject matter –conceptualizations of space, place, and scale.Rather than presuming that postcolonial



theory needs to be supplemented bygeography’s robust materialism, we mightacknowledge that we geographers have some-thing to learn from literary theory preciselybecause a concern with the material thingsthat literary scholars are traditionally occupiedwith – books, the printed word, the formalqualities of textuality – opens to view a set ofspatialities that are much more fluid, mobile,tactile, and differentiated than the ones thatsocial scientists often favour.

Here then, in conclusion, are three reasonswhy postcolonial theory is not relevant onlyto geographers, but important preciselybecause of the fact that it is predominantly avariety of literary theory concerned withissues of textuality. First, it teaches us impor-tant lessons about the ways in which poweroperates in the modern world, through themediated production of subjectivities. Second,by problematizing seemingly neutral practiceslike reading, writing and interpreting, it

broaches questions about the ways in whichcross-cultural understanding depends not onthe mastery of meaning but on openness todifference, to developing an ear for the other,and on relations of translation. And finally,in the focus upon practices through whichtextual meaning is produced and enforced,postcolonialism opens up an alternativeconceptualization of spatiality that is not‘metaphorical’, and therefore not in need ofbeing beefed up by some added ‘materiality’,but emerges from a careful attention to thetextures of symbolic communication itself.

NOTE1 This is one of the themes which connects

Said’s cultural theorizing with the other facetof work for which he is best known, namelyhis strong advocacy of the cause of Palestinianindependence (see Gregory, 1995; 2004).

158ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

ReferencesBarnett, C. (1997) ‘Sing along with the common people: politics, postcolonialism and

other figures’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15: 137–54.Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Blaut, J. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and

Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford.Bonnett, A. (2003) ‘Geography as the world discipline: connecting popular and academic

geographical imaginations’, Area, 35: 55–63.Connolly, W. (2000) ‘Speed, concentric cultures, and cosmopolitanism’, Political Theory,

29: 596–618.Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Fanon, F. (1991) Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove.Gates, H.L. (1991) ‘Critical Fanonism’, Critical Inquiry, 17: 457–70.Gregory, D. (1995) ‘Imaginative geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 19:

447–85.Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell.James, C.L.R. (1963) Beyond a Boundary. London: Hutchinson.Mohanty, S.P. (1995) ‘Colonial legacies, multicultural futures: relativism, objectivity, the

challenge of otherness’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association, 111(1):108–18.

Ngûgî wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in AfricanLiterature. London: Heinemann.


Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.Robinson, J. (2003) ‘Postcolonialising geography: tactics and pitfalls’, Singapore Journal

of Tropical Geography, 24: 273–89.Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus.Sidaway, J. (2000) ‘Postcolonial geographies: an exploratory essay’, Progress in Human

Geography, 24: 591–612.Slater, D. (1992) ‘On the borders of social theory: learning from other regions’,

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10: 307–27.Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds),

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, pp. 271–313.Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Young, R.J.C. (1990) White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London:

Routledge.Young, R.J.C. (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Routledge.



Editors’ Passnotes

13-Aitken-3325(Passnotes).qxd 11/24/2005 12:26 PM Page 161

PASSNOTES – POSITIVISM

What is it about?: Using scientific principles and methods to study social issues.

Who does it?: Gerard Rushton, Art Getis.

Where did it come from?: 1950s – recognition that geography was too descriptive and neededto be more scientific in its method to explain spatial patterns.

Where’s it going? : GIS (though not the critical kind)!

Who started it?: Auguste Comte and the Vienna Circle.

How do you do it?: Through identifying laws, spatial modelling and hypothesis testing.

What’s the evidence?: Quantitative data.

Tell me something I don’t know about it: Not many people claim to be positivists even thoughothers label their work in this way.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: The University of Iowa and Wisconsin (US);Bristol and Cambridge (UK).

162ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

PASSNOTES – HUMANISM

What is it?: A people-centred philosophy concerned with meanings, values and understandingour taken for granted experiences of ‘being-in-the-world’.

Who does it?: Robert Sack (1997) provides a humanist conception of place making.

Where did it come from?: A discontent with, and critique of, positivistic human geography.

Where’s it going?: Its legacy is work on moral geography and ethics, and the study of landscapesand everyday life in cultural geography.

Who started it?: In Geography?: Yi Fu Tuan, Anne Buttimer, Edward Relph and David Ley.

How do you do it?: In-depth engagement with individuals; exploring meanings and the humanimagination through texts, language, sound, art, etc.

What’s the evidence?: Interpretive accounts of human experience.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : There are close connections between humanism andhistorical perspectives in Geography.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: It’s about individuals remember!


EDITORS’ PASSNOTESÿÿ163

PASSNOTES – FEMINISM

What is it?: A philosophy that theorizes gender relations.

Who does it?: Collectives (e.g.Women and Geography Study Group of IBG/RGS; and GeographicalPerspectives on Women speciality group of the AAG)

Where did it come from?: A concern with understanding women’s place in the world and a cri-tique of the masculinist nature of geography.

Where’s it going?: Troubling the category ‘gender’.

Who started it?: A defining moment was Jan Monk and Susan Hanson’s paper in The ProfessionalGeographer – ‘On not excluding half of the human in human geography’.

How do you do it?: Close attention to, and politicization of, the research process (from a focuson power; acknowledging your positionality; giving something back to research participants).

What’s the evidence?: Anything you like (quantitative, qualitative, etc.), it’s not what you do, it’sthe way that you do it.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : Men can do it too.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: In the pages of Gender, Place and Culture.

PASSNOTES – MARXISM

What is it? : An uptake and moving beyond of Marx’s ideas so as to foster a wider realm of humanfreedom and an attitude of non-conquest toward the non-human.

Who does it?: Versions have seeped into much of critical human geography.

Where did it come from?: A critique of ‘establishment’ geography. Influenced by political uprisingsin Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Where’s it going? : Marxism rejects categories so it is always going outside the box!

Who started it? : Some say Marx (others say Hegel, Spinoza or capitalism itself).

How do you do it?: Reading Marx is one way but don’t stop there.

What’s the evidence?: The ubiquity of capitalist social formations.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : Marx was a starting point for ‘post’ philosophers likeFoucault, Derrida and Spivak. Marx disavowed Marx-ism.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: Wherever you find Geography.


164ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

PASSNOTES – BEHAVIOURIALISM

What is it about?: Understanding the psychology behind individual spatial behaviour.

Who does it?: Reg Golledge, time-geographers.

Where did it come from?: Psychology.

Where’s it going?: Its legacy may be in psychoanalytic geographies.

Who started it?: Lowenthal’s paper on geographical experience and his typification of Environment,Perception and Behaviour research were influential.

How do you do it?: Measurement e.g. structured questionnaires, cognitive maps, etc.

What’s the evidence?: Mental maps.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : Behavioural research has contributed to sub-disciplinaryfields such as cartography and disability geography.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: In the pages of Environment and Behaviour.

PASSNOTES – STRUCTURATION THEORY

What is it?: An approach to social theory that explains intersection of human agency and thewider social structures within which we operate.

Who does it?: Time-geographers; some health geographers.

Where did it come from?: Giddens’ critique of historical materialism.

Where’s it going?: It’s being eclipsed by Actor-Network Theory.

Who started it?: The sociologist Anthony Giddens.

How do you do it?: By understanding context and the contingencies.

What’s the evidence?: Models of time–space relations.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : Anthony Giddens’ friendship with Derek Gregory atCambridge facilitated the flow of his ideas into geography.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: Health geography, sociology.



PASSNOTES – REALISM

What is it about?: A philosophy that seeks to identify causal mechanisms.

Who does it?: Andrew Sayer.

Where did it come from?: Bhaskar’s realist theory of science.

Where’s it going? : Continues to be widely supported.

Who started it?: Sayer was the key figure in introducing realism within human geography.

How do you do it?: Process of abstraction.

What’s the evidence?: Things, relations, actions, discourse …

Tell me something I don’t know about it : Physical geography also engaged with it in the 1990s.

Where would /did you find these geographers?: Scattered across British and Scandinaviangeography and social science departments.

PASSNOTES – POSTMODERNISM

What is it?: A loss of faith in modern myths (e.g. ‘progress’ via ‘reason’ towards a ‘final’ ‘glorious’‘order’).

Who does it?: Ed Soja, Michael Dear (in geography). Jean-François Lyotard (philosopher) andZygmunt Bauman (sociologist) are amongst the most reliable guides.

Where did it come from?: We’re talking a genuine Zeitgeist here – a reflection of the spirit of anage, the colour of the times, the mood of contemporary culture …

Where’s it going?: The term’s already outmoded, but the ideas persist in various guises.

Who started it?: Lyotard did much to popularize the term.

How do you do it?: Ironically.

What’s the evidence?: How modern of you to ask! (See? Irony).

Tell me something I don’t know about it : Lyotard isn’t named after a gym garment; the garmentwas named after a French trapeze artist, Jules Léotard (1830–1870).

Where would/did you find these geographers?: Los Angeles, cyberspace, elsewhere …


166ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES

PASSNOTES – POSTSTRUCTURALISM

What is it? : It’s a loosely grouped set of texts and philosophies that are radically anti-essentialist.

Who does it? : Most geographers under 35.

Where did it come from? : Its genealogy can be traced back 200 years+ through continentalphilosophy.

Where’s it going?: Some argue it’s fragmenting into other connective forms of theorising such asActor-Network Theory.

Who started it?: It dates from Kant.

How do you do it?: Deconstruction; unsettle categories; challenge binaries.

What’s the evidence?: Discourse and new cartographies.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : It’s inspiring geographers to find new ways of writing.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: In libraries.

PASSNOTES – ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY

What is it? : It’s a theory that understands the world as multiplicity of different connections in whichnon-humans also have agency.

Who does it? : Latour and Law are the big cheeses; in Geography, Thrift, Whatmore, Murdoch.

Where did it come from?: Sociology of Science.

Where’s it going?: Towards theories of chaos and complexity.

Who started it?: Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.

How do you do it?: Theorizing networks of association.

What’s the evidence?: Whatmore’s Hybrid Geographies.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : It uses the term actant rather than actor.

Where would/did you find these geographers?: Open University (UK).


PASSNOTES – POSTCOLONIALISM

What is it?: A critique of colonialism and western-centric views of the world; and a reconceptual-ization of representation.

Who does it?: Bhabha, Spivak, Pratt; and in Geography: Alison Blunt, Jane Jacobs, Derek Gregory,David Slater.

Where did it come from?: Intellectuals who wrote about anti-colonial struggles and challengedwestern versions of culture. But its academic roots are in literary and cultural studies.

Where’s it going?: The pressure is on to show more concern with material practices rather thanrepresentation.

Who started it?: Edward Said’s book Orientalism has been most influential in its development.

How do you do it?: Analysis of colonial archives.

What’s the evidence?: Discourses, representations.

Tell me something I don’t know about it : It has involved close engagement with poststructural-ists like Derrida.

Where would/did you find these geographies? : In cultural studies.



Part 2People

The first part of the book dealt primarily with arguments. Leading scholars in the disciplinemade a case for their particular ways of knowing. In this part we turn to autobiographies tohelp elaborate more fully some of the personal factors that influence how geographers cometo know their world. Philosophies as ways of knowing are derived from day-to-day livingand, as such, they are intimately entwined with the lives of their practitioners.The previouspart focused on some major philosophies that engage geographers. In this part, somewell-known figures in the field talk about how they came to engage particular ways ofknowing and doing.

Within contemporary human geography there has been a recent emphasis on situated orcontextual knowledges (see Chapter 12); personal writing is seen as an important strategy tochallenge the disembodied and dispassionate nature of much academic writing.This secondpart focuses on how the work of a number of influential contemporary geographers has beenshaped by their academic context, place, and personal experiences. In the process, the parthighlights the way that some approaches to the discipline may remain constant through acareer, may evolve gradually or may undergo a radical shift in the face of disciplinary orsocietal movements.

The part is made up of autobiographical accounts of how ideas and work are shaped byphilosophies, personal experiences, place and time.These different testimonies highlight thecontradictions, ambiguities, stabilities and flux in individuals’ writing and practice. Journeysthrough and between places are central to the stories in these testimonies. Some talk abouta profound love of place, and the construction of a geographical imagination that beganin youth and continues in a connected way to where they live now. Others focus onexperiencing different people and places and how that experience changes the way theythink about the world; while still others focus on solving problems evident from observinglandscapes and change. Some of the commentators talk about the process of journeying andmobility and how those processes weave connections and the contexts of their work.Thereare those who see change in the way they move from institution to institution, while otherssee the importance of change in the institutions that they remain at throughout their careers.All are indebted in huge ways to past teachers and influential colleagues.These personalconnections are important, making these authors who they are as individuals as well asrespected leaders in geography.

Academic careers are equally about entertaining interesting and unsought afteropportunities as they are about stalwartly following convictions.To some, the journey andthe road less travelled is the most important thing. For David Harvey, for example, articles,books, and prestigious appointments pale in significance compared with a continuous lived


process of learning and exploration.The love of this process, this way of life, is shared indifferent ways by each of the authors in this part. Linda McDowell writes about theexcitement of being part of the women’s movement in the UK and shares with Harvey rootsthat enable a clear appreciation of class struggles. For Harvey and David Ley, the process isalways embedded in a singular love of places. Ley notes the ways that people and placesintertwine to promote powerful opportunities. Both Ley and Gerard Rushton talk aboutwhat can happen when new ideas are coupled with the dynamics of young students in oneplace at one moment in time (e.g. Pennsylvania or Iowa in the 1960s), while Richa Nagarhighlights the importance of inspiring mentors (particularly Susan Geiger). For Ley, theimportant focus was on humanism and social geography. Coming from a differentphilosophical tradition, for Rushton the challenge was to disentangle and solve spatialproblems in the landscape.

While most of the writers focus on the connections with and pleasures of place, LarryKnopp draws on his experience as a white gay man to reflect on the sense of beingsimultaneously in and out of place, and the often unacknowledged pleasures of movement,displacement and placelessness.

Both Richa Nagar and Vera Chouinard identify the importance of the relationshipbetween radical theories of power encountered in the geography classroom and theirunderstandings of their own personal experiences from childhood onwards. Here, Nagardescribes how her active negotiations of her own identity as a Tanzanian Asian woman ofcolour became interwoven in her PhD dissertation where she explored the complexities ofgender, race and community. Chouinard’s essay focuses on the process of being marked outas different within the discipline of geography .While other essays stress the joys of thepursuit of geographical knowledge, Chouinard describes her struggles within the academyand the toll they took on her health, and the wellbeing of her family. In doing so she showshow becoming disabled in turn shaped her own geographical agenda and reflects onconnecting the personal and the political with the philosophical and the theoretical.

Mohandas Ghandhi once noted that almost anything we do is insignificant, and yet it isnonetheless very important that we do it. Each day, each idea, each opportunity, each wordis small but takes us in a direction.These directions may in time look like Janice Monk’sbraided streams or Larry Knopp’s fluid mobility, and they are always of consequence.The notion of doing provides an important conduit to Part 3, which outlines some of theday-to-day tensions between philosophical purity, theoretical cohesion and the need forpragmatism in how we do research.As some of the chapters in Part 2 suggest, conflictbetween ways of knowing and ways of doing often emerges in the course of research projectsbecause of the practicalities of everyday contexts and constraints such as time, resources, andfunding.



INSTITUTIONS AND CULTURES

Gerard Rushton

Growing up in a small industrial town inNorthwest England during WWII whettedmy interest in Geography at an early age.Everyevening my mother would lay a large map ofEurope on the floor and we would listen to thenine o’ clock news and then find the locationsof the battles and bombings on the map. Ivividly remember climbing a hill near home tosee the red night sky as a bombed Manchesterburned 30 miles away. Five uncles were in HisMajesty’s Service: two in Europe, one in Indiaand the other in Kenya. My father was also inservice, but luckily was selected, by drawinglots, to stay in Britain when his ship was notable to transport the whole regiment.That shipwas torpedoed and all perished.

It was in high school that my interest ineconomic geography began. In my hometown of Nelson, Lancashire, there were manycotton weaving mills which closed downwhen in the 1930s Japan dominated the worldmarket for cotton cloth. In 1945, the loomswere brought out of storage and were soonworking around the clock. Britain thendepended on the industry for a large part ofits export earnings, but by 1952, the millsbegan to close again. Some mills relocated toTasmania. My auntie Francis agreed to relo-cate if she could have the same 12 loomsshe worked in Nelson accompany her toTasmania.One of the remaining larger mills inNelson hired an Urdu speaker to solicit work-ers from Pakistan and when I returned a fewyears ago, all five movie theaters were playingSouth Asian films.

The University of Wales

When I was an undergraduate at the Uni-versity College of Wales, Aberystwyth, oureconomic geography textbook by WilliamSmith had maps of Burnley, the neighboringtown to Nelson, showing the mills thatclosed down in the 1930s. Smith argued thatmost of the closed mills were located onthe canal and that, as a means of transporta-tion, the canal was little used by the 1930s.Therefore, the mills had lost their locationaladvantage.

Knowing how these mills operated, I wasunimpressed with this argument. Yet thepattern of canal-located mills closing andmost others remaining open was clearly there.No point pattern analysis was needed. Bybicycling around and noting the dates on thecornerstones of the mills, I established that thepattern of closing in the 1930s correlatedwith the age of the mill. I also found thatthose built before 1880 had invariably wovencoarse cotton cloth, whereas most establishedafter that date had Jacquard looms.1 Thisbecame the model for computer softwarecode. So my interpretation of the pattern ofclosures was connected to the kind of cottonweaving each mill did: those in the businessof the coarse cloth had a tendency to close;those doing the fine weaving mostly remainedopen. This became the basis of my under-graduate thesis, so change in geographicalpatterns of industrial activities became myspecial area of study.

13


In 1959 the Chairman of Geography at‘Aber’ called me into his office and offered a“Demonstrator” position teaching the fieldwork components of surveying and geomor-phology. The British Government had justannounced its intention to end the militarydraft in two years. My friends were beingassigned to Britain’s trouble spots of the day:Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Aden, Singaporeand Hong Kong. Doing geography seemed afar better way to spend the next two years.

My masters thesis was on patterns ofchange in industrial activities in Lancashire.When I interviewed people at ‘The Board ofTrade’ in Manchester about industrial changein Lancashire, I soon realized that their goalwas to attract American capital and Americanbranch plants. I began to see my small area ofEngland in a wider context.

The people I interviewed in new indus-trial plants in the area stressed their commit-ment to finding optimal locations for theiractivities.They often told me that it was thesubsidies the UK Government offered themthat attracted them to consider such periph-eral places as Northern England. This wasthe age of rationality and new methods werebeing developed to solve the problem offinding optimal locations.

My adviser in Aber, Peter Mounfield, hadjust received his doctorate from Cambridgeand he talked about the new industrial geo-graphy there. Developing cost surfaces atalternative locations was the approach, but,easier said than done. He advised me to readAmerican economic geography and thensuggested a year of study in the US. Hehelped me make a list of American economicgeographers whose work we liked. I wrote tothem to enquire about admission and sup-port for one year of graduate study. I appliedto Chicago, Wisconsin and Iowa, and also,because Mounfield had a personal friend,David Simonett, at Kansas, I wrote there too.Simonett immediately replied: ‘Iowa is theplace for you.’

The University of Iowa

Iowa geography in 1961 was like nothing Ihad ever encountered.The small faculty (six)and graduate student group (about 30) wereclearly on a crusade. They saw a new geo-graphy founded in philosophical positivism andimplemented with quantitative methods (cf.McCarty, 1954).This period at Iowa has beendescribed by McCarty (1979) and by King(1979). McCarty, the Chair, had us read Stende Geer (1923) as his inspiration on the natureof laws in geography. According to de Geer‘Geography is the science of the present-daydistribution phenomena on the surface of theearth. It aims at a comparative and explanatorydescription of the characteristic complexes ofimportant distribution phenomena – geo-graphical provinces and regions – which occuron the earth’s surface’ (1923; 10). This wasIowa’s definition of geography in the 1960sand the tools were field observations, statisticsand the computer.

Iowa Professor Jim Lindberg introducedme to central place theory and to a newEnglish translation by Baskin of Christaller’sbook. I was fascinated and I contrasted myview of it with the emphasis on geometricpatterns of urban centers in the literature ofthat time. Influenced by the experience offlying across Iowa several times as a guest ona small plane, I was convinced I could predictthe locations of the next towns and their rel-ative sizes. It was far from a neat hexagonalpattern, but always it seemed to make sense asChristaller and Lösch theorized. Both thesescholars were interested in the orderly behav-ior of people. They thought of people, bothconsumers and producers, as rational in a spa-tial context. This became my mantra in mythird and final year at Iowa.

That year I decided I needed to finish thispost-graduate education and move on. I hadmarried a girl from northern Iowa – anundergraduate in English whom I’d met on ablind date. I soon saw the need to finish my

172ÿÿPEOPLE


dissertation quickly. I was employed duringthat third year as a research assistant by theBureau of Business and Economic Research.They had a multidisciplinary project to studythe future role of Iowa’s small towns. As partof their study, the survey research center atIowa State University in Ames had conducteda random sample of the rural population ofIowa. They asked each of 803 householdswhere they shopped for a few dozen com-modities.The results were on 81,000 punchedcards and analysis of these was stalled. Notmuch thought had gone into designing ananalysis plan. It was a good lesson for a youngscholar to learn.

We made slow progress until I proposed tothe Director that I be hired for extra hours,specifically to prove that I could replicate theresults from their retail trade-area analysis sur-veys from a model based on this sample. It tooksome persuasion,but the point that finally con-vinced the Director was my promise to writeit up for an article in the Iowa Business Digest,my first real publication, in 1964.

The project almost came to a halt when Ipetitioned the University computer allocationcommittee for a block of eight hours ofcomputing time.They wondered why a geo-grapher needed that much time. I had to appearbefore the committee to explain my model.I calibrated two large T-squares in miles andtaped a large transportation map of Iowa to atable.The location of each of 1144 towns inIowa were measured in terms of miles eastand miles north of an arbitrary location insouthern Nebraska. My computer programplaced a four mile grid on the state and,sequentially, from each grid point, computeddistances to all the neighboring towns. It thenplaced each of the six closest towns on a util-ity function I had calibrated from the surveydata and it then predicted the likelihood of aperson at the grid location patronizing eachof the towns around.

The computer committee not onlygranted my request, but assigned a doctoral

student in computer science as my assistantto optimize the model.The model ran earlyone Saturday morning. I received a telephonecall from my assistant that the program hadcrashed after three hours. He was baffled. Iraced to the computer center, stopping at agas station to pick up a map of Iowa. I figuredout where in Iowa the model was workingwhen it crashed. I saw the problem immedi-ately. Our program found the towns within25 miles of each grid location. But we hadnot programmed what to do when therewere not six towns within 25 miles.That wasthe problem.

We changed that key parameter andre-started the model and within the eight hoursit successfully completed its work. Later, Itested the results from the model against oneof the Bureau’s field trade area studies and itperformed very well.This was my first modelof an aspect of a spatial economy in a geo-graphic information system.

In my final summer at the University ofIowa, I worked with Reg Golledge and BillClark.Reg was a fellow Iowa student and Billhad just received his doctorate from theUniversity of Illinois. Ron Boyce, the newurban geographer at Iowa, hired us to workon the continuation of the Bureau project.With little formal guidance, we crafted ourown objectives and designed three paperswe would write using the same survey datadescribed above. Each of us would be princi-pal author of one of them, but all wouldactively contribute. The theme of each wasrecovering or using the rules people used inmaking their spatial choices of where to shopin the context of the real choices available tothem.These papers were published soon afterwe left Iowa.

McMaster University

After receiving my PhD I was hired byMcMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

INSTITUTIONS AND CULTURESÿÿ173


McMaster was a different culture. It was atraditional geography department, yet it hadaspirations to change. I received lots ofencouragement from the Chair and other fac-ulty to develop my ideas.They encouraged meto recruit students, although they already hadmany talented students at all levels. Soon therewas a very fine group of graduate students,among them Michael Goodchild, BryanMassam, John Mercer and Tim Oke. Theyworked in several areas under different advis-ers, but all were dedicated to scientific geog-raphy and used quantitative models whereappropriate.

After three years at ‘Mac,’ I received a callfrom Michigan State University. They had aposition, half-time in geography and half-time in the Computer Institute for SocialScience Research. Julian Wolpert had vacatedthe position to go to Princeton and he wastheir model geographer. The interview inCISSR was extremely demanding and thesheer stimulation of it made me want to bethere. I taught introductory economic geo-graphy and a seminar in central place theoryat MSU. I had plenty of time for my research.From McMaster I had brought my unfinishedbusiness which was to construct a behavioralmodel of spatial choice that was consistentwith other models of choice in social science.Part of my positivistic philosophy was that atheory and model in geography should notbe exceptional with respect to the basicsof social science. I felt that my pre-MSUwriting was too exceptional in this regard.CISSR was a good place to voice thesedoubts and I found a sympathetic group.

I became attracted to psychological mea-surement theory and soon found a group ofscholars who were heavily engaged in choicetheory and associated measurement theories atnearby University of Michigan.A psychologistcolleague at CISSR showed me some non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) workfrom there and I saw a connection to theproblem I had grappled with for five years:

how, from the individual choices of peoplein different spatial contexts, could a scale bedetermined that showed how all such possiblechoices would be evaluated by them? I wrote:‘In the study of spatial behavior we are inter-ested in finding the rules for spatial choicewhich, when applied to any unique distribu-tion of spatial opportunities, are capable ofgenerating spatial behavior patterns similar tothose observed’ (Rushton, 1969: 391). I intro-duced the concept of revealed space prefer-ences and later found that MDS was thetechnical means of implementing it. I wroteseveral papers which supported this claim.

Back in Iowa

After two years at MSU a call came fromIowa. Professor McCarty had just retired, thedepartment was growing in size, and theywere about to make three new appointmentsto add to the two they had just made.All wereto be in the scientific and quantitative tradi-tion. Given my interests, the opportunityseemed too good to be true.At Iowa my inter-ests in spatial preferences broadened to con-sider the problem of eliciting preferences forspatial situations that could not currently beobserved. This brought the transition frommethods of revealed space preference to infor-mation integration theory where soon, JordanLouviere, a graduate student I was advising,was making impressive contributions. Myinterests began to switch to the other set ofactors in central place theory: those who choselocations in which to put activities or thosewho chose activities for the locations theyoccupied. In other words,what set of locationsmaximized preferences? At MSU, I had con-structed a model that showed that the samepreferences, when applied in a classical centralplace situation, led to different groups of func-tions in places at the same level of the urbanhierarchy.The model itself had many sectionslifted from the Iowa Bureau model of 1964.

174ÿÿPEOPLE


Instead of working over the actual map ofIowa, it used a grid over a classic central placehexagonal pattern (Rushton, 1971).

In 1970,The Ford Foundation asked if Iwould review a project in India that wasdesigned to facilitate the provision of servicesto villages in areas where the green revolu-tion was being promoted. The project wasimplemented by the Government of Indiaand the Ford Foundation provided technicalsupport.

The project organizers in India statedthat their approach was based on centralplace theory. I criticized their plan roundly,mainly on the grounds that it appeared to betrying to lay hexagons over the regions ofinterest to promote the development of vil-lages close to the theoretical nodes. In aninvited visit to New York, I argued at theFoundation that the principles of centralplace theory should be used in this experi-ment but that the geometric results shouldnot be applied. I made several suggestionsabout how this could be accomplished.

They asked if I would be willing to visitthe project for a few months. For threemonths in the spring of 1971 I spent time inHyderabad and New Delhi.Working for theFoundation was unlike academic work andliving in their guest house and meeting thepeople coming and going from some of thebest universities in the US and elsewherewas an interesting experience. I was asked tojoin the staff of the project but for many rea-sons declined. Instead, they gave me an openticket to come and go whenever I chose, pro-viding I would spend at least three weeksthere on each visit. I made five visits in allbetween 1971 and 1974.

I had a reputation for being too theoret-ical and too impractical, and, to convince meof this, they encouraged me to visit several oftheir field sites. I had many opportunities tosee the effects of poorly made decisions tolocate services and became convinced that,without a methodology to judge their efficacy,

locating services would continue to be thestuff of politics. Geography needed to developa methodology for evaluating the location ofservices and for judging the effectiveness ofalternative location decisions.

Allen Scott introduced location-allocationmodels to geography in the first volume ofGeographical Analysis in 1969.As soon as I sawthis article I knew this was the track to follow.In the summer of 1973, I received a grant fromNSF to conduct a three week workshop forcollege teachers on location-allocation modelsand their role in a new location theory.‘CampAlgorithm,’ as the participants called it, servedto advance the adoption of location models ingeography.What would August Lösch have saidif he had seen such models and could see thatin fact they could be implemented? I want,Lösch said, ‘a spatial economic science that,more like architecture than the history ofarchitecture, creates rather than describes.’Herewas a major development to that end.

Location-allocation models advancedrapidly in the 1970s, particularly in theOperations Research community. Methodswere implemented, however, mainly on smallproblems rather than on real applications.The data models were ill-developed to opti-mize the task of spatial searching which, afterall, was the real purpose of the models.

For fifteen years I was consumed withmaking these models work for real situations.I advised several students who wrote disserta-tions on the subject, notably Ed Hillsman,Steve Nichols and Paul Densham.We addedthe centroids of Iowa townships to my geo-graphic information system of Iowa townsand succeeded in applying the then bestheuristic location-allocation algorithm, theTeitz and Bart algorithm, to this.At the time,this was considered to be an extremely largedata set of about 3,000 nodes.

Two NSF grants allowed us to continueworking in India and Nigeria on problems oflocating services in developing countries. Mycolleagues were Mike McNulty in Iowa,



Vinod Tewari in Bangalore and Bola Ayeni inIbadan. In a summary of this work, I wrote:‘Location-allocation analysis systems providean explicit framework for diagnosing serviceaccessibility problems, measuring the effi-ciency of recent locational decisions and thecurrent levels of settlement efficiency, andgenerating viable alternatives for action bydecision makers’ (Rushton, 1988: 97).

My student, Paul Densham, and I coinedthe phrase ‘spatial decision support systems’ torecognize that location theory was no longerthe retrospective study of past location deci-sions, but was now a tool for assisting peopleto make better decisions. The new locationtheory had to recognize how people under-stood and used the tools. I became puzzled atthat time that geography,while embracing therapid developments in geographic informa-tion systems, was retreating from the use ofmany of the models developed in the 1970s.

GIS was the new spatial decision supportsystem of the 1990s.The problem was to linkthe information processing functions of GISwith the analytic functions of the models.Since a good education in GIS must includeknowledge of the spatial models, I now teacha course ‘Location models and spatial deci-sion support systems’.

In 1989 San Diego State University wassearching for a senior person who wouldcompliment their very strong program ingeographic information systems, the lack ofwhich at Iowa at that time was affecting mywork. With the assistance of UC SantaBarbara, they were commencing a doctoralprogram.Although it was wrenching to leaveIowa, which had contributed so much to myprofessional development and to my life, Ienjoyed working with colleagues in SDSUand enjoyed getting to know SouthernCalifornia and San Diego. I was able to com-plete papers describing new implementationmethods for location-allocation models in aGIS environment.Two years later I returned toIowa, where I sensed the beginnings of change

and, eventually, a return to the department’straditional strength in geographic informa-tion science, spatial analytic models, behaviorand the environment.

I had often collaborated with faculty inthe health sciences at Iowa. For two years inthe mid-1970s I had been a full-time directorof the Center for Health Services Research.In 1993, I received a call from a Professor ofPediatrics asking if I would meet with a groupthat had been asked by the Iowa Departmentof Public Health to assist with a study ofinfant mortality in Des Moines. Was it true,they asked, that computers can now locate theaddresses of births and deaths from vital statis-tics records and make maps of rates?

Tiger line files from the 1990 Census werebeing released that year. I agreed to make suchmaps by address-matching the 20,000 or sobirth records and the 200 or so infant deaths.A student,Panos Lolonis, had worked with meto make projections of students in small areasfor the Iowa City School District and I sawhow,with a little modification, we could makea continuous distribution of infant mortalityrates. I was impressed by how much this mapwas appreciated by the Health Department inDes Moines and I saw how much superiorsuch maps are over the traditional maps ofcensus tracts or zip code areas.

I became interested in the spatial changein the error structures of such maps andwondered why so few people were interestedin the subject. Why did the whole area ofpublic health make so little use of spatial ana-lytic methods and of GIS?

I saw a lot of use of spatial statistics in thisarea, but virtually no use of spatial analyticmethods. I sensed an interesting area to study.With colleagues and students, I wrote twopapers published in Statistics in Medicine andwas invited to give lectures to groups in theCenters for Disease Control. I was appointedto several peer-review panels in NIH wherethe term GIS was beginning to appear inresearch proposals sent to them. I was also

176ÿÿPEOPLE


appointed Chair of the GIS oversight com-mittee for the National Cancer Institute’sLong Island Breast Cancer Project.Currently,I have grants from CDC and NIH to researchthe development of more effective spatialanalysis methods for measuring the cancerburden in local populations.The principles ofspatial search are still a major feature of theseefforts.

What is my current philosophy of geog-raphy? I remain dedicated to a scientificapproach: searching for theories, laws andmodels that can predict human spatial behav-ior; developing theory that links spatialbehavior to the spatial structures it generates;

and maintaining, developing and validatingmethods of spatial analysis to supportdecision-making in significant arenas of humanendeavor. If I am labeled a stalwart, unrecon-structed positivist, I gladly accept that charge.For me and for my students, I firmly believethe best is yet to come.

NOTE1 Jacquard looms are known today by many

computer science students for their use of asequence of punched cards to instruct amachine to weave complex color patterns incloth.


ReferencesDe Geer, S. (1923) ‘On the definition, method and classification of geography’,

Geografiska Annaler, 5: 1–37.King, L.J. (1979) ‘Areal associations and regressions’, Annals, Association of American

Geographers, 69: 124–8.McCarty, H.H. (1954) ‘An approach to a theory of economic geography’, Economic

Geography, 30: 95–101.McCarty, H.H. (1979) ‘Geography at Iowa’, Annals, Association of American

Geographers, 69: 121–4.Rushton, G. (1969) ‘Analysis of spatial behavior by revealed space preference’, Annals,

Association of American Geographers, 59: 391–400.Rushton, G. (1971) ‘Postulates of central place theory and the properties of central place

systems’, Geographical Analysis, 3: 140–56.Rushton, G. (1988) ‘Location theory, location-allocation models, and service develop-

ment planning in the third world’, Economic Geography, 64: 97–120.


PLACES AND CONTEXTS

David Ley

Intellectual knowledge, like other socialphenomena, emerges from the intersection ofimagination, practice, and context. In thisshort essay I shall outline the places and (someof the) people who have shaped my own aca-demic development. This autobiographicalaccount exemplifies my research bent of tra-cing the relations between place and identity,extending it to my own formation as a socialand cultural geographer.

Early Influences: from Swanseato Windsor

Where does biology end and social contextbegin? Was it the promptings of DNA orsome tribal conformity which prescribedthat in my extended family five of the sevenuniversity entrants up to my generationstudied geography? And was childhood stamp-collecting – as others have noted, an earlyindicator of a geographical predisposition – aresponse to some inherited patterning, or toopportunity (my father’s occasional gifts fromforeign sea captains in the ports of SouthWales)? And how did an adolescence pre-occupied with team sports intersect withrecognition of the frequent coincidencebetween university athletes and geographicalstudies? In these taken-for-granted collisionsand collusions a broader configuration tookshape, prompting certain paths to be takenrather than others, and cumulatively orches-trating more and less likely trajectories.

From Windsor to Oxford: the Powerof Mentoring

By adolescence certain influences assumedgreater clarity. It has been my good fortuneto have been instructed by superb teacher/mentors, including Roy Yabsley and ColinBrock at Windsor Grammar School,Paul Pagetat Jesus College, Oxford, and Peter Gould atPennsylvania State University. Without theirformative and imaginative direction, outcomeswould have been different. Colin’s charismaticinfluence deflected me away from historyand to geography as a university subject; Paulignited the interest in social geography for meas he did for so many others (Clarke, 1984);while an unexpected letter from Peter effec-tively ended a potential career as an urbanplanner in Britain and led to a focus on innercity research in first the United States and thenCanada.

These mentors brought specific contribu-tions. At secondary school, field studies werean essential ingredient of knowledge, and theforced marches in the milieux of the ThamesBasin – across the chalk downs, through theclay vales, and up to the sandy heathlands –created a compelling pedagogic lesson ofspatial association, of an ordered world to bediscovered.This education continued at uni-versity, with field trips among the diverse andrapidly changing landscapes of the Oxfordregion,and longer forays to the dramatic Celticends of Europe, the landscapes of Connemaraand the Scottish Highlands that stretched the

14


concept of ecumene to its limit, as strikingbeauty obscured a miserly endowment forhuman settlement even without the historicalintervention of oppressive landowners. Theculmination of an Oxford degree in thosedays was a regional interpretation of a rela-tively small area, and my selection, scoutedwhile on site at a field hockey tournament,was a region of the westernmost Weald ofSussex in the south of England. In this ruralarea of villages and small towns the unfoldingof a rapid progression of geological outcropswas accompanied by a sympathetic humangeography of parish boundaries, land use andsettlement, a vernacular landscape that hadconsolidated through the centuries, had largelyleapfrogged the interventions of industrialurbanization, and was being ossified by retireesand long-range commuters to postindustrialLondon who, as rural gentrifiers, sought theapparent authenticity of historic preservation.

It was in undertaking this regional studythat I became, in an enveloping visceral sense,smitten by geography. Cycling down countrylanes in early summer, from village to villageand from small town to small town, observingthe lie of the land, engaging in casual andsemi-directed conversations, was a sensuousreception of sounds, sights and smells, of pal-pable geographical presence, as well as anintellectual challenge of problem-solving.Thework (if such it was) not only sedimented aconviction about the importance and rewardsof field study, but also established a foundingprinciple of the centrality of empirical work inestablishing geographical regularities and con-ceptual development, a statement that wouldseem banal were it not for tendencies inhuman geography in the past 40 years to priv-ilege theoretical abstraction that has freed itselffrom the inconvenience of empirical account-ability. For – as I have frequently discovered –the empirical world has no shortage ofsurprises, as agricultural labourers’ cottages inSussex may be occupied by London bankers,just as millionaire mansions in Vancouver

might be the home of immigrant householdswith Canadian incomes below the povertyline (Ley, 2003).Theorists who forsake empir-ical work commonly reproduce their ownpresuppositions as results and thereby lose sig-nificant opportunities for learning. A secondprinciple emerged. An interpretive study isintegrative, and the task of synthesis encour-ages an intellectual vocabulary of nuance, of‘more or less’ and ‘most of the time’. It allowsfor contingency and exception. In contrast amore analytical methodology, notably of thetype that C.Wright Mills (1959) chastised asabstracted empiricism,might be more likely topress harder with lines of causality.

Of course the tradition I am describingendured serious criticism during the quanti-tative revolution. In part those criticisms werewell placed, for regional interpretation couldeasily become formulaic and conceptuallylazy. At Oxford in the late 1960s there wasgreat excitement as students passed arounddog-eared copies of a truly radical messagein the pages of early issues of the Journal ofRegional Science (Barnes, 2004), reinforcingword of more conceptually innovative geo-graphy emanating from departments inCambridge and Bristol and in more distantparts like Lund, Chicago, Pennsylvania, andWashington. So when in spring of 1968 anunanticipated invitation to undertake a grad-uate degree in Pennsylvania arrived, I flewlike a moth towards a bright light.

Pennsylvania: The Shock of the New

The Penn State department in 1968, in factAmerica in 1968, were exceptional places ofhyperstimulation. A civil war was under wayin the classrooms of Penn State geography,and the four young Turks – Ron Abler, JohnAdams, Peter Gould and Tony Williams – hadboth the zeal of youth and the scent of vic-tory.Their own momentum was enhanced bythe stimulating presence of David Harvey

PLACES AND CONTEXTSÿÿ179


and Julian Wolpert as visiting professors, bythe appointment of Roger Downs as a superbinstructor, and by the visits of Gunnar Olssonand Les King, other regional members of the‘Michigan Inter-University Community ofMathematical Geographers’, who showedup periodically for energetic conversation atthe departmental watering hole on CollegeAvenue. Peter Gould was the animator ofthese events and an extraordinary intellectualpresence (Haggett, 2003).

But the United States too was on theverge of civil war in 1968, with rebellion inthe inner cities and riots on university cam-puses. Perhaps most remarkable was the man-ner in which these turbulent arenas ofscholarship and the nation scarcely inter-sected.Among the faculty at Penn State, it wasa member of the old guard,Wilbur Zelinsky,who was the most public opponent of theVietnam War and the domestic injustices inAmerican society. Meanwhile courses on sim-ulation, Markov chains (topics that studentsrequested David Harvey to teach!), linear pro-gramming, canonical correlation, and so on,had this in common.They were preoccupiedwith an internal world of theory, with tech-nique and logic, rather than an external worldof people and place. Indeed to my disappoint-ment (and initial incredulity) I discovered thatcreative course assignments set to ‘learn thetechniques’ consisted of imaginary data setsthat were contrived to show off the power ofthe method.This privileging of ‘theory’ as thegreatest good seems to me to be fundamen-tally misguided, and no less so with structural-ism, social theory and cultural theory, some ofthe frameworks that followed the logical pos-itivism at Penn State.The issue of course is notthe need for theory, which is self-evident, butthe privileging of theory which can makescholarship overly introverted, at its worst atype of intellectual makework programme.A better balance is represented, for example,by my colleague Gerry Pratt’s new book,Working Feminism (2004), with its concern to

work with, indeed to struggle with, theory inface of the rude surprises of evidence –though I suspect my own predilection mightbe to see still less explicit theory and a fullerempirical account.

It was at Penn State that I discoveredthe city, through courses with John Adamsand especially Julian Wolpert, a visitor fromthe Regional Science Department at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, who invited meto his home in suburban Philadelphia fora weekend, when we drove through NorthPhiladelphia and witnessed the extensive ter-ritory of what in those days we uncriticallycalled the black ghetto. Through a summerjob in a high school equivalency programmein the American South, I had recently enteredthe astonishing world of American race rela-tions, and Wolpert’s encouragement fuelledmy own religious ethics of social justice, andled to the ethnographic study of a section ofNorth Philadelphia that became my doctoraldissertation.

I have reflected on theoretical, methodo-logical, and ethical issues associated with thatresearch before (Ley, 1988; Ley and Mountz,2000) and will not do so again. Two points,however, may bear repeating. Like all humanworks, my study was in part a product of theintellectual and social environment of itstime, an integration of authorial agency andencompassing context. To my reading of ittoday, what has aged in the account is thebusy conceptual scaffolding around the study,while what has survived is the interpretationof the practice of everyday life in an environ-ment of chronic constraints and stressors. Myconclusion is that we should hold onto ourconceptual apparatus lightly. Second, thoughan ethnography, the study included somemodest quantitative analysis of a neighbour-hood questionnaire. While ethnography hasbecome a popular methodology amonghuman geographers in the past decade, invari-ably a form of methodological purity has pre-vailed, with little or no pursuit of anything

180ÿÿPEOPLE


but qualitative data. This predilection rulesout of the scholarly record valuable large datasets that can throw light on general relation-ships by engaging much larger samples thanare possible in ethnographies. My preferenceis for a messier strategy of triangulation, build-ing off several methodological positions,rather than a purer model that favours a singlemethodological base point.

Vancouver: Reflections in situ

Relocation to Vancouver (like the earliermove to Pennsylvania) is testimony to thestrength of weak ties, for just as a letter out ofthe blue despatched me to the United States,so a chance corridor meeting made mereconsider the unthinkable condition of notreturning to the United Kingdom followinggraduate study. I arrived in Vancouver in 1972to a very different institutional, national andurban environment than I had come to knowon the East Coast. The department at theUniversity of British Columbia (UBC) hadstrengths in physical, cultural and historicalgeography, and saw itself as the intellectualother to the quantitative innovations inSeattle, Pennsylvania,Toronto and elsewhere.Appointed at UBC in the same year wasMarwyn Samuels, who like me had illus-trated the pluralism of a putatively quantita-tive department by writing a dissertationwith Anne Buttimer at the University ofWashington on geography and existentialism.UBC wanted to show off its new appoint-ments and asked Marwyn and me to devise atitle for a double header that would introduceus to geographers in the region.We came upwith the title ‘The Meaning of Space’ andpresented our papers to a local meeting of theCanadian Association of Geographers inNovember 1972. From that session, and thefruitful conversations that developed from it,was conceived the edited volume HumanisticGeography which appeared six years later.

In many respects the position identified inmy essay in that volume is one that I have fol-lowed in most of my research since that time,including forays to such theoretical fields ashuman agency, postmodernism, and global-ization that tend to work from the samepresuppositions (e.g. Ley, 2004). Somewhatdifferent, and a clear legacy from graduatelearning, are projects that have used simplestatistics to examine relationships in largerdatabases (e.g.Ley and Tutchener, 2001).Asidefrom the database analysis, the abiding mes-sage has been a concern with the intersubjec-tive projects of everyday life among groupsoccupying urban places – actions contextual-ized by the influence of other groups (agentsof the state, the market, or other collectivitiesin civil society) and also by a much broaderset of contextual processes, comprising rela-tions that may be summarized in such con-cepts as postindustrialism, multiculturalism orneoliberalism. Such a position is methodo-logically and theoretically eclectic, informed bytheory but not confined by it, and allowingfor surprises in the world to reshape concep-tual agendas. Consideration of positionality,the taken-for-grantedness of the scholarlypose, is a basic building block in work thatobserves the social and cultural embeddedness(but not determination) of all of life.

After some 20 years of research on thesocial and cultural geography of Canadiancities, examining such issues as neighbour-hood organizations, urban politics, changinglabour and housing markets (especially gentri-fication), in the mid 1990s a very differentopportunity presented itself: to establish aninterdisciplinary network of researchers in thefield of immigration and urbanization, an ini-tiative known as the Metropolis Project. I hadjust completed a book that brought togethermy gentrification work (Ley, 1996), and was ata career stage where a significant reorientationwas welcome. A consortium of federal gov-ernment departments established four researchcentres across Canada, with the provision of



six years of assured funding, later renewed fora further five years. A keyword of Metropoliswas partnership, involving relations with dif-ferent levels of government, with NGOs andcommunity representatives, and with an inter-national network of close to 20 countries. Asone of the two Directors of the VancouverCentre (RIIM) from 1996 to 2003, life as amore or less solitary researcher came to anabrupt end. While general policy themes areidentified by government sponsors, funds arechannelled through the Social Science andHumanities Research Council, and scholarshave considerable freedom in defining specifictopics (see the Vancouver Centre’s website,www.riim.metropolis.net). The broader storyof Metropolis has yet to be told, but it hasproven an interesting exemplar of policy rel-evant research, of interdisciplinary and inter-national enrichment, and of engagement withgovernment and the community. Metropolisqualifies as an example of the current call forgeographers to be more active in public pol-icy research (Dicken, 2004).

Not the least of the opportunities hasbeen the stable funding horizon that has pro-vided significant professional developmentresources for graduate research. Students havebenefited not only from research funds butalso from access to a network of personnel,dataand field opportunities, and from the presenceof each other. Reflecting the emphases of theproject, a significant harvest of student publi-cations has ensued (including Ley and Smith,2000; Rose, 2001; Waters, 2002; Mountz,

2003;Teo, 2003) and with it a new generationof social geographers examining race, ethni-city and immigration in the city.

Conclusion: Continuity and Change

To spend an entire working career in a singledepartment may seem to be a failure of geo-graphical imagination. However, not only arethere advantages in establishing continuity ina place, but also the places we occupy bothundergo change and emerge as multifaceted,for through the life course one moves fromthe sites of young adulthood – inner city,apartment based, with sustained travel toleisure and learning sites across the metropoli-tan region – to different urban settings as a par-ent and citizen involved in children’s activitiesand institutional programming. Moreover,cities (and departments) change around us.In 1972 I was advised that Vancouver was aquasi-British city, that included Brits, cricket,and temperate weather, and indeed in theearly 1970s the British flag flew from allpublic buildings. Some time later that decadethe practice ended, and no one today wouldmake such an ethnic designation in a citywhere 80 per cent of a large immigrantcohort originates in Asia, and where theChinese-origin population alone nudges400,000. To a considerable degree I havehybridized with the city, leading to a new, butnever final, reconfiguration of identity andplace.

182ÿÿPEOPLE

ReferencesBarnes, T. (2004) ‘The rise (and decline) of American regional science: lessons for the

new economic geography?’, Journal of Economic Geography, 4: 107–29.Clarke, C. (1984) ‘Paul Paget; an appreciation’ , in C. Clarke, D. Ley and C. Peach (eds),

Geography and Ethnic Pluralism. London: Allen and Unwin, pp. xiv–xvii.Dicken, P. (2004) ‘Geographers and “globalization”: (yet) another missed boat?’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s. 29: 5–26.Haggett, P. (2003) ‘Peter Robin Gould, 1932–2000’, Annals of the Association of

American Geographers, 93: 925–34.


Ley, D. (1988) ‘Interpretive social research in the inner city’, in J. Eyles (ed.), Researchin Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 121–38.

Ley, D. (1996) The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Ley, D. (2003) ‘Seeking Homo economicus: the Canadian state and the strange story ofthe Business Immigration Program’, Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers, 93: 426–41.

Ley, D. (2004) ‘Transnational spaces and everyday lives’, Transactions of the Institute ofBritish Geographers, n.s. 29: 151–64.

Ley, D. and Mountz, A. (2000) ‘Interpretation, representation, positionality: issues in fieldresearch in human geography’, in M. Limb and C. Dwyer (eds), Qualitative Methodsfor Geographers. London: Arnold, pp. 234–50.

Ley, D. and Smith, H. (2000) ‘Relations between deprivation and immigrant groups inlarge Canadian cities’, Urban Studies, 37: 37–62.

Ley, D. and Tutchener, J. (2001) ‘Immigration, globalisation and house prices in Canada’sgateway cities’, Housing Studies, 16: 199–223.

Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.Mountz, A. (2003) ‘Human smuggling, the transnational imaginary, and everyday geo-

graphies of the nation-state’, Antipode, 35: 622–44.Pratt, G. (2004) Working Feminism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Rose, J. (2001) ‘Contexts of interpretation: assessing urban immigrant reception in

Richmond, BC’, The Canadian Geographer, 45: 474–93.Teo, S.-Y. (2003) ‘Dreaming inside a walled city: imagination, gender and the roots of

immigration’, Asia and Pacific Migration Journal, 12: 411–38.Waters, J. (2002) ‘Flexible families? “Astronaut” households and the experiences of lone

mothers in Vancouver, BC’, Social and Cultural Geography, 3: 117–34.



MEMORIES AND DESIRES

David Harvey

When I was around 12 years old, I had my firstlesson on the geography of North America.We drew a map of the eastern seaboard andmarked on it something called the ‘fall line.’It stretched from New England to Georgiaand recorded where the rolling foothills ofthe Appalachians abutted onto the flat allu-vial coastal plain. Its name derived from thenumerous waterfalls to be found there.Thesewaterfalls had social significance because theyprovided water power for innumerable millsthat spawned towns and villages and eventu-ally large cities. Today, the fall line is roughlymarked by interstate 95, which connects awhole string of cities up and down the easternseaboard of the United States.

As I studied that map in the dark andgloomy days of postwar Britain, I dreamedthat one day I might visit North America andexplore its wonders.The idea seemed hopelessthen, even though I had relatives in the UnitedStates (they sent us food parcels in the SecondWorld War).We were too poor, and it was alltoo far away. Little did I then imagine that Iwould spend more than half my life living onthat fall line.

If you had told a 12-year-old boy livingin the despairing days of immediate postwarBritain that this was the future in store forhim, every muscle in his body would havebeen aquiver with excitement. That boy hadto rummage in his imagination (TV was yet tocome, and he got to the cinema as a treat onlyonce every six months) to construct flights offancy that landed him in Rio, Rangoon,

San Francisco,or Benares.And more than oncehe decided to run away from home andexplore the world only to find that if itwas sunny in the morning, it was raining inthe afternoon (an elementary fact of Britishmeteorology), and that sharing a hollowed-outtree in the rain with an assortment of insectswas not anywhere near as comfortable asbathing in the maternal warmth of home.Andso it was that his interest in what I now call thedialectics of space and place (the way experi-ences in place always mesh with broader spa-tial relations) began.

Undergraduate Studies at Cambridgeand an Empire’s Decline

The fantasy of escape and exploration wasnourished by the knowledge that the worldwas open to be explored. Those maps withso many parts of the world colored red assomehow ‘belonging’ to Britain indicatedwide-ranging choices of territories availablefor inspection. But British power was declin-ing. Many of my teachers at Cambridge hadexperience in the military or colonial service.They seemed to regret the loss of Empire,while accepting that it should evolve, thoughonly in ‘sensible’ways. It is easy in retrospect tocriticize their imperial vision, their paternal-ism, and their colonial thinking.But what stayswith me more positively is the incredible lovethey evinced for the countries and the peoplesthey worked among and studied. Through

15


innumerable anecdotes, I learned of the curiousconflicts among the colonizers and the colo-nized, as well as the more obvious symbioticconflict between the two over what to do andwhere to do it.The everyday struggles aroundthe use of the land, over power and social rela-tions, over resources and meanings, came alivein those anecdotes and remain fundamental tomy geographic education.

The catalytic moment for me occurredwhen Britain, France, and Israel colludedto try to take back the Suez Canal fromEgyptian control. Even my father, who neverexpressed any overt political opinion butgave off the aura of a respectable working-class patriot who accepted that the aristo-cracy had been born to rule benevolently overthe nation and the Empire, expressed disgust. Iwas just 21 and in my final year as an under-graduate. I abandoned my studies for a wholeterm to argue vehemently about politics andturned resolutely anti-imperialist thereafter.

Local/Global Dialectics

I did my undergraduate thesis on fruit culti-vation in the nineteenth century in my localarea (I picked fruit to earn extra money – apittance – every summer from age 14 onward)and continued such studies through to the endof my doctoral dissertation,‘Aspects of agricul-tural and rural change in Kent, 1815–1900’.Exploring and excavating the deep roots of myown landscape,my own locality, became a cen-tral obsession. Intimate sensual contact withthe land went hand in hand with study of it.I became deeply immersed in that world.

As part of my dissertation research I readthe local newspapers from 1815 to 1880. Ittook me a whole summer to do it, and it wasan incredibly rewarding experience.Anecdoteupon anecdote all added up to an intricatepicture that saw personal lives articulated withabstract social forces, making for those glacialchanges that in the end have incredibly deep

consequences for the landscape and social life.The newspapers changed their format andtheir social content as the century wore on.When I sat back and reflected, I recognizedthat I had witnessed the rise and fall of acertain kind of regional consciousness, anupheaval that depended on changing means oftransport and communications, as well as onmore general economic, technological, andsocial changes.The speed and spatial range ofcommunications was clearly a dynamic shap-ing force in historical geography.

Yet there was another theme writ large inthat experience. When I looked at the dataon the hop industry, the cycles in plantings,output, and spatial spread and contractioncorrelated almost exactly with business cyclesin the British economy. Agricultural distressor affluence in mid Kent was a function ofchanging discount rates in the London finan-cial markets, which depended on trade con-ditions more generally. Finance capital andgeographical forms were, as I now would putit, intimately and dynamically connected.

I record all this because I now think ofthat summer as one of the most formativeexperiences of my intellectual life.The read-ing occurred, of course, against the dual back-ground of the local intimacy that I had longcultivated and the fantasy of escape to a widerworld that I had long harbored. But theexperience gave me insights and resourcesthat I have drawn upon ever since; it plainlyunderlies much of what I myself write aboutthe circulation of capital and the spatial andtemporal dynamics of global and local rela-tions. The local and the global, as we wouldnow put it, are two faces of the same coin.

A Love of Place and the Arroganceof Class

So my preference is to go places and justhang out. I did that on many trips to Swedenin the 1960s and in Paris for several summers

MEMORIES AND DESIRESÿÿ185


in the 1970s when I was collecting materialsand writing up on the historical geographyof the Second Empire. Long Greyhound bustrips in the United States in the 1960s, withstopovers to visit with people such as BillBunge in Detroit (a very formative influ-ence), or down into the depths of Mexico(where I designed the format of Explanationin Geography),were typical of my wanderings.

The formal world of academic life toooften seems removed from such tactile experi-ences of the world.There is always a connec-tion between what I write and what I feel, andwhat I feel depends on where I place myselfand how I react to people and situation. Towalk the streets of Baltimore or to talk withworkers in a Burger King, for example, is toexperience outrage at the waste of lives andopportunities, the patent injustices and stupidinefficiencies, the gross neglect that demandsrectification. Experiences like that impel meto write.They fuel my academic rage.

Call it class envy, prejudice, or war, butCambridge taught me about class in a waythat I had not earlier experienced, for I hadbeen raised in a fairly humdrum town wherethe main class distinctions were between pro-fessionals (mainly military) and respectableand dissolute working classes. My father’smother was the last of an aristocratic line thathad fallen on hard times. She disgraced her-self by marrying a professional naval man,but the aristocratic heritage was there. Likemy father, I was prepared to accept somenotions of aristocratic privilege until I gotto Cambridge and felt its abusive qualitiesfirsthand.

My mother’s father, on the other hand,wasof ‘the aristocracy of labor’. Scottish by origin,he was a skilled worker in the AmalgamatedEngineering Union. He said little and wasquiet and dutiful – which was just as wellbecause his wife was extremely determined,strong, and opinionated. She was the ambitiousand pushy daughter of an agricultural laborer.She was also a strongly outspoken socialist who

would shop only at the co-op. I recall herstanding, in the middle of the Second WorldWar, in the co-op denouncing WinstonChurchill (our much revered war leader) as a‘rotten bugger’ who cared nothing for theworking classes.She responded to the surprisedlooks by admitting that Hitler was an even ‘rot-tener bugger’ and that it probably ‘took onerotten bugger to get rid of another rotten bug-ger’. I evidently inherited some of her politicalrage. If you look at my class heritage as awhole, of course, only one significant class ismissing: that of capitalist. I sometimes think Iinherited anti-capitalism in my DNA.

Graduate Years and Changing Gears

I had acquired a Leverhulme scholarship tostudy in Sweden for a year, mainly on thegrounds that the Swedes had better populationdata going back into the eighteenth century.When I arrived in Uppsala in 1960, I wasunceremoniously dumped into a room along-side some strange bear of a figure namedGunnar Olsson – an event that both of usfreely acknowledge was one of those fortuitousaccidents that have long-standing conse-quences. Along with many others (Chorley,Haggett, Ullman, Garrison, Berry, Morrill, andHägerstrand in leading roles), we helped tobend the structure of formal geography, againstconsiderable opposition, to our collective will.The immediate effect was that I dropped theresearch project on Swedish demographicsand just hung out all over Sweden, learning atremendous amount about what it meant tolive in a strange and foreign land, while retool-ing myself with all sorts of ideas and prospectsfor undertaking new kinds of research armedwith different philosophical foundations andmethods.This was the project that was to pre-occupy me throughout my subsequent years atBristol University, with a talented faculty thatincluded people such as Michael Chisholm (inhis sensible years), Barry Garner (a wonderful

186ÿÿPEOPLE


drinking companion), Peter Haggett, AllanFrey, and Mike Morgan. This project (aidedand abetted by a year teaching in Penn Statewith Peter Gould as mentor) was to culmi-nate in the writing of my first major book,Explanation in Geography, in which I sought toexplore the rational and scientific basis for geo-graphical knowledge by way of philosophy ofscience.

But I confess to being inwardly tornthroughout much of this period. On the onehand, the political, intellectual, and hence pro-fessional project pointed toward the unity ofall forms of knowledge under the umbrella ofpositivism and toward the rational applicationof such knowledge to the general task of socialbetterment. On the other hand, I still had thatlust to wander and diverge, to challengeauthority, to get off the beaten path of know-ledge into something different, to explore thewild recesses of the imagination as well as ofthe world.

I turned in the manuscript in the summerof 1968 with near revolutions going on inParis, Berlin, Mexico City, Bangkok, Chicago,and San Francisco. I had hardly noticed whatwas happening. I felt sort of idiotic. It seemedabsurd to be writing when the world wascollapsing in chaos around me and cities weregoing up in flames. The balance betweenactive engagement and academic work isalways tough to negotiate, and the whole issuestill bothers me immensely. I try to retain anactivist connection by attachment to socialmovements and some level of participationwhere I can. Such participation always remainsan important source of inspiration, and I hopeI can translate some of that inspiration into theworld of academia.

Johns Hopkins and Baltimore

In any case, I felt a crying need to retoolmyself again, to take up those moral andethical questions that I had left open in

Explanation and try to bring them closer to theground of everyday political life. In 1969, I washired at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to workin an interdisciplinary program dealing withgeography and environmental engineering.

The internal attraction of Johns Hopkinswas its interdisciplinarity. I thrived on it,much as I had as a graduate student. Figuressuch as Vicente Navarro, Rich Pfeffer, NancyHartsock, Donna Haraway, Emily Martin,Katherine Verdery, Ashraf Ghani, AlejandroPortes, and Neil Hertz (to name a few)became part of my intellectual firmament.The other attraction was my location inBaltimore, a city deeply troubled by socialunrest and impoverishment, one of thosecities that had gone up in flames the yearbefore I arrived. I wanted to put my skills towork to try to deal with urban issues andto do so in a directly reformist and engagedway. My new department already had someresearch under way on inner city housing.I immediately became engaged in that workand, together with my first graduate studentat Johns Hopkins, Lata Chatterjee, did somevery detailed studies on housing finance andgovernment policy in the city. This formedthe empirical background to my thinkingabout urban geography in a new way.

All of this set the stage for the publica-tion of Social Justice and the City, a book thatcontrasts what I called ‘liberal’ with ‘socialist’formulations of urban issues. I began to readMarx seriously around 1970. The journalAntipode had been launched a bit earlier, andsocialist,Marxist, anti-imperialist, and anarchistthought had an organized focus within theAssociation of American Geographers (AAG).Ben Wisner, Jim Blaut, David Stea, and DickPeet at Clark University, along with many oftheir graduate students, formed the nexus,with the awesome but difficult figure of BillBunge always lurking in the background.

These were heady days of discovery forme, both in Baltimore and beyond. For oncein my life it seemed that professional,



personal, and political life merged into oneturbulent stream of continuous innovationbacked by revolutionary fervor and culturalpower. Our research was dismissed as unreli-able and irrelevant.The publisher’s readers ofSocial Justice and the City called it incoherentand unreliable, and recommended its rejec-tion.A key essay I did,‘Population, resources,and the ideology of science’, was rejected outof hand by the Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers on the grounds that ithad nothing to do with geography (it cameout in Economic Geography instead).

By the time the battle was over, the oppo-sition had conceded (though usually withmultiple caveats) that the field of Marxistgeography might be intellectually coherent,even empirically relevant, but refused toengage with it for reasons of politics.

Limits and Paris

I had discovered earlier that Henri Lefebvrehad written on the urban question (I citedhim briefly in Social Justice), and it seemedthat the urban question was taken seriouslyin France. Manuel Castells had published LaQuestion urbaine in French in 1972. I met andlistened to him with great interest severaltimes in the mid 1970s. He encouraged meto come to France and created an attachmentin Paris. I got a Guggenheim to go there in1976–7.

I came out of the French experiencewanting to convert my attempt to constructa better urban political economy into noth-ing less than a project to overhaul all ofMarxian theory in order to encompass his-torical and geographical questions morecompetently. I conceived and wrote Limits toCapital to remedy the problem.

If I began with heady arrogance, thewriting of that book was terribly humbling.Crucial support came from Dick Walker(by then at Berkeley) and from Neil Smith

(whose key thesis work, which later becamethe book Uneven Development, intertwined inall sorts of ways with my own project) andBeatriz Nofal (both then graduate students),who shared some of the agony. The more Iworked at it the more complicated it became.I was desperate. Limits tested my own limits.It humbled me to write it. I knew then howmuch I could never know.Yet it was also aserious achievement.To my surprise and dis-appointment, Limits was neither widely readnor, as far as I could tell, influential with any-one very much apart from those specificallyinterested in geographical and urban ques-tions. I then discovered the limits that dis-ciplinary tribalism placed on free exchange.Economists would not take geographers seri-ously, and the sociologists had their worldsystem theory, and so on.

Writing a book like that takes its toll.Fortunately, friends and colleagues draggedme into political activities. Neil Smith wasparticularly insistent in those years, frequentlypointing out the pitfalls of lapsing into the-ory with no political praxis (I lost count ofthe number of picket lines he had me walk-ing on)! I also became involved with solidar-ity work in Central America and spent timewith a former colleague and his wife, ChuckSchnell and Flor Torres (she later becamea special assistant to Daniel Ortega), doingsupport work for the Sandinistas (includingoccasional journalism with my then partner,Barbara Koeppel), operating out of CostaRica. I witnessed there the devastating effectsof US imperialism firsthand.

Ignorance of real geographical informa-tion (as opposed to competency in the tech-niques of geographical information systems)increasingly appears to me as a deliberatemeans for the prosecution of narrow andself-serving US imperial interests. No won-der geography is so marginalized and sobadly taught in the US educational system! Itallows a privileged elite to have its way withthe world without any serious protest.

188ÿÿPEOPLE


Oxford and Postmodernism

I was offered – to my considerable surprise –the Halford Mackinder Professorship ofGeography at Oxford. For all sorts of oddreasons, I went there in January 1987, eventhough I was reluctant to leave Baltimore (bythen my adopted hometown) and my salarywas cut by half.

Above all, I think Oxford reminded meof my origins.The question of England andits relation to what had been Empire was stillall over the place. I was forcefully remindedof what I had long ago rebelled against.Thesmugness of much of Oxford repelled me,and I could not understand how the left inBritain, within geography and without, wastaking such wishy-washy positions in relationto Thatcherism. I wrote a few tendentiousarticles to that effect and got everyoneannoyed. And then I launched in and wroteThe Condition of Postmodernity.

Condition was the easiest book I everwrote. It just poured out lickety-split withouta moment of angst or hesitation (perhaps thatis why it is so readable). I wanted to prove thatMarxism was not as dead as some proclaimedand that it could offer some very cogent expla-nations of the dynamics then occurring (muchas it had in the case of the Baltimore housingmarket in my earlier work). The argumentworked well enough to provoke considerableand occasionally irate opposition among manypostmodernists (particularly of a strongly fem-inist persuasion). Because I had been deliber-ately provocative, what should I expect? Astime went on, it became clear that Conditionwas a forceful account to be reckoned withand that it had helped many people put a per-spective on events that had hitherto been lack-ing. It became a best seller (widely translatedinto foreign languages).

But there was an interesting sidekick inall this because the kind of Marxism that wasworking here was quite different from thatwhich had dominated in the early 1970s.

Marxists as a whole had never taken veryseriously questions of urbanization, of geo-graphy, of spatiotemporality, of place and cul-ture, of environment and ecological change,and of uneven geographical development.Condition worked precisely because it tookthese geographical matters as central ratherthan peripheral to Marxian thinking.

Hope and Dreams

By 1993, I was back on the fall line inBaltimore. It was not an easy move. I wentfrom a position of power in a large geographydepartment to being a minor and marginal-ized figure in a department dominated nowby engineers in a very corporatist engineeringschool that cared only about grants and spon-sored research. I returned to Johns Hopkinsunder unfavorable conditions, though a posi-tion of sorts was found for Haydee, my wife(an oceanographer with strong training influid dynamics), and I had support from manyindividuals in other departments.

Though I did not know it, my own per-manence was seriously threatened by lack ofblood flow to the heart. I sometimes thinkthat my articulation of dialectics as a relationbetween flows and permanences subcon-sciously reflected that condition! The fiveheart bypasses came just after I had done theindex to Justice, Nature, and the Geography ofDifference. For all of its lapses, I regard Justiceas one of my most profound geographicalworks.The book does for me in a geograph-ical way what Limits did for me from thestandpoint of political economy.

Trying to keep the connective tissue ofexperience, of thought, of writing, and of justbeing in the world, all together is what life isall about for me. So I wrote a book calledSpaces of Hope, which focused on possibilitiesand conversations about alternatives (themissing chapters of Justice). The book wasinspired in part by the ‘living-wage campaign’



in Baltimore and Johns Hopkins (with someof my students heavily involved), and it usedBaltimore as both foreground and backdropfor the exploration of utopian ideals. But itturned out to be my last Baltimore hurrah.Things just got too dismal for words in thedepartment and the university, and when anattractive offer came to join the AnthropologyProgram at the Graduate Center of the CityUniversity of New York (with Neil Smith andCindi Katz as colleagues), I jumped at thechance. It proved a shot in the arm and anopportunity to engage on an even broadercanvas of thought and activity.The outcomehas been a curious kind of closure of the cir-cle, for I have now written a book on TheNew Imperialism which takes me from themoment of a fading British imperialism of myearly youth to the sudden surge into an overtAmerican militaristic imperialism of today.The book draws upon 30 years of teachingMarx’s Capital, as well as upon many of myother previous writings, but also adds muchthat is new. But if it harks back to a sense ofdynamics acquired by a graduate student in a

long summer reading local press reports, andif it turns a certain imperial gaze acquiredin the waning days of the British Empire uponthe continents of knowledge as well as uponthe contemporary world … well, that is justhow books get written!

I hope, because I have both the memoryand the desire to change the world into a far,far better place than that which now exists.Life without hope is the death of desire.But inthe world at large, it is things that count.Theprocesses so fundamental to their productionfade into nothing.We can hope, of course, thatthe things capture something about the joysand frustrations, the irritations and sublimemoments, entailed in their production. But Iregard my books as essentially dead thingscrystallized out of a continuous lived processof learning and exploration. Now I must letthe text go to stand in the world as a fixed,static, and unchangeable document. But thedialectic of living does not stop here, neitherfor you nor for me. Dreams can come true, ifonly for that small segment of space–time inwhich we are able to sustain them.

190ÿÿPEOPLE


EXPERIENCES AND EMOTIONS

Robin A. Kearns

The Lure of the Far Away

During my high school years, I had a prizedposter pinned on my wall. While others hadpinups of motorcycles or film stars, the posterI gazed at depicted American national parks.Despite spending a childhood in close con-nection to the spectacular coast and hillsof the Northland region of New Zealand,I dreamt of visiting faraway places likeYellowstone and Jackson’s Hole.This fascina-tion for places with exotic names came frommy mother, Heather. She loved the sight ofplanes overhead, joked that she was born withjet fuel in her blood and found joy in visitingfar-flung places like Jasper, Alberta (knowingit from a John Denver song).

My parents had come to New Zealand asmigrants from Britain in search of new expe-riences. The opportunities for my father,a veterinarian, were more challenging inremote Northland than in the manicuredlandscapes of Suffolk. They never returnedto live there, although my mother quietlyyearned for the glens of Scotland. That seajourney at age four perhaps sowed seeds ofthe geographical imagination for me, withstops in Curaçao, Panama and Tahiti.

Growing up in the regional city ofWhangarei, we were never wholly at home.Bereft of soulmates my parents looked to theoutdoors for connection, and my curiosityfor landscape was roused. My father, a keenornithologist, took me on avian census-takingexercises in out-of-the-way places, and, once

my sister was a walker, we’d regularly gotramping in the rugged hills beyond the city.By teenage years I could identify most trees,rocks, birds and insects and, from my mother’sinfluence, developed a love of the writtenword.While the science of physical geographyturned me off in later years, those formativetimes gave me a love of the land and empathyfor the natural world.

Getting There

The dream of exploring North America waspartly fulfilled in 1977 when, having com-pleted high school, I left for the US as aRotary Exchange Student. I took flight withconsiderable relief having failed all but two ofmy final year public examinations. My high-est grade was in English; the 39 per cent ingeography reflected the absence of anythingthat interested me in the curriculum. IndustrialEurope seemed distant and dull, and the onlyfield trip that year was to our teacher’s pigfarm.There was more to the world than thisand my protest was leaving the exam roomearly.

Once in the tiny town of Sardis,Mississippi, the world paradoxically becamelarger. I learnt a great deal about race, historyand national identity. I attended a school thatwas 95 per cent African American. On thefirst day someone asked if New Zealand was‘up near Wyoming’. It rapidly became appar-ent that while school was a great cultural

16


experience, travel would be a preferableeducational option. I took up every opportu-nity.As my parents had hosted exchange stu-dents, I knew more about the programmethan my local Rotary hosts. My local coun-sellor began to ask ‘Where are you off tonow?’ whenever I phoned him. I reached37 states that year along with a few of thenational parks featured on that poster.

The wildest trip was accompanying atrucker who was driving to New York deliv-ering hospital beds to Pilgrim State Hospitalon Long Island, then one of the largestpsychiatric institutions in the US. Seeing thehuge hospital populated by distressed patients,and having hardly slept for three days, con-tributed to a lasting impression that may, atsome level, have fostered a later interest inplaces of mental health care.

While America had attracted me at age17, I would never have particularly chosen tospend a year in the Deep South. But, in retro-spect, choosing the country but not the regionwas fortuitous, for that year on the edge of theMississippi delta left a deep imprint.

Finding Geography

I returned from America and enrolled at theUniversity of Auckland.My hopes to be a psy-chologist were dashed by finding that year onepsychology was intensely tedious and techni-cal. It had nothing to do with studying com-munity dynamics as I had imagined. Feedingrats and being introduced to Van Morrisonmusic by my lab partner were the only relief.I passed with C grades. But in geographycourses, to my surprise, I gained A passes.In these, there seemed to be room to piecetogether my knowledge and experience of theworld. In my second year I took English andbegan to regret not having taken it at the out-set. By way of compromise, I returned for anMA and persuaded the Dean to allow me todo both geography and NZ literature. While

English was first love, geography ultimatelyoffered many more career opportunities.

Auckland had, and still has, a strong mas-ters programme. For a thesis, my connectionsto rural Northland and the attraction of field-work on familiar turf led me to research thepolitics and land use change associated with acommunity irrigation proposal.The potentialof the rich volcanic soils close to Whangareifor kiwifruit production was being recog-nized. The social as well as the spatial orderwas changing. It was a grand summer visitingfarms on a borrowed Yamaha 50, enjoying myfirst taste of interviewing amid the volcaniclandscapes of the Maungatapere district.Thatexperience left me a legacy of interest in ruralcommunities and a fascination for the con-flicting interests of individuals, communitiesand institutions.

Towards the end of 1982, my thesis super-visor,Warren Moran, encouraged me to applyfor a scholarship for doctoral study. AnneButtimer visited and was similarly encour-aging. I began to realize there was a world ofgeography beyond the thesis! Canada sparkedmy curiosity through having a geologist unclein Toronto. The Commonwealth Scholarshipapplication asked that six destination universi-ties be listed in preferred order. However,Brent Hall, a kiwi who’d returned from doinghis own PhD in Canada, said there was onlyone university worth going to: McMaster. Itook his advice and then five months laterreceived a telegram offering the scholarship.Having listed just one university, I can onlyimagine the adjudicators thought I knewexactly what I wanted.The opposite was thecase. I knew next to nothing about McMaster,but couldn’t turn down a paid passage toCanada.

Ontario in the Eighties

After I recovered from the shock of the midAugust humidity, the next adjustment was

192ÿÿPEOPLE


to geography at McMaster. Gone was theland-based focus of Auckland in the 1980s.Instead I found myself within a hotbed ofdebate on urban and economic aspects ofsocial life. I felt as if my carefully filled bucketof assumptions about the world was over-turned. I struggled to find classes that were ofinterest. For the first semester, I took RuthFincher’s urban political economy courseand, for the first time, grappled with thedeeper structures that underlie society.

These were days of feeling profoundly dis-connected from known territory. I grievedproximity to the sea. Each Great Lake seemedlike a great emptiness. Yet I was also deeplyexcited at being within a thoroughly interna-tional cohort of grad students. The degreeof sociability between academics and gradstudents was particularly enjoyable. Grapplingwith structuration theory with Derek Gregoryin Michael Dear’s living room seemed a greatdeal more doable than reading the journals.Yet, I was glad to create networks uncon-nected to geography. Engaging with theCatholic left gave me new friendships (includ-ing my partner Pat who was beginningmedical school) and insights into a varietyof struggles within and beyond Canada.However, none of the struggles seemed totouch the concerns of aboriginal Canadians.So when a chance encounter led me toCatherine Verrall, a self-effacing Quaker whoconvened the local chapter of the CanadianAlliance in Solidarity with the Native Peoples,my graduate years were changed profoundly.A fascination with First Nations’ spiritualityand land struggles was nourished within anorganization comprising of (at the time, radi-cally) native and non-native people workingtogether. It was a privilege to spend weekendson reserves learning of traditions and in dia-logue with artists.

It all left me at a loss for a doctoral researchtopic. I fleetingly considered transferring uni-versities, quitting even. The enthusiasm formatters Marxist and quantitative at McMaster

left me as cold as the looming winter. Theopportunity that gave me hope was MichaelDear and Martin Taylor’s recently completedwork on community attitudes to mentalhealth care facilities. Martin, with whom Iwas taking a course in environmental percep-tion, suggested I might examine communitymental health care from the perspective ofpsychiatric inpatients resident in inner cityboarding houses.Thus began a fascinating andchallenging opportunity to enter, at leastpartly, the world of mental health care.

Influences beyond, as well as within,McMaster shaped my thinking during thoseyears (1983–7). I found my way to a Centrefor Ecology and Spirituality on Lake Erie andfor four summers participated in colloquiafacilitated by Thomas Berry, a sage ecophilo-sopher who described himself as a ‘geologian’.At last I found rapprochement between the earthand deeper questions of meaning. Poetry alsoloomed large. I wrote and read as part ofthe Hamilton Poetry Centre and we hostedvarious Canadian poets passing through.The Toronto Harbourfront readings were aregular haunt and an opportunity to meetwriters ranging from Janet Frame to LawrenceFerlinghetti. All this, in combination, shapedmy passions for good writing and the good ofthe earth. At times, my colleagues and super-visors at McMaster were puzzled. But for megeography would always be a matter of theheart as well as the mind.

As my thesis research unfolded, I spenttime each week volunteering at a drop-incentre and would return with clothessmelling of smoke and my mind spinning.I experienced frequent attempts by droppers-in to convert me, or convince me of wild andwonderful things. Others just rocked in theirseats. The university campus and the carecentre felt like worlds apart. After the har-rowing experience of comprehensive exami-nations (two eight-hour exams followed byan oral on the questions I chose not to answer),I was free to work on the thesis research.

EXPERIENCES AND EMOTIONSÿÿ193


Qualitative approaches were unheard of atMcMaster at the time. I was flying by theproverbial seat of my pants, collecting narra-tives from respondents who surely thoughtmy questionnaires were akin to yet anotherpsychological test. Fellow graduate studentsprovided important perspectives on my thesiswork. Glenda Laws’ knowledge of welfarerestructuring and Susan Elliott’s panache forstatistical analysis were particularly helpful.

Another strong influence was NormanWhite, an intriguing psychiatrist whose socio-ecological ideas on health continued toinform my research for many years. Normanrevelled in engaging with geographers whocould think outside the medical model.Another influence was, and is, Michael Hayeswho had returned to geography after a mastersin epidemiology. He rapidly became a soul-mate whose catch-cry of ‘remember the gra-dient’ served as an enduring reminder of thedeeply structured opportunities for wealth,health and power in society. Michael’s com-mitment to social justice, tempered by his irre-pressible good humour and enthusiasm forgood music, contributed to the enjoyment ofmy later Ontario years.As my PhD oral exam-ination loomed, my supervisor posed thequestion: ‘Do you see yourself becoming a“career academic”?’ I recoiled from the affir-mative: the ‘publish or perish’ adage filled mewith ambivalence.

Back to the City of Sails

It was a weightless feeling that accompaniedme back to New Zealand, suddenly with ‘Dr’in front of my name. I’d received a MedicalResearch Council postdoctoral fellowship toundertake community mental health researchin Auckland.Arriving back in my old depart-ment was cosy yet unsettling. Former teach-ers were now colleagues but none seemed toshare common research interests. I set abouttrying to repeat my doctoral project but it felt

a bit stale. I also seemed to be collectingrejection letters from my attempts to publishfrom my PhD.

People working in the mental health sys-tem were obliging and curious at a geographer’squestions.The most surreal experience duringthat period was being put in touch with amental health client who wished to be inter-viewed at work rather than the clinic. Theaddress was on K Road, in Auckland’s red lightdistrict. Feeling vulnerable at the prospect ofgoing alone, I persuaded Pat to come along.Once within, and having run the gauntlet ofthe proprietor, we entered a room decked outin S&M paraphernalia. Our awkwardnessmust have been matched by that of the inter-viewee, given the unusual sight of an anxiousyoung couple entering her room looking likehealth inspectors.That experience was one ofa series leading me to an enduring interest inthe ethics of social research.

During the time of my postdoc,Christopher Smith of SUNY Albany came toNew Zealand on sabbatical and recruited myinvolvement in grant applications seeking toresearch relationships between housing andmental health. I warmed to Chris’s humour,humility and working-class sympathies.Shortlybefore he left, the funding was approved, leav-ing me the daunting prospect of running ahuge grant and employing a team of inter-viewers in two cities. It was a case of leapinginto the deep end.The advice of my architectfriend Tony Watkins, who had earlier encour-aged me to go to Canada, rattled in my head:‘Bite off more than you can chew, then chewlike hell.’ It became a career motto.

Within our first year together in NewZealand, Pat had the opportunity of a medicallocum in the Hokianga district, an area withwhich I had long-standing connections. Inthose glorious postdoctoral days of minimalteaching and no administration, I tagged alongand concocted research on the meaning of thehealth system.To gauge the social significanceof the community clinics I ‘hung out’ for a

194ÿÿPEOPLE


morning at each, noting the conversationsaround me, while pretending to complete thecrossword puzzle in the daily newspaper.Thismade-up method, which might now struggleto pass an institutional ethics review, served togenerate stark evidence of the place of theseclinics in the social fabric of community.Theimportance of their form (as medical clinics)was clearly rivalled by their function (as de factocommunity centres). This impromptu projectbecame a foundational research experienceand the results, published in Social Science andMedicine, went on to assist the local commu-nity in resisting amalgamation and assertingthe importance of its system to central bureau-crats. It served as an early and unexpectedcareer satisfaction.

Placing Myself

Towards the end of the postdoc, I was offereda lectureship at Auckland and began to diver-sify my research.The key construct that beganto inform my thinking was place as a recur-sive relationship connecting tangible locationwith experience and identity. Drawingloosely on comments in John Eyles’ Senses ofPlace book, this idea subsequently helped toinform my understanding of a range of com-munity studies and the associated narratives.Around that time, I was approached by col-league Steve Britton to contribute to a bookon restructuring in New Zealand. My initialreaction was that I had little to contribute.Restructuring sounded too economic for me.Eventually I was persuaded to write sectionson Maori housing initiatives and theHokianga health care system. The resultingbook, Changing Places, influenced my think-ing and became a collective expression ofNew Zealand geographers’ understandings ofthe radical shifts in policy sweeping the coun-try in the 1980s. Some of the sadness ofSteve’s premature death in 1991 was allayedby a growing collaboration with friend Alun

Joseph of Guelph with whom I have exploredthe links between rural health care servicesand broader restructuring processes.

After writing papers on home birth andrural health clinics, I was drawn to reflect onmethod and meaning in medical geography atthe 1990 New Zealand Geography confer-ence. Frustrated at the prospect of a long waitfor publication in small-run conference pro-ceedings, I took a chance and sent the paper tothe Professional Geographer. To my surprise itwas accepted. But reaction to my proposal fora reformed medical geography was quick.Twoof the established names in the field, JonathanMayer and Melinda Meade,delivered a scorch-ing retort to which I was offered the chance ofrebuttal. I recall a senior colleague telling me,‘You’ve bitten off more than you can chewthere, mate.’ Throwing caution to the wind,I introduced more reasons why geographyshould escape the shadow of medicine andengage with a more progressive discourse ofhealth and wellbeing. Postmodernism appealedto me for its legitimation of varied identities, itsopportunity for eclecticism, and its challengeto the certainty of science.We needed to ‘makespace for difference’, as I entitled a later essay inProgress in Human Geography.

This quest for difference followed me intoresearch methods. I last analysed data usingmultivariate statistics in the mid 1990s andhave since seen myself as a qualitative methodsperson. Creativity of method, for me, has ledto an expansion of theoretical explanation.A key target for method has been talk. Placeencourages, is formed by, and incorporates(literally and metaphorically) talk. A trans-disciplinary conference in Auckland in 1996on narrative and metaphor sent me back toold case materials, seeing new possibilities foranalysis. At last my love of language couldflourish!

Having been introduced to culturalgeography when an undergraduate student assomething exotic and largely found else-where, I found the reinvention of this field in



the 1990s exciting. The local and politicalwere suddenly in fashion. Getting to north-ern hemisphere conferences allowed me tomake acquaintances with those whose workI admired. Subsequent visits by Sue Smith,Peter Jackson, Isabel Dyck and GrahamMoon widened geographical horizons atAuckland, and in some cases led to new col-laborations.A key influence in the 1990s wasLawrence Berg who was completing his PhDat Waikato and led me to think criticallyabout ‘race’, place and power. My personalcommitment to supporting Maori aspirationsin health and housing was finding new theor-etical foundations that could translate intoteaching and research. While I have resistedself-identification as a ‘critical’ geographer(for me it risks being perceived as holier-than-thou), new cultural geography infusedand enthused my thinking. This was alsooccurring for Wil Gesler of UNC ChapelHill. Although we spent very little timetogether (I visited Chapel Hill once for twodays) we ended up publishing two bookstogether which, in combination, have assistedin widening the horizons of health geographythrough bringing together ideas about culture,place and health.

Research among Family and Friends

My research interests have frequently beenassociated with developments close to home.While some prefer to keep home and worklife separate, I have never been able to createstrong demarcations.A critical perspective onthe world is simply a way of seeing, and socialtheory assists the clarity of vision.When ourson was born, I built on earlier work onhomebirth and received a grant to exploremental health issues before and after child-birth. Later when Liam was admitted to thelocal children’s hospital, his linking ofmetaphor and place (‘Dad take me to theStarship where the robot is’) led to a series of

investigations of the spaces of corporatehealth care with Ross Barnett of theUniversity of Canterbury. As another long-term collaborator, Ross’s knack of sketchingthe ‘big picture’ of politics and capital hascomplemented my eye for detail and under-standing of the nature of place.

Latterly,with two school-age children, therole of primary schools as the heart of neigh-bourhoods has become acutely apparent. Sohas the way that traffic can bring congestionand threaten the health of that educationalheart. At our local school, a small projectquestioning the transport preferences of chil-dren and adults in 1999 led to an ongoingcollaboration with Damian Collins. Theintroduction of Auckland’s first ‘walkingschool bus’ (a scheduled walk to and fromschool staffed by adult volunteers) soon fol-lowed.Within four years, over 100 such routesare operating across Auckland.There is greatsatisfaction in seeing research gain legs andpolitical traction.

In a small country, networks matter a greatdeal.As in graduate days, I have been keen tomaintain connections from beyond, as well aswithin, geography.A key involvement beyondgeography over the last 16 years has been theNZ Public Health Association. Invariably thesole geographer participating in annual con-ferences, I’ve become known and can nowtake students to a region of the country, locatea member of the PHA and very soon have adialogue going on local health and commu-nity concerns. Getting away to be refreshedby the buzz of the bigger world offshore isanother key element to being a geographer ina small country. For maintaining wider net-works, the two-yearly international symposiain medical geography have been crucial andfar more satisfying then the grand scale of gen-eral geography conferences.

My involvement in multiple networkshelps to offset my discomfort at the prospectof being regarded as a specialist.The gener-alist in me wants to keep moving on. I am

196ÿÿPEOPLE


currently being stretched by new research onprimary care reform, tuberculosis, and sustain-able settlement. In all three projects, I am thesole geographer. While I continue to writewith, and enjoy the friendship of, a dispersednetwork of geographical colleagues, my localresearch is increasingly transdisciplinary. Thismove has also occurred within teaching.Whilemy enthusiasm for teaching cultural andhealth geography is undiminished, the oppor-tunity to teach within public health pro-grammes brings the satisfaction of seeingnon-geography students realize the importantof space and place.

As I await a bus home from the university,I often see a sociology professor who tells me

that geographers spread themselves too thinly.To an extent, he’s right.There’s a lot of groundto cover. In the course of my work, I repeat-edly defy expectations of what geographersdo. From early years, I was driven to lookout on, yet be involved in, the world. Thereare few limits to the scope of our researchcommitment. As I’ve acknowledged, we area magpie discipline – picking up on ideas,opportunities and attractive theories. But forme, this breadth of scope is geography’s attrac-tion. In biting off more than I can chew, I’velearnt to rely on, and learn from, friends andcolleagues to help digest the data and com-plete the picture. The heart of place can beappreciated, but not understood, alone.



PERSONAL AND POLITICAL

Vera Chouinard

How does one end up doing geographicresearch from one philosophical and theoret-ical position rather than another? How doeswhat happens in one’s life in particular placesand times alter one’s approach to understand-ing geographic phenomena such as the devel-opment of particular cities or urban areas?

In this chapter I outline some of the intel-lectual, personal and political forces that haveshaped my philosophical and theoreticalapproaches to doing geographic research. Indoing so, I hope to show that becoming aparticular type of geographer involves muchmore than learning a particular approachfrom books.Rather it is an often messy, some-times confusing and certainly contested jour-ney through learning which is as personal andpolitical as it is intellectual.

Early Days: Learning at Daddy’s ‘Knee’

I have always had a fascination with power:who has it, who doesn’t, and what differencesthis makes in people’s lives.This is one of theearliest signs that I might eventually becomeradical and feminist in my thinking about theworld and people’s places in it. I am not surewhere this came from but, looking back, I amsure that it was nurtured in places of child-hood in which I grew up with a father whoenjoyed almost absolute power and authorityin our home. Challenging his authority was arare and risky business, resulting in corporaland psychological punishment. Add to this

the fact that my father was a large, imposingman and it is no wonder that I grew up infear of him. Life with father was especiallystormy during my teenage years as I began torebel against adult authority. One particularlyvivid set of memories is when I would comehome from school eager to discuss issues suchas pollution and poverty – trying to expressnew-found opinions about difficult issues ofthe day – as we sat around my father’s dinnertable. As I sat down and began to speak, myfather would angrily insist that the only opin-ions I was ‘allowed’ to have on such matterswere the same as his own. If I disagreed,whichI almost always did given how different ourpolitics were, then down his fist would comeupon the dinner table sending the peas andusually my entire dinner plate hurtling off thetable while he shouted, ‘I’m right and you’rewrong!’While my mother rushed to pick upbroken dishes and pacify my father I wouldlapse into a temporary angry silence, only tocome back stubbornly another day to try tosay what I thought despite my father’s angerand intimidation.

What I learned at my father’s ‘knee’ andsupper table was that men had the power tooppress women – determining how they lived,particularly in places under their control suchas the home, and even what they could andcould not say and think. My fascination withthe causes of such inequalities in power grewalthough it would be a long time yet before mystudies and life more generally began to giveme answers to why such inequalities persisted.

17


Learning Geography Positivist Style

As a young woman who had been regularlysilenced and intimidated in her home, I waslooking forward to the freedom of inquiry anddebate that university life promised. Little didI imagine then that universities are also placeswhere knowledge is deeply and sometimesviolently contested; that knowledge is itself apotent form of power and something that canbe used in oppressive as well as liberating ways.

It is probably fair to say that, for most ofmy undergraduate days, I remained largelyunaware that social scientists disagreed aboutthe philosophical and theoretical perspectivesone could use to help develop explanations ofphenomena. As a psychology major, I discov-ered that we had theories about how percep-tion worked or about the inner psyche whichwe then tested deductively against empiricaldata.When a course in Third World develop-ment persuaded me to switch to major ingeography (unlike my other geographycourses, here we looked at inequalities inpower, for example between First and ThirdWorld nations), I learned to explain geo-graphic phenomena in similarly positivisticways. I was in a geography department inwhich positivism and micro theories of urbanand regional development held sway (i.e. the-ories which attribute phenomena such as sub-urbanization or gentrification to micro-levelcauses such as individual economic utilitymaximization) but were seldom if ever com-pared to other rival philosophies of scienceand theories of sociospatial change. Still, theseperspectives informed everything we did. Nowonder, then, that when I was asked to readDavid Harvey’s Explanation in Geography, anextended account of positivistic explanationsin geography, for a geographic thought class,I read it not as a discussion of one possiblephilosophical approach to geography, but sim-ply as the way scientific explanation was done.Nor is it any wonder that, while learning

micro theories of urban and regional change,on some level I kept feeling that issues of socialpower were being left out.

Radical Beginnings

It was at the masters level that I beganto question, at least implicitly, positivisticapproaches to geography and to realize thatgeographers disagreed, sometimes vehemently,about the theories they should use to helpexplain phenomena such as inner city orregional decline. My long-standing interest inissues of social power was leaving me dissatis-fied with the micro-economic and behav-ioural approaches to explanation popular withmany instructors at the University of Toronto.Yet, like most students, I was uncertain what todo about this. Although one or two humangeographers located in this department ‘dab-bled’ in radical theory and debates, such asManuel Castells’ writings on cities as sites ofconsumption in advanced capitalism, by andlarge geography was a conservative depart-ment. For the most part, then, the increasinglyinfluential subdiscipline of radical geographywas pretty much passing this department by.

As a result, faculty in the department didnot encourage students to explore more rad-ical approaches to geography. The almostentirely male faculty also had a strong sense ofhierarchy and of privilege when it came totelling students how we could and couldn’tdo ‘good’ geographic research. I discoveredthis, for example, when dealing with one pro-fessor who insisted I would like approachingmy work from a micro-economic modellingperspective if only I’d give it a serious try. Iwent along far enough to read importantworks such as Rawls’ theory of justice. I alsoworked on my multivariate statistical skills butfound myself more fascinated with the manyproblematic assumptions on which such waysof manipulating and explaining data are based

PERSONAL AND POLITICALÿÿ199


than I was by any apparent correlations,spatial or otherwise, that I found. Perhapsmicro individual-level theories of urban andregional change, and multivariate statisticalanalysis, were just not for me!

As my frustration with these approaches togeographic research grew, so too did my inter-est in finding out what ‘radical’ geography wasall about. I had overheard a PhD student dis-cussing his work with a radical planning pro-fessor with another student in the hallway oneday and decided to approach him. I rememberbeing shy and having a sense that this subjectwas ‘taboo’ when I stopped him and asked himwhat this was about. For whatever reasons, hewas reluctant to say much about it: a word ortwo and he was on his way.So I decided to findout for myself. Since I didn’t yet know manygeographers working in this area I began byreading a key source, the writings of KarlMarx. It was a fascinating if lonely intellectualjourney.But the more I read the more I under-stood that Marxist theory argued that it ismacro-level differences in power in society,notably differences in people’s locations withinthe class structure of society,which are the pri-mary reason that some people and places thrivewhile others struggle to barely survive. It was,for example, sudden and rapid shifts in capitalinvestment into and out of places such as urbanneighbourhoods or one-industry towns, I real-ized, which determined who lived in theseplaces and how (e.g. wealthy or poor, homedor homeless, employed or unemployed). Ibegan reading more recent Marxist work,much of it inspired by French structuralistthinkers, about questions such as why urbanenvironments were being redeveloped formore affluent citizens while the poor were los-ing their homes. Gradually, and despite thesometimes impenetrable language, the reasonscities and regions were changing in ways thatgave rise to problems such as homelessness,deindustrialization, and exploitation of ThirdWorld workers began to make more sense in amacro process (cf. individual causation or sta-tistical correlation) sense.

Even at this relatively early stage indiscovering more radical ways of understand-ing society and space, in hindsight my newphilosophical and theoretical directions werechanging my approach to understandingthe world as well as my life and politics.Consistent with the historical materialistphilosophical tradition, I was becoming moreinterested in developing a historical under-standing of processes of urban and regionalchange – one which attended to changingconditions of material life in society andspace. My life and politics were also chan-ging. I was becoming much more alert, forexample, to the ways in which academicenvironments were shaped by disparities inpower. Not only was power at stake instruggles over what did and didn’t count asgeographic knowledge, but our working liveswere shaped by our different locations inwider social structures of power. As graduatestudents working as teaching assistants, forexample, we lacked job security, benefits, andthe power to resist exploitative working con-ditions.As I began to make these connectionsbetween radical theories of power and myown life, I started to become more active onissues affecting relatively marginalized groups(something that characterizes my work as ageographer to this day). So, for example, Iagreed to serve as a vice-president of myteaching assistants union and learned aboutother aspects of struggles over power at uni-versities: that we couldn’t talk openly on theoffice phones because they were monitoredby RCMP officers keeping tabs on suspected‘radical students’, and that universities werenot collegial communities when it came tobargaining and labour matters – especiallywith relatively powerless groups such as grad-uate students.Of course,we were privileged inthe wider society in which it was difficult toafford university education, and those whocould were more likely than others to becomemembers of what some scholars termed an elitecore of the labour force. I was awakening to thepolitical realities of power and oppression and

200ÿÿPEOPLE


the contradictory ways that I and others foundourselves situated within relationships betweenthe more and less powerful in society andspace.

It had also become clear that the Torontogeography department was not a place inwhich my emerging interests in radical geo-graphy could flourish. Fortunately, nearbyMcMaster University had attracted a smallgroup of radical geography faculty (MichaelDear, Ruth Fincher, Michael Webber) and inSeptember of 1981 I went to work on myPhD with them. It turned out to be a won-derful place to study more radical approachesto the discipline – with lively seminarsand interesting graduate students to shareideas with.The early 1980s was a time whenMarxist approaches to urban and regionalchange were flourishing in geography butalso coming under attack by proponentsof other philosophical and theoreticalapproaches. I recall being infuriated, in par-ticular, by humanistic critiques which allegedthat Marxist approaches to geography werenecessarily structurally deterministic andhence neglected the role of human agencyand struggle in social change. And I wrote areply to one such paper (with Ruth Fincher)pointing out that more causally complexMarxist explanations of social and spatialchange treated social structures as limitingbut not determining outcomes which werealso shaped by human agency (Chouinardand Fincher, 1983).

What I didn’t realize at this time was howhotly Marxist and other radical approaches togeography were being contested within geo-graphy departments such as ours.This is becauseit was the professors who were training mewho were on the ‘front lines’ of conservativebacklashes against approaches challengingmore conventional, positivistic approaches tothe discipline. Nonetheless, this backlash alsofound expression in my work. In 1984 I pub-lished, with Ruth Fincher and MichaelWebber, a paper entitled ‘Explanation in scien-tific human geography’ in which we explained

how a postpositivist realist philosophy ofscience provided the basis for the rigorous,scientific testing of hypotheses in Marxistexplanations of social and spatial change(Chouinard et al., 1984).At the time, I attrib-uted my interest in writing this piece to mylong-standing interest in issues in philosophyof science. I realized later, however, that it wasalso a rebuttal to faculty in our departmentwho continued to insist that there was onlyone scientific way to do human geography andthat Marxist geography was by definitionunscientific – and an attempt to encourageothers to widen their horizons and admit thatone could do rigorous and important workfrom diverse philosophical and theoreticalvantage points.

The topic I chose for my PhD researchwas the struggle for cooperative housing forlow-income people in Canada. I was inter-ested in the role of the capitalist state in regu-lating struggles for alternative housing (i.e.decommodified) and the extent to whichgrassroots groups were able to achieve pro-gressive ends within the limits of state policiesand procedures. In accord with a complexcausal approach to using Marxist theory (seeEdel, 1981), the state was conceptualized notas a structure which determined outcomes incities and regions (e.g. particular types of socialhousing projects) but as a ‘terrain of conflict’over the power to determine how low- andmoderate-income people would be housed(see Chouinard and Fincher, 1987). Finally,I was able to use a theoretical approach whichallowed me to ask questions about howstruggles over power were played out andwho ‘won’ and ‘lost’ as a consequence!

Among the many memorable momentsfrom the days of working on my dissertation,one stands out in terms of influencingmy perspective on the politics of doinggeographic research.This was my first meet-ing with a leading activist in the Canadiancooperative housing movement. We werehaving lunch on Queen Street in Torontoand I was hoping to persuade him to help me



network with the activists and policy-makerswho would help make my project a reality.Our conversation turned to the question ofwhy he should help me get this research pro-ject started. I remember saying somethingabout how it would help document not onlypolicy changes over time but also the historyof struggles for cooperative housing in placessuch as Toronto; thus adding to our know-ledge of the movement and its outcomes.‘But,’ he cut in with his fork stabbing the airfor emphasis, ‘We already know all that’.As Isat there, ego quickly deflating, I realized hewas absolutely right. As a researcher I mightat best pull pieces of the co-op housing storytogether but it was, after all, their story; that is,the story of the people who had been fight-ing at the front lines for a non-inflationaryhousing alternative. What can and shouldresearchers contribute beyond a simpleretelling of the stories and knowledge ofothers? How can we do radical research inways that empower the marginalized groupswe work with? While I did not then nor doI now have all the answers to these difficultquestions, I do know that it is important thatwe continue to ask them of any geographicresearch we do. For they remind us that thereare crucial gulfs and power imbalancesbetween the world of academic research andthe real-world struggles for social changewith which we seek to connect. And that tobe a radical geographer is in part to be caughtup in the persistent contradictions of activismin and through the academy.

Out of the Frying Pan and into theFire? Life as a Junior, Radical, FemaleProfessor

My PhD studies were drawing to a close andI would soon find myself facing the challengesof being a radical member of the academy.When I was hired into a tenure-track positionin the same department where I completed

my PhD (those who had trained me had left)I faced a situation in which I was the only rad-ical, Marxist professor in the department andthe only woman. Unfortunately, these differ-ences would become bases upon which col-leagues marginalized myself, my work and mystudents. Being marked out as a negatively‘other’or different member of a department (seeKobayashi, 1997 on processes of differencing)is a gradual process – one that creeps up onyou through mundane everyday experiences.I recall being initially puzzled and frustrated,for instance, as student after student ended upin my office telling me that although theywere interested in doing geographic researchfrom radical perspectives, other professorswere advising them against this because ‘itwasn’t real research’ or ‘it wouldn’t get them ajob’ and so on. I would counter such narrow-minded advice by reminding students thatuniversities were, at least in principle, placeswhere diverse perspectives and approachesto research can and did thrive; after all it wasdebate across a range of perspectives thatadvanced knowledge, and not everyone doingand thinking the exact same thing!

The difference that being a woman madealso became clearer and clearer.Whereas at thegraduate level, I had naively assumed that wewomen were ‘equal’, as a junior faculty mem-ber it was very clear that we were anythingbut. At a personal level, the signs ranged acrosseverything from male colleagues remindingme that if my career ‘didn’t work out’ I couldalways ‘stay home with the kids’, to inappro-priate comments on my appearance and child-bearing intentions, to being ignored whenspeaking in faculty meetings (unless a malefaculty member reinforced what I’d said asimportant and deserving a response), and tobeing professionally harassed. The latter wasespecially painful and distressing – damagingmy health and my ability to do my job.

Other events made it clear that the kindsof personal negative differencing I wasexperiencing were part and parcel of systemic

202ÿÿPEOPLE


discrimination against women in geography.I recall quite vividly for example the firstfaculty hiring process I was privy to afterbecoming a junior professor.What was strik-ing about the process was the way in whichfemale candidates were evaluated by very dif-ferent and inappropriate criteria in compari-son to their male counterparts.The latter wereassessed by the usual standards of academicmerit (e.g. number of publications, grants, spe-cial awards) while the former were assessed,quite oddly it seemed to me at the time, bypersonal circumstances which ‘might’ affecttheir working lives (notably whether or not awoman had a male partner in another city andwould therefore commute to her job andpotentially spend less time on campus). Thegendered inequities in such evaluations areclear: candidates ought to be assessed by thesame criteria based on ability to do the job.

Through experiences such as these Ifound my feminist consciousness graduallyawakening as was my sensitivity to the role ofdifferences of gender in geographic change.Feminist colleagues and students also nudgedmy thinking along and encouraged me toincorporate struggles over gender relations androles into my work on changing geographiesof the local state (e.g. Chouinard, 1996).

Looking back on my early days as a loneradical, female geography professor in alargely conservative department, I think it isfair to say that I inadvertently became a light-ning rod for whatever misimpressions aboutradical, Marxist and feminist geography, andabout women in academia, persisted in thisplace. It was a hostile, lonely and difficultplace to work for myself and the associatedstress took its toll on my health and on thewellbeing of my family.

Disability and Differencing

In 1990 I was diagnosed with rheumatoidarthritis, an incurable immune-system-based

illness characterized, in my case, by severeunremitting inflammation in all the joints inthe body. This illness was a devastating per-sonal blow to someone in her early thirtieswith a new career and a young family. It wasalso, as it turned out, a devastating profes-sional blow because it marked the beginningof a long and gruelling struggle for accom-modation of my needs as a disabled professor.Under Canadian human rights laws, employ-ers such as universities are required toaccommodate disabled workers’ needs to thepoint of undue hardship (usually defined interms of prohibitive financial costs). Toooften, however, as in my case, legal rightsenjoyed in principle are difficult to win inpractice. Further, my disability and strugglesfor accommodation also helped to mark meout as even more negatively different than I’dbecome as a radical and feminist professor.

My struggles for accommodation coveredvirtually every aspect of my work as a disabledprofessor – from the need for an accessibleparking spot adjacent to the building Iworked in (an eight month fight) through tothe need for ground floor and elevator accessto the office in which I worked (over twoyears), to the fight against discriminatory waysof evaluating my job performance and payingfor the work I did (over a decade).These andother struggles also helped to open my eyes tothe significance of diversity in radical andfeminist geography, to the need to open upcategories such as ‘woman’, ‘child’ and ‘man’to diversity in where and how people live – asdisabled or non-disabled, heterosexual orhomosexual, for instance (Chouinard andGrant, 1995).

They also made me aware of the manysocial and spatial barriers that disabledwomen, children and men face in the fight forinclusion. Personal experiences, such as hav-ing to take legal action against my employerand fight for over 12 years for accommoda-tion at work, have taken on political meaningas I’ve come to realize, through disability



research and activism, how many disabledwomen, children and men fight, day in andday out, to have opportunities that the non-disabled often take for granted. Personalmoments, such as the time I was forced tostand in a conference session in excruciatingpain because no one would give up a seat forme even though I begged them to do so,spring to mind as I watch physically impairedwomen struggle to get into a room withoutan automated door or a facially disfiguredchild retreat from the taunts of other childreninto isolated play. The personal is deeplypolitical – connecting us in our marginaliza-tion, our sense of outrage and our diversity.

Geography Lessons: Connecting thePersonal and Political with thePhilosophical and Theoretical

Contemporary geography has come toencompass a rich diversity of philosophicaland theoretical perspectives. Here I’ve talkedabout becoming a radical, feminist and dis-abled geographer and some of the things I’velearned along the way.Among these are howimpossible it is to disentangle who we are and

how we do geography from where we’vebeen and how we’ve been caught up inprocesses of differencing. This is perhapseasiest to see from the margins – from suchvantage points as being the only womanfaculty in a department or the only visiblydisabled professor for example. It is harder tosee from vantage points of privilege becauseof the normality and taken-for-grantednessthat attaches to, for instance, being white inplaces of whiteness.Yet, it is vital that we learnto make such connections between how andwhy we do geography the way we do – notonly so that we can respect and learn fromdiversity in philosophical and theoretical ideasbut also so that we are aware of people andperspectives who remain ‘outside the project’of geography. By this I mean groups such asthe disabled whose vantage points and exper-tise promise to teach us a great deal abouthow the world works and for whom, andabout what needs to change if we are to worktogether towards a more inclusive world. Bypushing the borders and boundaries of thegeographic project in such ways, we open ourdiscipline and ourselves to new and excitingways of understanding and changing theworld we share.

204ÿÿPEOPLE

ReferencesChouinard, V. (1996) ‘Gender and Class Identities in Process and in Place: The local state

as a site of gender and class formation?’, Environment and Planning A, 28: 1485–506.Chouinard, V. and Fincher, R. (1983) ‘A Critique of Structural Marxism and Human

Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 137–45.Chouinard, V. and Fincher, R. (1987) ‘State Formation in Capitalism: A Conjunctural

Approach to Analysis’, Antipode, December: 329–53.Chouinard, V. and Grant, A. (1995) ‘On Being Not Even Anywhere Near “the Project”:

Ways of Putting Ourselves in the Picture’, Antipode, 27(2): 137–66.Chouinard, V., Fincher, R. and Webber, M. (1984) ‘Empirical Research in Scientific

Human Geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 8(3): 347–80.Edel, M. (1981) in Scott, A.J. and Dear, M.J. (eds), Urbanization and Urban Planning in

Capitalist Society. London: Routledge.Kobayashi, A. (1997) ‘The Paradox of Difference and Diversity (or, Why the Thresholds Keep

Moving)’, in John Paul Jones III, Heidi J. Nast and Susan M. Roberts (eds), Thresholdsin Feminist Geography. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. pp. 3–9.


DIFFERENCE AND PLACE

Linda McDowell

The opportunity to reflect – in print – onone’s own academic life, research interests andpreoccupations is both flattering and intimi-dating. I realized as I sat down to thinkthrough this comment that I had been con-tinuously employed in academic life for justabout 30 years and so I am entering the lastquarter of my career. I’m a representative ofthat fortunate generation of British women,born in the postwar years, helped into a goodand free education through the grammarschool system that was in existence inEngland and Wales in the late 1960s, and thensupported through university by what nowseems the almost unimaginable largesse of thestate, committed to the financial support ofstudents in higher education – but of courseonly an elite few.When I went to universityin 1968, less than 8 per cent of women in myage group had the same opportunity. It is asignificant mark of progress that now over40 per cent of all the relevant age cohort inBritain enter higher education, as many if notmore young women than young men,although the transfer of costs to individualsand their families is regrettable. But thesewomen of my age, although relatively few innumber, have proved to be a significant lot –at least as far as the development of the sec-ond wave women’s movement and feministtheory and scholarship is concerned.And thisis the focus of my paper, because, above all,mywork has been influenced by and set withinthe huge and exciting flowering of feminist-inspired work within and outside geography.

I began my academic life as an urban geographerand slowly metamorphosed into an economicgeographer, although as I argue below, and asfeminist theorists have long insisted, the sepa-ration of work from home, the urban fromthe economic, or daily life from working lifeis analytically unsatisfactory, challenged by theevident connections that are held in place, inthe main, by women’s domestic labour.A focus on the connections between whatwere in general defined as separate spheres bygeographers is the connecting thread in mypublished work over the decades.

Before I explore these connections andmy changing emphases, I want first to empha-size that academic work is always the productof collaboration. Even those papers and bookattributed to a single author are located in aca-demic and policy debates between near anddistant scholars, theorists and practitioners,greatly facilitated now by email and the explo-sion of new journals on the web. I have beenfortunate to work with and to be influencedby conversations and collaborations with a sig-nificant group of feminist geographers andothers working within a largely leftist criticalsocial theory approach from the late 1970sonwards. In the immediate circle of geo-graphers, in at the beginning as it were of femi-nist work in our discipline,were Jo Foord, JaneLewis, Jackie Tivers, Eleanore Kofman andSophie Bowlby in the UK and Damaris Roseand the late and much missed SuzanneMacKenzie in Canada. These conversationsspread in part through the establishment of a

18


women and geography working party in theIBG (later the Women and Geography Group;see Women and Geography Study Group,1984; 1997), to include, among others, MelissaGilbert, Susan Halford, Michelle Lowe andGill Valentine. All these scholars enriched myunderstanding of urban issues, as did a widergroup of feminists, including Mary Evans,Nanneke Redclift and Clare Ungerson, thenat the University of Kent at Canterbury whichwas where I began my academic career.Indeed, one of the first explicitly feministpapers I produced (McDowell, 1983) had itsorigins in a conference paper given at UKC.I remember it well because I had just discov-ered that I was pregnant.And pregnancy, birthand childcare are the other events irretrievablybound up for me with my writing and teach-ing, influencing not only the time available butmy understanding of the constraining influ-ence of the built environment and the spatialsegregation of different types of urban activi-ties as well as gendered differentiation in theworkplace.

The issues about negotiating the builturban fabric and patching together servicesseparated in time and space that I addressed inan academic sense in that 1983 paper took ona new meaning and materiality for me as Ichanged status from a mobile young profes-sional to an encumbered mother of two, orrather as, again with the help of numerousothers, I tried to combine the two, strugglingagainst both the tyranny of the built environ-ment and the diurnal patterns of universitytimetables. I reread Hägerstrand’s work onthe constraints of time and space with a newunderstanding. I was not alone in combiningemployment and motherhood as numerousfeminist friends were involved in the samecombination of what was still then, even in the1980s, referred to as ‘women’s dual roles’.And,as has often been noted about the writingsof the second wave feminists, the changingconcerns of that discourse reflected our/theirown life course, as emphases shifted from the

domestic labour debate, through childbirthand childrearing to ‘the change’ and ageing.My most recent papers (McDowell, 2003a;2004) are based on fieldwork I have beenundertaking with elderly women, born aboutthe same time as my own mother. In the yearsbetween I have undertaken a study of middle-class women and men working in a pressuredenvironment – merchant banking (McDowell,1997), not universities, but there are parallels(a point Doreen Massey, 1995 has also made inher work on high-tech industries) – and morerecently on the social construction of mascu-line identities among young men affectedby deindustrialization and facing workinglives in feminizing service sector occupations(McDowell, 2003b). In both pieces of work,there are clear connections with and reflectionsof my own career as a professional worker andas a mother of a son.

One of the great joys, of course, of beingan academic feminist theorist is being able todraw on personal experiences while analysingthe sociospatial construction of genderedidentities. This very strength is also a weak-ness, however, as the bitter debate in the mid1980s about the white middle-class hetero-sexist emphasis in both the theoretical and thepolitical demands of the women’s movementwere challenged by women of colour and les-bian separatism. Throughout that decade, asthe diversity rather than the commonalities ofwomen’s lives demanded both theoretical andempirical attention, the authority and right ofacademic feminists, largely white and middleclass, to speak for others was challenged. Inpart as a response to this recognition of diver-sity but also connected to broader theoreticalshifts, in the 20 years or so since I have beenpublishing feminist work, both feminist andurban theory have changed, expanded anddeveloped in numerous ways (see for exampleFincher and Jacobs, 1998). In the early 1980s,for example, urban theory was beginning toemerge from what now seems an unnecessar-ily restrictive straitjacket of searching for its

206ÿÿPEOPLE


own ‘theoretical object’. Influenced byAlthusserian Marxism as interpreted byManuel Castells (1978), many geographersand sociologists had defined their object ofanalysis as the provision of the goods andservices of collective consumption, regardedthen, before full-blown Thatcherism andReaganism showed how wrong we were, asessential for the maintenance and reproduc-tion of cities.

Feminist theorists, in similar theoreticalblinkers, were at the same time asserting thenecessity of domestic labour in the mainte-nance and reproduction of men, children,everyday life and the capitalist system, beforethe advent of fast food, massage parlours, shirtpressing services and singles bars put paidto this argument too (Ehrenreich, 1984;McDowell, 1991). Further, the increasingmobility of international capital demonstratedthat the reproduction of particular working-class families in particular places was barely ofany concern at all.And yet at the time this jointfocus on collective and household mainte-nance services was productive. Even thoughmost of the renowned urban analysts of the eratended not to have noticed, it was women’srole as key providers of both types of service –both as employees of central and local govern-ment services and as housewives and mothersin millions of individual homes – that keptcities running. Throughout those years, how-ever, feminist arguments about interconnec-tions and complexity were generally ignoredwithin our discipline. But it might also beargued that the other social sciences, in theirturn, ignored the significance of space andplace in understanding the nature and distrib-ution of economic and social life. Neither ofthese assertions stands up today.There has beenan exciting explosion of work across the socialsciences focusing on the significance of spatialdifference and its constitution within andacross a range of different spatial scales: a pointI shall return to in a moment. First though,I want to pick up again my point about the

significance of diversity by returning to that1983 paper about the gender division of urbanspace.

One of the most evident signs of the timewhen that paper was written lies in its singularfocus on ‘women’. Here both feminist theoryand urban studies have changed. More recentwork on the rich diversity of urban life and theexperiences of women from different classbackgrounds, ethnic and national origins, sex-ual identities, abilities, ages, and household cir-cumstances are submerged in this singularterm.The focus was on ‘women’, I think, notfrom ignorance – as a rich strand of socio-logical and historical work by feminists, as wellas, of course, that long geographical traditionabout residential segregation and the city,madeit abundantly clear that the city was an arena ofgreat diversity – but because the theoreticaltools to link this recognition to an explicitlyfeminist geographical analysis had not yet beendeveloped.As I wrote in the early 1980s a sin-gular discourse about women’s oppression andthe necessity of equal treatment informed ourwork. Neither the ‘equality/difference’ debate(Phillips, 1987), now subsumed within a widerdebate about the significance of redistributionand recognition in claims for equality (Fraser,1997), nor the shift in emphasis towards diver-sity in feminism and the particularity of placein geography, was yet well developed, as oldertheoretical traditions emphasizing regularities,even a search for spatial laws, or at least explic-itly spatial processes, were still evident. Thus,my 1983 paper included a swipe at locationalanalysis, as well as, as I have already suggested,its positioning within a materialist approach.Nevertheless, the arguments about the familialand gendered assumptions made concrete inurban form were important and influenced arich set of empirical studies analysing, forexample, the connections between the grow-ing numbers of single women, sole mothersand dual-career households and gentrification:not just a ‘rent gap’ nor a lifestyle choice but aresponse to the changing position of women in

DIFFERENCE AND PLACEÿÿ207


the contemporary cities (see for exampleBondi, 1991). A parallel set of analyses aboutthe connections between urban form and sex-uality have also drawn on and extended theearlier analyses of urban structure (see forexample Valentine, 1993).

Perhaps one of the most importantshifts in feminist work about the connectionsbetween gender and urban form, as well as themove to analyse the role of state institutions aselements in the oppression of women, hasbeen the much greater recognition of ambi-valence and contradiction and the multiplicityof women’s lives and geographies (Women andGeography Study Group, 1997; McDowell,1999).The early second wave women’s move-ment was, in retrospect, perhaps rather dourand serious in its initial theorizing about, forexample, the labour theory of value and itsconnection to domestic labour or its insistenceon the oppressive nature of marriage and thenuclear family.Thus, what was absent from mypaper was any awareness of the contradictoryrole of the home and the family in manywomen’s lives, as a place of hard work andinequality undoubtedly, but also as a place oflove and joy, the location of rest and recreationas well as respect and pleasure.While feministsof my generation wrote rather dismissively ofwomen ‘dusting their lives away’ or of theirfalse consciousness if they promised to obeyon marriage and to honour a man by workingunpaid in his home, we forgot that the homeis also a private site of intimacy as well as, asbell hooks (1991) reminded us, a haven forsome of the most exploited women, whetherworking class or members of a minoritypopulation, and a place from which politicalprotest and resistance to the norms of whathooks termed the white heteropatriarchymight be organized. Thus Jane Humphries(1977), in an early and controversial paperabout the domestic lives of working-classwomen in the nineteenth century thatreceived a rather hostile reception, insisted onthe rationality and the mutual support thatlay behind a conventional gender division of

labour in working-class families, as well as onits basis in female exploitation.Her analysis hasworn well.The general assertions in my papernow seem more particular: the demands ofwhite middle-class women for equality in theworkplace and in the home loom large butunexplored in their background.

My paper also reflects the emphasis onmaterial conditions then dominating feministtheorizing.Two decades on, as I wrote a newpaper on the city for a book on feminist the-ory (McDowell, 2003c), I was struck by mycurrent focus on issues of meaning and repre-sentation as well as much greater attention tothe significance of different spatial scales inthe social construction of meaning. In recentwork on cities and on feminist theorizationsof urban space, the focus moves both up anddown spatial scales as well as, of course,emphasizing their interconnections. We nowrecognize that place, the city, is a locus in anetwork of interconnected sociospatial processin which the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, and anyscale in between, are mutually constituted, asDoreen Massey (1984) insisted. I was fortunateto work with her at the Open University fora decade and her analysis of spatial divisions oflabour and the constitution of space, place andscale has had a lasting impact not just on myown work but on the whole discipline.Thus,current feminist work in and on the city,including my own, might, for example, discussthe meaning of the ‘home’ at the smallest spa-tial scale of room layouts within a dwelling, aswell as address the connections between the‘homeland’ and the nation and idealized con-structions of a particular version of nationalistfemininity, reflected both in national mythsand in everyday lives in the home. In thisrecent work, in which alternative versions ofthe home are imagined, constructed, and con-nected to place and to territory in differentways, as well as struggled against and resisted, afar wider range of sources than was common20 years ago is drawn into analyses.

In common with the wider ‘cultural turn’in the social sciences, feminist geographers

208ÿÿPEOPLE


now place greater emphasis on questions ofmeaning and representation as well as drawmore readily on artistic and literary sources inexplorations of the connections between fem-ininity and urbanity, on the gendered mean-ings of urban space as well as on women’s livedexperiences, in unpicking the links betweenmaterial inequalities and the cultural meaningof difference in understanding still persistentgender divisions. In this work there has been aproductive coincidence of effort by feministgeographers and by social philosophers. HereI think of the recent influence of the US the-orists Iris Young (1990) and Nancy Fraser(1997) on my own and others’ analyses of thechanging nature of inequality and difference,as well as Judith Butler’s (1990; 1993) influen-tial analysis of gender as a performance, andmore recently perhaps Martha Nussbaum’s(2000) extension of Amartya Sen’s concept ofcapacities and capabilities as a way through thecomplex discussion about social justice andequality in a postmodern theoretical land-scape.The last few years have been a demand-ing but extremely productive period in thedevelopment of critical feminist thought.

It is also beginning to be an extremelyproductive period in urban theorizing. Itseems to me that the late 1980s and early1990s were perhaps somewhat an era of mark-ing time in urban theorizing in general andfeminist geographical work on the city, despitethe undoubtedly significant work that wasundertaken in mapping and measuring theextent of the differences in women’s opportu-nities and lives from men’s in particular cities,in the main I think because the vexed question

of how to define ‘the urban’ continued tohaunt many urban geographers. What hasbeen so interesting about recent work – andsurely it is significant that most theorists nowtalk about ‘cities’ rather than the urban – is theemphasis on global interconnections, on citiesas nodes, networks, spaces of flows, in whichdiasporic populations forge new lives but alsomaintain ties between and connect in newways places in different parts of the world.As the sociologist Stuart Hall (1990) insistedand feminist theorist Chandra TalpadeMohanty (1991; 2003) demonstrated forwomen migrants, the Third World is now inthe First World, transforming understandingsof spatial divisions and connections, as well asindividual lives. Newer work on identity, onwomen’s waged and unwaged work, on for-mal and informal employment, on commodi-fied domestic labour, on artistic and othercultural movements in global cities, on politi-cal resistance in cities is now under way, mov-ing beyond what once was regarded as ‘urban’processes and patterns, blurring the distinc-tions between urban, economic, social andcultural geography, and infusing work on citieswith a new rationale and a great surge ofenthusiasm.To be part of this new and excit-ing wave is a pleasure in the same way that tohave been part of the early flowering of femi-nist geographical work was both a pleasureand a privilege. It seems to me that feministtheorizing, in all its rich multiplicity and vari-ety, has come in from the cold of a separatecategory or subdiscipline ‘outside the project’(Christopherson, 1989) and is now a key partof mainstream geographical analyses.

DIFFERENCE AND PLACEÿÿ209

References Bondi, L. (1991) ‘Gender divisions and gentrification: a critique’, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, 16: 190–8.Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge.Castells, M. (1978) The Urban Question. London: Arnold.Christopherson, S. (1989) ‘On being outside “the project” ’, Antipode, 21: 83–9.


Ehrenreich, B. (1984) ‘Life without father: reconsidering socialist-feminist theory’,Socialist Review, 73: 48–57.

Fincher, R. and Jacobs, J. (eds) (1998) Cities of Difference. New York: Guilford.Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition.

New York: Routledge.Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Culture,

Community, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 222–37.hooks, b. (1991) ‘Homeplace: a site of resistance’, in Yearning: Race, Gender and

Cultural Politics. London: Turnaround, pp. 41–9.Humphries, J. (1997) ‘Class struggle and the persistence of the working class family’,

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1: 241–58.Massey, D. (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Massey, D. (1995) ‘Masculinity, dualism and high technology’, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, 20: 487–99.McDowell, L. (1983) ‘Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space’,

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1: 59–72.McDowell, L. (1991) ‘Life without father and Ford: the new gender order of post-Fordism’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 400–19.McDowell, L. (1997) Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell.McDowell, L. (1999) Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies.

Cambridge: Polity.McDowell, L. (2003a) ‘The particularities of place: geographies of gendered moral

responsibilities among Latvian migrant workers in 1950s Britain’, Transactions of theInstitute of British Geographers, 28: 19–34.

McDowell, L. (2003b) Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and WhiteWorking Class Youth. Oxford: Blackwell.

McDowell, L. (2003c) ‘Space, place and home’, in M. Eagleton (ed.), A ConciseCompanion to Feminist Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.1–11.

McDowell, L. (2004) ‘Workers, migrants, aliens or citizens? State constructions anddiscourses among post-war European labour migrants in Britain’, Political Geography,22: 863–86.

Mohanty, C.T. (1991) ‘Cartographies of struggle: third world women and the politics offeminism’, in C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds), Third World Women and thePolitics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, pp. 1–47.

Mohanty, C.T. (2003) ‘“Under western eyes” revisited: feminist solidarity through anti-capitalist studies’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28: 499–535.

Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and human development: the capabilities approach.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Phillips, A. (ed.) (1987) Feminism and Equality. Oxford: Blackwell.Valentine, G. (1993) ‘Negotiating and managing multiple sexual identities: lesbian

space–time strategies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18: 237–48.Women and Geography Study Group (1984) Geography and Gender: An Introduction to

Feminist Geography. London: Heinemann.Women and Geography Study Group (1997) Feminist Geographies: Explorations in

Diversity and Difference. London: Longman.Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.

210ÿÿPEOPLE


LOCAL AND GLOBAL

Richa Nagar

19

Rumor has it that Kothi Sahji, the grandeighteenth-century house where I grew up inthe old city of Lucknow – and where the war-rior Begum Hazrat Mahal took shelter at thetime of the Indian revolt against the British –was constructed from the building materialsstolen from the Asaf-ud-daula Imambara. Mygrandfather, who was to become an eminentHindi novelist by the time of my birth, startedrenting this kothi located in the historic neigh-borhood of Chowk for 100 rupees in 1958.It was in this kothi, in the narrow, bustlinglanes surrounding the kothi, and in the mannerin which the rest of the world related tothose lanes and the kothi, that my first andmost deeply felt encounters with geographiesof difference, inequity, and social injusticeshappened.

My childhood memories are filled withtimes spent with cousins, neighbors, domesticworkers and their children in the big and smallcourtyards; in the winding, narrow stairwells;and in the ‘secret’ little doorways and tunnelsthat interlinked many of the old houses andtightly compressed lanes of Chowk. Chowk,by the way, was considered as the only realtourist attraction of Lucknow, because it washere that the past glory of Shi’i nawabs nur-tured not only the Lakhnavi Urdu and cultureof modesty, finesse and hospitality, but also thecraftsmanship of the local Sunni and Hinduartisans, and the practices of Khattry businessfamilies who hired (and exploited) them.

Inside the spaces of the kothi – at onceimposing, stifling and nurturing – I cameto admire my grandfather’s genius and his

popularity among people of all classes.And inthe same spaces, I watched my mother beingshunned by the family because of her parents’extreme poverty. I learned how child labor gottransformed into a lifetime of bonded laborthrough the stories of Baba who raised me andmy sister. I was taught what my sociospatial andbehavioral limits were as the oldest girl in theextended household.And I saw my young andambitious father gradually becoming a prisonerof his own body as he battled with an aggres-sive muscular dystrophy. Immediately outsidethe kothi, I met bhangi1 women and men whoinhabited the other side of our residential lane,and who came with their baskets every day tocollect the filth from our homes and non-flushlatrines. In the covered alley beside the kothi, Iknew girls of my own age who cooked,ate andslept with their families with only an eigh-teenth-century arch over their heads. Thesewere girls who never got a chance to go toschool or to use a ‘real’ toilet; whose growing,barely clothed bodies filled their mothers’hearts with fears; and who were married offand had babies by the time I reached college.

When I was seven, my mother – who hadthen become an assistant teacher of Hindi ina primary school – rebelled in a startling way.In a household that prided itself in serving theHindustani literature and people’s theater, andin a community where ‘English schools’ wereconsidered both elitist and beyond financialreach, she demanded that her daughters besent to an Angrezi school and announced thatshe would spend her earnings to help withthe fees. Her victory resulted in my admission


in 1976 (followed by my sister’s in 1979) toLa Martiniere, a school founded by a Frenchgeneral which is known as much for its high-quality education as for the historical role itsboys played in fighting against Indians andhelping restore British power during therevolt of 1857. In retrospect, the journey to LaMartiniere – barely two miles away fromKothi Sahji – was at once the most traumaticand enabling journey that changed the courseof my future life.

From Chowk to La Martiniere

When I arrived in La Martiniere, I becamesilent. The people, sounds and sensations thatthrobbed in the veins of Chowk were veryfar removed from this world. I was surroundedby Anglo-Indian teachers, administrators andboarders; and by daughters of bureaucrats, pro-fessionals, military officers, local legislators andbusiness families, who were raised in the mod-ern ‘residential colonies’of Lucknow in nuclearfamilies, who often spoke English comfortably,and who chatted about travels, films,novels andparties that I had never heard of.To many ofthem, Chowk was a ‘backward Muslim inte-rior’ where everyone wore chikan fabrics,chewed betel leaves, flew kites or visited thecourtesans. I tried hard not to feel embarrassedof belonging to Chowk or of coming from ajoint family that did not own a car or a house,and the most sophisticated members of whichcould only speak broken English. I searched forwords and points of connection as I traversedback and forth on cycle rickshaws betweenChowk and La Martiniere. For the next nineyears, I struggled to muster the tools to trans-late the pieces from one world of my child-hood and early teenage to another.

My latter years in La Martiniere were notas difficult as the initial ones, however – partlybecause my sister and I had co-devised severalsurvival strategies; partly because I startedfinding solace in Hindi creative writing; and

partly because I had earned a reputation as aso-called pundit of things non-English. It wastoward the end of the La Martiniere days thatI also discovered Ms McClure. Raised inBurma, Ms McClure disapproved of twothings: her husband’s cigarettes, and girls who‘stitched like mochis’2 (shoemakers) in hersewing class.But she loved stories by RudyardKipling and geography textbooks by GohCheng Leong. Even with her weakness formonsoon-Asia-type regional geography, MsMcClure effectively communicated to us thateverything in our world happens in space andplace, and one cannot ever escape geography!Although Ms McClure never said it in somany words, somehow her adoration ofgeography convinced me that it was possiblefor geographers to move between manyworlds without compromising their passionfor any of them. I think it was while listeningto one of Ms McClure’s lectures in 1983 thatI decided to become a geographer.Three yearslater, this decision was to become a secondbattle point in my household …

The Aborted Journey to Allahabad

The desire for geography led me to pursue myBA at Avadh College where I studied anthro-pology, geography and English literature;but at the masters level, geography was non-existent in Lucknow.No one in my entire clanhad ever heard of sending a daughter away tostudy something as inconspicuous as geo-graphy! A hundred relatives interrogated myfather: ‘Where will you find the means to puther in a hostel?’ If I had been selected for amedical or an engineering program, it wouldhave been worthwhile to beg or borrow, butthat was not the case: ‘What wonders will sheaccomplish with an MA in geography? Workfor the Geological Survey of India?’And then,there was the bigger question lurking behindthese minor anxieties:‘What if she does some-thing that disgraces the family?’

212ÿÿPEOPLE


In some ways, perhaps, my father sharedbits of all of these fears, but deep inside himhe also had faith in his children. He decidedthat since the Government of India had agreedto give me a merit scholarship of 150 rupeesper month to pursue higher studies, I shouldbe allowed to go Allahabad, four hours bytrain from Lucknow, to get my masters degreein geography.

But a year of intense student activism ledto the academic year 1986–7 being declared a‘zero session’ at the University of Allahabad.AsI devoured Bengali and Russian classics (intranslation) and waited in vain for classes tostart, my father convinced me that this wasa good time to develop my creative faculties.I worked for the Educational Television,received lessons in writing and directing chil-dren’s plays, transcribed life-history interviewswith theater activists, and reviewed Kathakdance performances for the local dailies. Hindiliterary writing continued to pull me as Ibegan to publish short stories and poems inmagazines such as Dharmyug and Sarika. I alsobecame the unofficial personal assistant of mygrandfather, who was then fighting glaucomaand diabetes. I took dictation as he narrated hislast novel, answered his mail, accompaniedhim to seminars in Lucknow and Delhi, andescorted him to Bombay when the well-known film maker Shyam Benegal invited himto discuss one of his novels for a film project.

The one-month trip to Bombay with mygrandfather impacted me deeply. It exposedme to a vibrant political and artistic atmo-sphere and to the excitement of being in a bigcity in a more ‘advanced’ part of the country;and it triggered in me a desire to movebeyond Uttar Pradesh. I decided againstgoing to Allahabad when studies resumedthere and applied instead to the Universitiesof Bombay and Poona.With student politicalactivity delaying the start of the academicyear in Bombay this time, I found myselfstarting a new life in the Savitribai PhuleHostel in Pune in August 1987.

From Pune to Minneapolis

The University of Poona was a subsidizedstate university and boasted one of India’sbest geography departments. Of the largenumber of students who came to pursuegeography at Poona, almost 80 per cent wereMarathi-speaking men from middle- tolower-class farming families in the adjoiningdistricts. Of the small minority who was edu-cated in the English medium, four students in1987–9 were from the Pune metropolitanregion, and two (including me) were fromthe capital cities of Manipur and UttarPradesh. The composition of our regional,class and educational backgrounds made thelinguistic medium of instruction an interestingchallenge for instructors and students alike.Nevertheless, the department managed to giveall its students a two-year immersion in all keysubfields: geomorphology, climatology, humangeography, economic geography, cartographyand research methods. Although everythingwe covered in these areas was dominatedby the work of British, US and German geo-graphers, the department did a good job ofintroducing us to geographers working inMaharashtra – Dikshit, Diddee, Sawant, andArunachalam.

Ironically, however, all this geographyremained untouched by larger political issuesthat had captured the imagination of studentson campus: the furor over Rushdie’s SatanicVerses and the murder of sati Roop Kanwar inRajasthan.Terms such as Marxism, feminism,political economy, imperialism or even colo-nialism never became part of our classroomdiscussions. Our training remained faithfullyentrenched within positivist, Malthusian, andneoclassical paradigms no matter what wechose to specialize in during our last semesterin the program. For me, all these sociopoliti-cal influences remained confined to the extra-curricular realm, and I did not imagine thatthey could ever become part of geography –until I came to the University of Minnesota.

LOCAL AND GLOBALÿÿ213


Minnesota was the most unbelievableaccident of my life. Three factors facilitatedthis accident. First, Jayamala Diddee urged meto contact Joseph Schwartzberg because hehad authored An Historical Atlas of South Asia.Second, my resourceful roommate in the hos-tel decided to take the TOEFL and GRE soshe could apply to electronic engineering pro-grams in California.Third, I did not look forMinnesota on the world map until after I gota MacArthur fellowship to study geographythere!

From Minneapolis to Dar es Salaam

The trip from Delhi to Minneapolis on31 August 1989 was the most difficult tripI have ever taken anywhere.The joint house-hold had split; my family had been in thegrip of some serious illnesses and economichardships; and my presence was needed inLucknow. Although I received nothing butcomplete support for my decision to go to theUS, the circumstances in which I left made mefeel guilty and fearful.

But exciting things were in store for me!The MacArthur program had just begun togenerate tremendous opportunities as a com-munity of international and US students cametogether with a dynamic group of left-leaningfaculty at Minnesota to create new interdisci-plinary agendas in a post-1989 world. I wasparticularly drawn to the conversations hap-pening among the African studies scholars inthe MacArthur program, as well as the ener-getic discussions on oral histories, personalnarratives and popular memory that had ani-mated the work of a large group of feministscholars at Minnesota.At the same time, post-colonial approaches had started stirring excit-ing critical conversations about feminisms andthe projects of ethnography.

The energy created by the MacArthurprogram was nourished by the GeographyDepartment which encouraged me to grow

theoretically and methodologically in thedirections that were drawing me, and I decidedto focus my doctoral research on the SouthAsian communities in postcolonial Tanzania,under the support and advice of six inspiringmentors. Philip Porter and Susan Geiger, myco-advisers, taught me the importance oftelling stories in academia – without losing asense of responsibility and commitment eitherto the people I was studying, or to the issues Iwished to confront and struggle for. EricSheppard and Helga Leitner exposed me to themost exciting ideas in social and economicgeography and cultivated the spaces wheretheir students could come together to expandtheir own – as well as geography’s – horizons.Ron Aminzade and Prabhakara Jha made meattentive to temporality and postcoloniality,and showed me what interdisciplinarity was allabout.

After having immersed in the race politicsof the US and developing a strong identity asa woman of color, confronting the racializedrealities of East Africa in a physical way wasjarring. As a woman from India who hadarrived in Dar es Salaam (Dar) via the USAand who didn’t easily fit the stereotypicalcategory of a local muhindi (‘Asian’), I wassometimes treated as an honorary mzungu(‘European’). But soon I found myself nego-tiating and actively exploring other layers ofpolitics as well – class, caste, religion, language,neighborhoods, as well as those of sexualpractices and privileges – in a Tanzania thatwas shifting from being Nyerere’s dream to athoroughly liberalized multiparty democracy.The worlds that I had moved between – fromChowk and La Martiniere to Poona andMinneapolis, as well as my ancestral links tothe Gujarati language – gave me the tools andpassion to analyze the complexities of gender,race and community in the everyday spacesand identities of South Asian immigrants inDar. And all this happened right as the BabriMasjid was being razed in Ayodhya near tomy hometown, and the effects of BJP’s rise

214ÿÿPEOPLE


in India could be felt as strongly amongthe upper caste Hindus in Dar as AyatollahKhomeini’s preachings could be heard in theKhoja Shia Ithnasheri Jamaat.All these inter-woven processes became the subject matter ofmy dissertation, as well as a string of nine art-icles and book chapters that followed between1995 and 2000.

From Geography to Women’s Studies

In 1995, I started my first teaching job at theDepartment of Geography in Boulder,Colorado. To put it in Minnesota English,Boulder was different! And I do not meansimply its physical geography. Both inter-disciplinarity and engagement with trans-national politics were difficult to carry out atColorado, especially in the face of the overthostility that was frequently expressed againstfaculty who happened to have a combinationof specific traits (relatively young, radicalwomen of color who mentioned US imperi-alism in their undergraduate lectures, forexample). However, I did find wonderful col-leagues to learn from and grow with. DonMitchell, Lynn Staeheli, Tony Bebbingtonand Tom Perreault in geography and MichikoHase, Kamala Kempadoo and Alison Jaggar inwomen’s studies, in particular, gave susten-ance to mind and soul. David Barsamian ofAlternative Radio became a source of politi-cal nourishment while Amy Goodman didsome of that work through the radio wavesevery morning.

But the massive shift in institutional cul-ture and context that Boulder brought intomy life sparked questions that went beyondBoulder. As I moved from being an adopted‘daughter’ of Dar to becoming an assistantprofessor at Colorado, I found myself caughtbetween intellectual, political and personalcommitments I had made to communities inthree continents. In strategic terms, I learnedto respond to the administration’s message of

‘publish or perish’. But I was deeply troubledby the realization that the only things thatcounted were those that could be discussed orconsumed within western academic circles.There was hardly any institutional space toact on my sense of accountability to thepeople and issues I had studied in Dar. Anyefforts to make my work ‘travel’ beyond theAnglophone academy in ways that couldbecome meaningful to people that mattered inDar or Delhi were deemed extracurricular –in the same way that politics surroundingRoop Kanwar and Rushdie became extra-curricular in Poona.

My work in Tanzania also made me awareof other difficulties pertaining to the ques-tion of relevance in scholarly knowledge pro-duction. In challenging the dominant imageof all Tanzanian Asians as exploitative maletraders, I highlighted the narratives of peoplefrom varied caste, class, religious, sectarianand linguistic locations. In highlighting therelationality of identity, space and power,I focused as much on the lives of cab drivers,sex workers, and ‘racially mixed’ people (whowere both accepted and shunned by the‘pure’ Asians) as on the prosperous mer-chants, professionals, and community leaders.However, the sociopolitical power wieldedby affluent Asians in Tanzania – combinedwith my position as a non-Tanzanian – meantthat I could not share the critiques of com-munal organizations and leaders articulatedby Asians who were relegated to the margins,without risking the latter’s social lives or liveli-hoods. While my work could have provedhelpful for those interested in fostering pro-gressive interracial alliances in Tanzania, thisfear of backlash by community leaders pre-vented me from publishing a book on myresearch. An ethnographic focus on the prac-tices of the elite, however exciting theoreticallyor empirically, seriously limited the spacesavailable to me for producing knowledges thatcould advance progressive politics in Tanzania‘on the ground’.



Struggling with these questions made itnecessary for me to ask why I wanted to be inthe US academy, and what kind of academicwork I wanted to do. Conversations withSaraswati Raju and Satish Kumar in Delhi, aswell as a project with David Faust that focusedon discursive and material divides produced byEnglish medium education in postcolonialIndia, added new layers of complexity to thisstruggle.As I tried to work through these lay-ers, I became frustrated with the limitationsposed by narrow conceptualizations of reflex-ivity in critical scholarship, that rarely addressedhow to generate conversations (and produceknowledges) that could move across the bor-ders of the academy, classes and continents.Incidentally, Susan Geiger, who was finishingher book TANU Women, was also becomingdisillusioned with popular approaches toreflexivity.Together, our mounting dissatisfac-tion created fertile ground to sow the seeds ofa collaborative project, entitled ‘Reflexivity,positionality and identity in feminist fieldwork:beyond the impasse’.

And somewhere in the middle of all thesesearches, I decided to shift my institutionalhome to women’s studies – a ‘field’ whereI felt I could blend commitments, genres,and theories in a more undisciplined way.Through a mix of exciting developments, Ifound myself returning to Minnesota in fall1997 to make a new beginning in women’sstudies.

From Mujhe Jawab Do to Playingwith Fire

Susan Geiger’s untimely death in 2001 cruellyinterrupted our collaboration. But theleukemia that destroyed Susan’s body couldnot kill the quest that our collaboration hadinspired: a quest to create new forms ofaccountability in feminist knowledge produc-tion, not only through a self-reflexivity about

how ‘researchers’ are always inserted in politicsof identities and categories, but also througha serious interrogation of how our institu-tional and geopolitical positions contribute torendering our work relevant – or irrelevant –across the boundaries of the northern academy(wherever that north might be geographicallylocated). For me, this quest – combined withprior associations with feminist activists inIndia – translated into a process of imaginingnew collaborations with non-governmentalorganization (NGO) workers and activists inUttar Pradesh.

The process began with Mujhe Jawab Do, astudy of a rural women’s street theater cam-paign against domestic violence in ChitrakootDistrict.This work shared the ongoing com-mitment of postcolonial feminists to destabi-lize ethnographic practices that perpetuate theidea that it is only ‘women’ who live in theThird World – not the institutions or subjectsof feminism. But as I faced the reality of howNGOs and donor-driven visions of empower-ment were deradicalizing grassroots femi-nisms, it became clear to me that any effectiveintervention in transnational politics of know-ledge production would have to be accompa-nied by a reshaping of dominant intellectualpractices. It would require – among otherthings – collaborative agendas created withgrassroots activists, to concretely grapple withthe forms and languages in which new know-ledges ought to be produced, and the waysin which those knowledges can be shared,critiqued, used and revised across multiplesociopolitical, institutional and geographicalborders. These concerns found expression inan ongoing journey with eight NGO activistsin Sitapur District, that resulted first in thecreation of a book in Hindi called SangtinYatra, and then its English version, Playing withFire.

The Hindi book has faced a warmwelcome as well as a backlash, and bothhave advanced the authors’ struggle against

216ÿÿPEOPLE


depoliticization propagated by donor-drivenprograms that seek to ‘empower’ ruralwomen in the global south. As we awaitreaders’ responses to Playing with Fire, mycollaborators and I remain convinced that itis only through more collective journeys acrossborders that we can create new intellectual andpolitical possibilities to grow and flourish onour own terms, in our own spaces, and in ourown languages.

NOTES1 On the one hand, the terms bhangi and mochi

reinforce categories created by practices ofuntouchability. On the other hand, these termsspecify (rather than hide) the continuingdegradation and dehumanization to whichmembers of these caste groups are subjected.I use these labels here to mark this specificity.

2 See note 1.



MOVEMENT AND ENCOUNTER

Lawrence Knopp

Introduction

My ideas and work have been shaped by avariety of forces and circumstances, includingvarious personal experiences, engagementswith the ideas and works of others, and travelsthrough space and time. Of course these arenot separable, and I have discussed elsewheretheir unity in terms of a wide variety ofthemes, crosscurrents, tensions, and transfor-mations (Knopp, 2000).These have character-ized and continue to characterize my ongoingprocess of becoming as a geographer, a gay man,a radical, and an activist (among other things).

For purposes of this chapter I focus morenarrowly on the significance of one particu-lar lens through which these processes canbe considered: the experience of movement.Being in motion is of course part of what itmeans to be embodied and human. But itis constructed and experienced differentlyby different bodies and consciousnesses.For many moderns, especially queer mod-erns, movements of stunningly diverse types,quantities, and scales are particularly acuteand common experiences. Our bodies, con-sciousnesses, and creations circulate throughspace as agents and artifacts of production,consumption and meaning-making.

This experience of hypermobility hascertainly shaped my own thinking and workas a geographer, and as an increasingly impor-tant feature of (post?)modernity it deservesscrutiny in terms of its broader impact ongeographic thought1. In this chapter, then, I

discuss both of these through a considerationof how my own and other queers’movementshave impacted geographers’ thinking aboutspatial ontologies, most notably ontologies ofplace, placelessness, and movement.

I locate my discussion within the broadercontext of contemporary crises in socialscience and geography, which I believe tobe part and parcel of broader crises of con-temporary society2. I focus on spatial ontolo-gies (rather than, say, epistemologies ormethodologies) because I believe that episte-mological and methodological issues havegenerally received more attention in this cur-rent crisis than ontological ones (the mainexception being debates about essentialism,particularly in the context of questions ofidentity vs subjectivity3).

I focus as well on a particular kind ofmovement – what I call quests for identity –that I regard as being crucial to my ownprocess of becoming as well as, I suspect, thatof many other queer (post)moderns (and,indeed, many moderns generally, queer orotherwise). By ‘quests for identity’ I meanpersonal journeys through space and time –material, psychic, and at a variety of scales –that are constructed internally as being aboutthe search for an integrated wholeness as indi-vidual humans living in community (if notsociety).What this amounts to, in my mind, isa search for emotional and ontological secur-ity. It is an effort to create order out of thechaos that is fractured identity combined withoppressive structures of power. While there

20


may not be a lot that is new about thisphenomenon in general terms, I do believethat in the current historical moment (inwestern individualist cultures, anyway) it takesa particular form. This is the creation andtransformation of what sociologists call ‘com-munities of limited liability’ 4 (Janowitz, 1952)into collective identities that demand a placeat the table in some kind of a liberal ima-gination. For gay men, as for other oppressedgroups, this means seeking people, places, rela-tionships, and ways of being that provide thephysical and emotional security, the wholenessas individuals and as collectivities, and the soli-darity that are denied us in a heterosexist world.

Gay Men’s Journeys: Quixotic Quests?

My personal story, like that of many gay men,features very material geographical quests foridentity in the sense that I have described.Indeed, the basic contours of this experienceare common to many sex/gender ‘outlaws’and indeed to members of any group whostruggle with stigmatization based on somekind of very strong psychosocial experienceor desire that is culturally pathologized (e.g.gender ‘dysphoria’).

One of the most obvious manifestationsof this was my distancing from family andcommunity of origin in order to ‘come out’.That this is extremely common for gay menis well documented in the gay studies litera-ture (Leap, 1995; Miller, 1989; White, 1982).Story after story features people who areeither rejected by or voluntarily disavow theirroots and then move in order to ‘find them-selves’. Frequently this entails traveling greatphysical distances over long periods of time,and it is common not only for gay men fromunsupportive families and communities but,interestingly, for those from supportive ones aswell.This was certainly the case for me.WhileI had come out in a formal sense to very sup-portive family and friends several years before

moving away from them, and while severalkey formative experiences as a gay man tookplace in the burgeoning and generally well-supported gay community of my hometownurban environment in Seattle, Washington,I did not feel free of what nonetheless felt likethe oppressive gaze of my family and home-town until I actually left Seattle.The unlikelyenvirons of a small college town in Iowaafforded me the freedoms and opportunitiesto explore what being a gay man would meanto me. Ironically, this milieu – quintessentiallymiddle American and conservative in a gen-eral sense, but mediated by an atypical liberalacademic culture – showed me, in a way thatthe protective cocoon of family and commu-nity of origin could not, that the price ofbeing openly gay in US society did not haveto include the loss of certain privileges associ-ated with social status, gender and class.Indeed it taught me that some of these privi-leges – most notably male privilege – canactually trump homophobia and hetero-sexism in some situations, and challenged mewith disturbing ethical dilemmas in theprocess (see Knopp, 1999 for a more detaileddiscussion).

That and subsequent experiences in avariety of places have convinced me that formany – perhaps even most – gay men, com-ing out is about much more than just findingand/or creating new families, new relation-ships, new communities, and new placeswherein certain counterhegemonic normsprevail, and self-actualization is perceived aspossible. It is also about testing, exploring, andexperimenting with alternative ways of beingin contexts that are unencumbered by theexpectations of tight-knit family, kinship, orcommunity relationships – no matter how‘accepting’ these might be perceived to be. InNew Orleans, for example, where I lived andconducted fieldwork for my PhD dissertationwhen I was 30 years old, I was challenged bymembership and participation in a gay com-munity whose racism was generally quite

MOVEMENT AND ENCOUNTERÿÿ219


unabashed, and that worked automatically tomy advantage as a white man. In the process,my eyes were opened to the more subtle waysin which I had benefited from white skinprivilege in both the gay and broader com-munities of supposedly more ‘liberal’ Seattleand Iowa City. This helped me to recognizesimilar processes – having to do not just withrace but also with class – when I moved toanother self-consciously ‘liberal’, predomi-nantly white, and predominantly working-class place (Duluth, Minnesota), where I havelived and worked since.

It should come as no surprise, given thedrive for many gay men to flee oppressive fam-ilies and communities of origin, that rural tourban migrations of gay men are common(Grebinoski, 1993; Fellows, 1996). But so, myexperience suggests, are migrations down anurban hierarchy (my own is a case in point), aswell as international, interregional and intra-urban migrations and movements,and a generalembracing of cosmopolitanism (Bech, 1997).This is because movement and changes ofenvironment in and of themselves can be everybit as important for gay men (and others)engaged in identity quests as the particularcharacteristics of their origins and destinations.

Clearly these sorts of mobility practices arecommon for many people in contemporaryindividualistic societies and cultures, especiallythose with the means to be physically mobile,such as those with class, race, and/or genderprivilege. Such privilege has certainly been afeature of my own story. But these practices’connections to a rather urgent perceived needto reinvent the self shine through particularlystrongly in many, many accounts of gay men’slives, not just those of the privileged (see forexample Northwest Lesbian and Gay HistoryMuseum Project, 2002).

At the same time, my experience andthat of many others reveals gay men’s ratherfraught relationships to the new places theyencounter and create, and a nostalgia, at times,for the places left behind. A persistent

disappointment with every new environmentI have encountered (and/or attempted tocreate) has led me to re-engage on new termswith past places from which I became alien-ated.This reflects the entirely predictable fail-ure of a plainly utopian imagination that is atthe heart of any quest of this nature.While lifemay be better as a result of these movements,it sometimes is not, and in any event there isno escape from the dominant culture of sexand gender to which we all belong and fromwhich we almost all spring. Will Fellows(1996) illustrates this ambivalence particularlywell in his compilation of first-person storiesby mostly expatriate ‘farm boys’: the vastmajority of his narrators no longer live onfarms or in rural areas but express a sense ofloss about this, along with a sense of at leastpartial alienation from their (chosen) newenvironments. Frank Browning (1996) cap-tures a similar fraught relationship to place inhis very personal account of his own jour-neys, as well as those of others, in his bookA Queer Geography. In my own case, a midlifenostalgia for my urban gay origins, and a con-tinuing ambivalent relationship to my adopted‘home’ in Minnesota, have led to the construc-tion of a ‘two home’ solution in which travelbetween them is every bit as crucial to mysense of self as simply being in one or theother (see Knopp and Brown, 2003, for afuller explanation).

It is this attachment to movement that Ifind particularly interesting, along with a cor-responding ambivalent relationship to bothplacement and identity. I and many gay menfind the quest itself to be a source of consider-able pleasure (Bech, 1997). For many of us(certainly for me), it becomes a source ofontological and emotional security as well.And while this too has its disappointments, theidea of movement, flux, and flows as importantontological sites in and of themselves, for bothgay men and geographic thought, has beenunderappreciated and underdeveloped in theliteratures on both. The fact is that being

220ÿÿPEOPLE


simultaneously in and out of place, and seekingcomfort as well as pleasure in movement,displacement, and placelessness, are commonlysought after experiences for many people.

Ontologies of Place, Placelessness,and Movement

So how have these experiences shaped myideas and work, and what are the implicationsfor geographic thought more broadly? I focushere on three issues that have occupied vary-ing amounts of my and other geographers’attention: place, placelessness, and movement (inparticular, diffusion). I have worked with thefirst primarily in the context of place-basedgay and lesbian politics and social movements(though I have also explored issues of place asthey relate to nationalisms and nation-buildingprojects; cf. Knopp, 1990; 1995a; and Knopp,1997;1998).The third I have begun to explorein the context of how gay male bodies, cul-tures, and politics circulate between metro-politan and non-metropolitan environments(Knopp and Brown, 2003). But the secondI have only recently begun to think about.Allthree, however, have been conceived in multi-ple ways by different kinds of scholars repre-senting various philosophical, epistemologicaland ontological commitments.

From my perspective, the identity questexperience makes very problematic almost allexisting ontologies of place, placelessness, andmovement, but particularly those that havetheir origins in some kind of modernistand/or structuralist thought. Such thought isalmost by definition grounded in all sorts ofbinaries and essentialisms (e.g. ‘gay’, ‘straight’,‘man’, woman’, ‘public’, ‘private’, ‘inside’,‘outside’). Yet my and others’ identity questexperiences demonstrate quite clearly thathuman subjectivities are multiple, fluid, andfractured. Like Heisenberg’s subatomic parti-cles, they refuse to be pinned down, much lessto have order imposed upon them.A new and

radical anti-identity politics of hybridity andfluidity, variously termed diasporic, postcolo-nial, postfeminist, and ‘queer’ (among otherappellations), speaks against these modernistand structuralist essentialisms in a way I findquite compelling. But as I have also expressedelsewhere, denying the materiality and materialconsequences of essentialisms also has its dan-gers (Knopp, 1995b). So for me some kind ofpostmodern or poststructuralist ontologicalperspective with clear ethical and politicalgroundings offers the best hope for accom-modating this experience. But what mightthis be? Clearly diasporic notions of identitysuch as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993)can help, but these kinds of postcolonialefforts seem much more interested in theontological significance of movement as itpertains to identity than in the ontology ofmovement itself. Nigel Thrift’s (1998) non-representational theory, with its notion of‘weak ontology’, by contrast, along with cer-tain aspects of actor-network theory (Serresand Latour, 1995), are particularly intriguinghere. Let me explain.

Gregory (2000) argues, and I think Iagree, that both traditional scientific and moreexistential and phenomenological approachesto ontology are to a substantial degree ‘foun-dationalist’. By this Gregory seems to meanthat they are grounded in fairly absolutistnotions of ‘truth’, or at least of what is.Thatwhich is is that which can be shown to exist,and the evidence of existence is usually takento be some kind of causal efficacy.This is eas-ily seen in the case of traditionally scientificapproaches, such as positivism, realism, andidealism, since they define themselves quitestraightforwardly in terms of their searches forand isolation of what are taken to be realcausal agents.Thus ‘place’, for example, is con-ceived as a real, usually material entity pos-sessing causal powers, and its ontologicalstatus is confirmed through the detection ofits effects.This detection can be either direct(e.g. ‘the neighborhood effect’ of positivist



social science) or indirect (e.g. through theory,contemplation, and reflection, as in transcen-dental realism). In phenomenological andexistential approaches, however, place is seenin both material and more metaphysicalterms, and in relation to a broader range ofparticularly human experiences. Pickles(1985), for example, argues for a ‘place-centredontology of human spatiality’, which hedescribes as the discursive and existentialparameters within which knowledge is cre-ated. In this sense place becomes a fundamen-tal condition of human existence, albeit onethat is potentially flexible and reinventable.While there is much more room, therefore,for place to take on multiple and fluid char-acteristics in this approach, Pickles’ ontologyis still characterized by Gregory as foundationalin the sense that it is seen as a fundamentalframe of reference or causal force in humanlife, albeit one that is shaped and reshaped in arecursive relationship with human agency.

Non-representational and actor-networktheory, by contrast, question this distinctionbetween human agency and place as toosteeped in an ontology of representation.Rather than focusing on abstraction and inter-pretation,Thrift (1996) in particular advocateswhat he calls a ‘weak ontology’ that focuses onlived experiences and unmediated social prac-tices. Place, then, becomes a conjunction oftime- and space-specific material practices,only minimally mediated (if at all) by processesof representation such as abstraction and inter-pretation. What is intriguing about this for-mulation is its (inherently spatial) ontology of‘fluid encounters, juxtapositions and diver-gences’ (Gregory, 2000: 564), as well as its cri-tique of elitist representational practices, andits insistence on engagement in the processesbeing examined by those doing the examin-ing. All of this resonates quite instinctivelywith my own (and, I am quite sure, other gaymen’s) identity quests.We are actively engagedin a process of personal reinvention whichintrinsically entails examination of ourselves

and our surroundings. Hence our ambivalentrelationships to place and identity, and ouraffection for placelessness and movement.

While I am more than a little skepticalabout what it might mean for the practices ofself-aware beings to be unmediated, I takeThrift’s points about how important it is forpractice to be at the heart of any spatial onto-logy (or at least of ontologies of place andmovement). I also appreciate actor-networktheory’s broadening of this notion of practiceto include the ‘agency’ generated by net-works that include non-human ‘mediariesand intermediaries’ such as ‘nature’ and ‘envi-ronment’ (Thrift, 2000). And both critiquethe inherent elitism of representational acts,while celebrating the political and ethicalvalue of direct engagement. An ontology ofplace that embraces embodied performativity(Butler, 1990) as every bit as much at theheart of the matter as any rhetorical or otherrepresentational articulation, then, seems tome to capture many aspects of how identityquests are actually experienced, as well as ofwhat they mean.

Existing ontologies of placelessness areeven less well equipped to deal with the iden-tity quest experience. Geographers havelargely conceived of placelessness as place’sopposite, which is to say as an absence or alack rather than as an embodied experienceor practice that is anything or provides any-thing positive.But if placelessness is conceivedas something active, something practiced, oras an embodied form of human agency, itbecomes much more recognizable to gay menand others struggling with issues of identity.Whether because of its perceived homogen-eity, its allegedly transitory character, theanonymity it supposedly provides, or its cos-mopolitanism, the experience and practice ofplacelessness can dispense enormous amountsof both pleasure and emotional/ontologicalsecurity to those of us in such circum-stances, particularly if we are marginalized oroppressed. Thrift’s ‘weak ontology’, then,

222ÿÿPEOPLE


despite its own obvious contradictions (e.g. itsanti-representational representations), againoffers a way of conceiving of placelessness aspractice that is very resonant with the identityquest experience. The same can be said ofactor-network theory’s rhizomatic analogies,in which linkages and traffic through net-works constitute fluid and elusive topologiesof meaning.

Closely related to placelessness, in mymind, is movement.Yet the two are not iden-tical. If placelessness is a set of practices thatdispense particular meanings, movement is amuch broader set of practices producing aneven wider set of meanings. In geography, thestudy of movement includes all kinds of spatialactivity and interaction at a variety of scales,from the body to the globe. So my commentshere focus on just one form of movement thathas preoccupied geographers for a long time:diffusion. Most ‘scientific’ ontologies of diffu-sion focus, I would argue, on origins, destina-tions, patterns, pathways, vectors and flows,and see these primarily as static bearers andcarriers of objects and information (e.g.Hägerstrand, 1967).The pathways, vectors andflows in particular aren’t seen as having quitethe same ontological significance as the placesand sites that they connect. Moreover they arerarely seen as complexes of social practiceentailing complicated sets of power and othersocial relations.They are evaluated still less interms of what it is that they generate onto-logically themselves. Some more phenomeno-logical and postmodern approaches probablydo allow the possibility of these pathways, vec-tors and flows having the ontological status ofsites (perhaps Rose’s 1993 critique of timegeography can be seen this way), and they mayeven be conceived in terms of social practices(Blaut, 1987; 1992). But these critical perspec-tives on diffusion have so far done little aroundthe idea that these movements may, throughtheir contingency, fluidity, and incomplete-ness, constitute practices of reflection andreinvention that are as ontologically significant

themselves as the sites they connect, thephenomena they bear, or their physicaldescriptions and trajectories. In other words,the journeys themselves, as human engage-ments, are generative of all kinds of importantemotional and ontological ‘stuff ’. And it maybe their perceived placelessness itself, as well astheir contingency, fluidity, and incomplete-ness, that is at the heart of this.

Conclusion

Quests for identity such as my own, then,offer several interesting avenues for reconsid-ering our ontologies of place, placelessnessand movement. We can think about theseconcepts as fluid and ‘under construction’projects of becoming, sets of spatial practicethat dispense pleasure, security, and empower-ment, and not just as origins, destinations,bearers, carriers, lacks, or hegemonic discur-sive frames of reference. Such conceptualiza-tions have the potential advantages ofminimizing the elitism of abstract representa-tion, of honoring the messiness and indeter-minacy of human experience, and by focusingon minimally mediated practices – especiallycritical examinations of self and surroundings –of forcing political and ethical engagement.Naturally there are no guarantees that suchengagements will be to our liking, but at leastthey will be made. And for a discipline thathas postured in so many ways and for so longas apolitical, that is something.

NOTESAn expanded version of this chapter appeared inGender, Place and Culture, 11: 121–34, under thetitle ‘Ontologies of place, placelessness and move-ment: The effects of quests for identity on con-temporary geographic thought’.1 I do not wish to enter here into a discussion

of how to characterize the current histori-cal moment in terms of ‘modernity’ or



‘postmodernity’. I do, however, wish toacknowledge that one of the many contradic-tions of the current moment is that this hyper-mobility itself is unevenly experienced. Capitaland commodities circulate much more freelyand widely than do most humans, while thehumans who experience it are disproportion-ately drawn from privileged castes, classes, andstatus groups (including those defined by ‘race’and ‘gender’).

2 The crises to which I refer include everythingfrom the so-called ‘crisis of representation’

(Barnett, 1997; Duncan and Ley, 1993; Duncanand Sharp, 1993) to struggles over the ‘souls’ ofscience and of geography and to contradic-tions in global capitalism.

3 Compare, for example, Spivak (1990; 1993),Butler (1990), Fuss (1989), Kobayashi and Peake(1994),Gibson-Graham (1996), and Pile (1996).

4 Communities of limited liability are looseaffiliations of people that emerge out of rela-tively narrow sets of common interest and thatserve primarily as instruments of individualself-actualization.

224ÿÿPEOPLE

ReferencesBarnett, C. (1997) ‘Sing along with the common people: politics, postcolonialism and

other figures’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15: 137–54.Bech, H. (1997) When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity. Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press.Blaut, J. (1987) ‘Diffusionism: a uniformitarian critique’, Annals of the Association of

American Geographers, 77: 30–47.Blunt, J. (1992) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and

Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford.Browning, F. (1996) A Queer Geography: Journeys toward a Sexual Self. New York:

Crown.Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1993) Place/Culture/Representation. New York: Routledge.Duncan, J. and Sharp, J. (1993) ‘Confronting representation(s)’, Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space, 11: 473–86.Fellows, W. (1996) Farmboys: The Lives of Gay Men in the Rural Midwest. Madison, WI:

University of Wisconsin Press.Fuss, D. (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York:

Routledge.Gibson-Graham, J.-K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Oxford: Blackwell.Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.Grebinoski, J. (1993) ‘Out north: gays and lesbians in the Duluth, Minnesota–Superior,

Wisconsin area’, presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of AmericanGeographers, Atlanta, April.

Gregory, D. (2000) ‘Ontology’, in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and M. Watts (eds),The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edn. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 561–4.

Hägerstrand, T. (1967) Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process. Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press.

Janowitz, M. (1952) The Community Press in an Urban Setting. Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press.

Knopp, L. (1990) ‘Some theoretical implications of gay involvement in an urban landmarket’, Political Geography Quarterly, 9: 337–52.


Knopp, L. (1995a) ‘Sexuality and urban space: a framework for analysis’, in D. Bell andG. Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–61.

Knopp, L. (1995b) ‘If you’re going to get all hyped up, you’d better go somewhere!’,Gender, Place and Culture, 2: 85–8.

Knopp, L. (1997) ‘Rings, circles and perverted justice: gay judges and moral panic incontemporary Scotland’, in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds), Geographies of Resistance.New York: Routledge, pp. 168–83.

Knopp, L. (1998) ‘Sexuality and urban space: gay male identities, communities andcultures in the U.S., U.K. and Australia’, in R. Fincher and J. Jacobs (eds), Cities ofDifference. New York: Guilford, pp. 149–76.

Knopp, L. (1999) ‘Out in academia: the queer politics of one geographer’s sexualization’,Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 23: 116–23.

Knopp, L. (2000) ‘A queer journey to queer geography’, in P. Moss (ed.), PlacingAutobiography in Geography. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 78–98.

Knopp, L. and Brown, M. (2003) ‘Queer diffusions’, Environment and Planning D: Societyand Space, 21: 409–24.

Kobayashi, A. and Peake, L. (1994) ‘Unnatural discourse: “race” and gender in geo-graphy’, Gender, Place and Culture, 1: 225–43.

Leap, W. (1995) Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination, andAppropriation in Lesbian and Gay Languages. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach.

Miller, N. (1989) In Search of Gay America: Women and Men in a Time of Change.New York: Atlantic Monthly.

Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project (2002) ‘Life stories: from isolation tocommunity’, Mosaic 1. Seattle: Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project.

Pickles, J. (1985) Phenomenology, Science and Geography: Spatiality and the HumanSciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pile, S. (1996) The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. New York:Routledge.

Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Serres, M. and Latour, B (1995) Conversations on Science, Culture, Time. Ann Arbor, MI:University of Michigan Press.

Spivak, G. (1990) The Post-Colonial Critics: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London:Routledge.

Spivak, G. (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge.Thrift, N. (1996) Spatial Formations. London: Sage.Thrift, N. (1998) ‘Steps to an ecology of place’, in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds),

Human Geography Today. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 295–322.Thrift, N. (2000) ‘Actor-network theory’, in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and

M.Watts (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edn. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 4–5.White, E. (1982) A Boy’s Own Story. New York: Dutton.



SPACES AND FLOWS

Janice Monk

Searching for a geographic metaphor thatwould capture four decades of research, writ-ing, and professional engagement in geography,I settled on ‘braided streams’.This fluvial formis characterized by divergent and convergentchannels, mostly occurring ‘where there arealmost no lateral confining banks’ (Fairbridge,1968:90).1Two channels account for the great-est volume of my work – feminist studies andgeographic education, primarily as it is relatedto higher education, though the two oftenintersect. But others are evident and also over-lap with these, including research related toracial/ethnic minorities in white dominantsocieties and on change in rural communities.

Reflecting movements and encounters inmy life course, I have been stimulated to writeabout Australia, the Caribbean, the EuropeanUnion, the southwestern United States, andthe United States–Mexico border region.My writing in English has been publishedin Australia, Britain, Canada, the Caribbean,New Zealand, and the United States andappeared in Catalan, Chinese, German,Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.2 I have con-ducted field surveys and observations, archivalresearch, oral histories, and textual interpreta-tions. Editorial commitments have also been amajor part of my work. Professional connec-tions and related friendships have led to short-term appointments and periods as a visitingscholar or consultant in Australia, Canada,India, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand,Spain, and Switzerland. I have held appoint-ments in departments of geography and in an

interdisciplinary institute in women’s studiesand been very active in professional organiza-tions. Across these various sites of endeavor, Isee convergences and continuities in my moti-vations including a consistent concern withsocial equity, with action as well as research,and with responsiveness to the people andplaces with which I have been associated.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, workingwithin and to change institutions, and valuinginternational ties are pervasive in my practice.Others may not see my work as I portray ithere and I hope my comments do not appeartoo self-serving.This account is from the per-spective of hindsight and also from one thatreflects ideals that I might not have been ableto articulate at the time work was under-taken.To a considerable extent, the directionsemerged, rather than being planned.

Places, People, and Ways of Knowing

I have often looked to other disciplines, whileretaining a deeply rooted geographical com-mitment to recognizing the importance andspecificities of place.3 My doctoral disserta-tion on differences among Aboriginal com-munities in New South Wales exemplifies thisposition (Monk, 1974). When I approachedthis topic in the mid 1960s, the boundariesof Australian geography largely excludedAborigines. Interest was increasingly focusedon testing spatial theories developed else-where. Neither was there much international

21


interest in geography in minority populationsor questions of ‘race’. My choice arose frompersonal experience, not from the literature.Shortly after earning my BA I had worked asa volunteer constructing homes for Aboriginalfamilies in a small town in New South Wales.The project was organized by a church group,with young white men and women (mostlyrecent graduates and professionals) providinglabor, and the state government paying formaterials as part of its policy to ‘assimilate’Aborigines by moving them into town fromreserves on the fringes of white communities.The project raised many questions for me,both ethical and geographical. Almost adecade later, formulating a research topic as agraduate student in the United States duringthe era of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement,I turned to questions of social and economicrelations between Aboriginal and white com-munities in New South Wales.

Seeking insights, I looked beyond geo-graphy to the obvious site of Australian anthro-pology, but it did not offer work that spoketo my geographical sensibilities. Drawingon traditions of British social anthropology,it presented participant-observational studiesof single communities, and interpreted themin relation to the persistence of ‘traditional’cultural ways or in terms of the psychology oftheir being closed, institutional communities.I found more useful the ideas of some anthro-pologists and sociologists in the United Stateswho brought ecological and material perspec-tives to the study of cultural change and ofrace relations. While planning my research Iencountered Charles Rowley, a political scien-tist directing a large-scale project on the his-tory and current conditions of Aborigines forthe Social Science Research Council ofAustralia (Rowley, 1970a; 1970b; 1970c); thesestudies were associated with subsequent majorchanges in national policies. He was sym-pathetic to my interests in material relations,and ultimately incorporated my work in hisbook Outcasts in White Australia.

My dissertation illustrates movementoutside the channels that were common ingeography at the time, while representing onethat has persisted in my work – drawing onpersonal experience to prompt examinationof links between public policies and individ-uals’ experiences of them.Another example ismy study of the residential patterns and socialnetworks of Asian professional immigrants toSydney in the 1970s (Monk, 1983), again at atime when the discipline was not especiallyaddressing issues of race and immigration.Thechoice undoubtedly reflected the confluenceof my experiences of growing up in a societywhere the ‘White Australia’ policy was stillunder debate, where a relatively homo-geneous Anglo-Celtic majority populationwas beginning to change with the substantialinflux of immigrants of diverse national ori-gins, and my own situation of living as a for-eign student and immigrant junior facultymember in the multi-’racial’/ethnic society ofthe United States. My subsequent work inthe Caribbean was initiated when CharlesAlexander and I were assigned to teach asummer field class in Puerto Rico for theUniversity of Illinois. What we saw in thelandscape prompted us to ask questions aboutthe impact of changing development policieson rural communities. A physical geographerwho had earlier studied cultural historicalgeography on Margarita Island, Venezuela,he was open to collaboration and to multipleways of knowing.We integrated survey inter-view methods, of which I had experience, hisexpertise in making field observations, hisrusty and my beginning Spanish (Monk andAlexander, 1979; 1985). The Puerto Ricanresearch also yielded my first feminist writing,prompted by the strengthening women’smovement in society in the 1970s and itsimpact on academic work across disciplines.We studied the intersections of gender, class,and migration in Puerto Rico and later onMargarita Island (Monk, 1981; Monk andAlexander, 1986).

SPACES AND FLOWSÿÿ227


In the late 1970s, another set of encountersdirected my work into new channels, butones that were compatible with my earlierwork on people outside the centers of power.The feminist movement prompted scholars tosee more clearly how research and teachingreflected social, cultural, and political valuesand gender-based inequalities. For feministsin geography, this led to organizing papersessions, networking and support activitiesat conferences, developing new courses andteaching materials, and directing new researchto women’s and gender issues. Bonnie Loydand Arlene Rengert, learning of fundingopportunities under the Women’s EducationalEquity Act (WEEA) in the United States,approached me about collaborating to write aproposal to support the development andpilot testing of curriculum modules thatwould introduce feminist content into intro-ductory human geography courses. We sub-mitted a successful request under the auspicesof the Association of American Geographers,thus giving professional sanction and recogni-tion to feminist concerns. The result was abooklet of student and instructor materialstitled Women and Spatial Change (Rengert andMonk, 1982). Bonnie and Arlene also coordi-nated a special issue of the Journal of Geographyon ‘Women in Geographic Curricula’ towhich I contributed an analysis of genderbiases in the language and roles represented inpublished simulation games in the discipline(Monk, 1978a). These pieces were intendedboth to critique existing practices and toadvocate a more inclusive human geography.The same goals served as the impetus for apaper with Susan Hanson (Monk andHanson, 1982) that addressed gender biases inprevailing theories, methods and purposes ofgeographic research. Since that time, effortsdirected towards feminist-inspired curriculumchange have been a dominant stream in mywork, cutting across disciplines and embra-cing attention to minority groups and cross-cultural perspectives as well as having a

gender focus (e.g. Monk, 1988; 2000; Monket al., 2000; Lay et al., 2002).

Changing Institutions

In two senses, changing institutions has beena critical part of my professional work. Fromone perspective, my involvement in educa-tional projects has meant linking research andaction to attempt innovation in teaching inhigher education. From another, changing theplace of my employment from a geographydepartment to a regionally oriented institutein women’s studies has markedly influencedmy opportunities and obligations.

The educational work began almost bychance when researchers in the Office ofInstructional Resources (OIR) at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaignapproached the Geography Department seek-ing collaborators for an applied research pro-ject that would experiment with alternativeapproaches to improving assessment of studentlearning. I was close to finishing my disserta-tion and the department asked me to take agrant-funded junior faculty appointment,teaching an honors class in physical geographyand collaborating in the research. Next, OIRsought further collaboration in efforts to eval-uate courses and teaching; this work extendedmy association. Both assignments requiredlearning new literatures, creating newapproaches in the classroom, supervising grad-uate teaching assistants, and co-authoring pub-lications (e.g.Monk,1971;Monk and Stallings,1975; Monk and Alexander, 1973; 1975).They also meant engagement with experi-mental research designs, quantitative and qual-itative methods, illustrating their strengths,limitations, and complementarity.The experi-ence enhanced my awareness of the value ofaccepting multiple ways of knowing.

Around this time, the Association ofAmerican Geographers (AAG), which wasengaging in an array of projects to improve

228ÿÿPEOPLE


college geography, obtained funding from theNational Science Foundation to address thepreparation of doctoral students for theirteaching roles.With my newly acquired exper-tise and my department’s interest in being partof a national project, I took on being the localproject director in this multi-university pro-gram (Monk, 1978b). It fueled my interest inand commitment to changing practices inhigher education through faculty and curricu-lum development, connected me to a national(and subsequently international) network, andinitiated me into participating in large-scalemultiperson and multi-institutional projects.

My diverse experiences at this early careerstage and my feminist commitments stood mein good stead when I was forced to find a newposition at a time when the academic jobmarket in geography was poor. I moved to theUniversity of Arizona to become Associate(subsequently Executive) Director of theSouthwest Institute for Research on Women(SIROW). SIROW conducts interinstitu-tional, interdisciplinary research, educational,and outreach programs focusing on theregional diversity of women or of interest toscholars in the region it serves. My place-sensitive orientations as a geographer, myexperiences in multiperson and multifundedprojects that crossed disciplinary boundaries,and my engagement with feminist scholarshippositioned me well for the new work. But themove also inhibited continuation of personal,field-based research of the type I had carriedout in Australia and the Caribbean. I substi-tuted more text-based projects, review essays,and editorial endeavors.

Over two decades at SIROW, I haveengaged with colleagues and communityorganizations concerned with women’shealth, economic situation, education (espe-cially in science, mathematics, and engineer-ing), and cultural expressions. In some projectsmy role has mainly been to co-author grantproposals, administer the work, and see that itis disseminated. In others, I have taken a lead.

The most sustained effort brought togethermy geographic interests in the meaning ofplace with feminist commitments, resulting inthe book The Desert Is No Lady: SouthwesternLandscapes in Women’s Writing and Art(Norwood and Monk, 1997) and a filminspired by the book.Vera Norwood, a scholarin American studies at the University of NewMexico, and I put together a team ofresearchers in literature, anthropology, and arthistory to explore how Mexican American,American Indian, and Anglo-Americanwomen over a century had connected theirsenses of identity and place and expressedthese in their creative work. Our interpreta-tions contrasted with studies of the writing bywhite men which had dominated scholarshipon the Southwest.They were identified withrepresentations of the land as a virgin to beconquered, as a nurturing mother, as a placefor development or conversely a wilderness toprotect.We saw the women’s work as focusedon drawing energy from the land and cele-brating its wildness and sensuality. We exploredhow women’s representations were inflectedby historical contexts, ethnic and cultural dif-ferences, and specific geographies.This projecttook me into new methodological terrain andprompted further writing related to genderand landscape (e.g. Monk, 1992; Norwoodand Monk, 1997) as well as collaborationin film making with British colleagues(Williams, 1995).Though my commitments inthat endeavor were largely for fundraising andconsulting, the project highlighted howgreatly representations can be manipulatedthrough editorial processes, and heightenedmy awareness of the many-faceted aspects ofwhose voices are represented in research.

Valuing the International

The final stream I would like to discussinvolves convergence of the various channels.Starting in the 1980s, I began to look for



ways to link what we might now term ‘thelocal’ and ‘the global’ while bringing togetherfeminism, educational efforts, and profes-sional networks. I initiated a series of facultyand professional development programs atSIROW to introduce feminist work intointernationally oriented courses across dis-ciplines and international perspectives intowomen’s studies. These programs resulted ina number of consultancies and co-editing ofcollections to disseminate approaches to link-ing teaching in women’s studies and interna-tional studies (Monk et al., 1991; Lay et al.,2002). Since the mid 1990s, this direction hasinvolved collaboration with Mexican col-leagues in promoting research, faculty devel-opment, and community outreach on thetheme of gender and health at the Mexico-USborder. Though collaborative work has longbeen part of my professional life, this cross-border project has been especially informedby feminist thinking that has addressed suchquestions as who sets the agenda for and bene-fits from research, and what are the ways inwhich research and action might be respect-fully linked.We have developed approaches tosharing decision-making and resources equi-tably, and have reflected on the relationshipsamong researchers and those working in com-munity agencies (Monk et al., 2002).

Within geography, I have worked sincethe 1980s with like-minded colleaguesto foster gender scholarship within theInternational Geographical Union and femi-nist geography more generally. An importantmotive has been not only to enhance the vis-ibility of feminist scholarship in geography,butto try to promote perspectives that valuevisions and voices outside the dominant USand British realms. It led me to co-edit thebook series International Studies of Womenand Place with Janet Momsen, to co-edittwo books that include contributors frommultiple countries (Katz and Monk, 1993;García-Ramon and Monk, 1996), to write

on comparative perspectives in feministgeography (Monk, 1994), to visit and consultin universities in several countries, and to bean active participant in the IGU Commissionon Gender and Geography, editing itsnewsletter since 1988.Whenever I can, I citework by scholars outside the hegemonicregions and draw attention to issues involvedin working across national boundaries in geo-graphic education (Monk, 1997; Shepherdet al., 2000; García-Ramon and Monk, 1997),and promote teaching that attends to humandiversity in the US and beyond (Monk, 2000;Monk et al., 2000). These perspectives alsoinformed the directions I took when I had theprivilege of serving as President of the AAG in2001–2, and invited the women presidents offour geographical associations (Australian,Californian, Canadian and Catalan) to speakat the Presidential Plenary at the AnnualMeeting on the theme ‘Points of View, Sitesfor Action’, also initiating a reception to wel-come the many geographers from outside theUS who attend AAG meetings.

Looking back, I see my commitments asin some ways reflecting having been on themargins geographically and professionally –an expatriate Australian feminist, a womanwho grew up in the 1950s when women didnot expect to pursue academic careers – butalso as an immigrant who has now lived foralmost 20 years near the border of the UnitedStates and Mexico, and who is employed inan interdisciplinary feminist institute. Thesecircumstances have contributed to the posi-tionality of my work. The braided streams,while flowing relatively unconstrained by‘lateral banks,’ have nonetheless sustained acommitment to a life in geography and adesire to bring my values to its course.

NOTES1 Other tempting choices which some might

apply to me include ‘misfit stream’ and ‘erratics’,

230ÿÿPEOPLE


but I hope not ‘deranged drainage’, ‘rubbledrift’, or ‘planetary wobbles’.

2 Colleagues have undertaken the translations.3 This account of my dissertation research is

adapted from Janice Monk and Ruth Liepins

(2000). I appreciate the permission of myco-author and the journal publisher to drawon it.


ReferencesFairbridge, R.W. (1968) ‘Braided streams’, in R. W. Fairbridge (ed.), The Encyclopaedia

of Geomorphology. New York: Reinhold, pp. 90–3.García-Ramon, M.D. and Monk, J.J. (eds) (1996) Women of the European Union: The

Politics of Work and Daily Life. London and New York: Routledge.García-Ramon, M.D. and Monk, J.J. (1997) ‘Infrequent flying: international dialogue

in geography in higher education’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education,21: 141–5.

Katz, C. and Monk, J.J. (eds) (1993) Full Circles: Geographies of Women over the LifeCourse. London: Routledge.

Lay, M.M., Monk, J.J. and Rosenfelt, D.S. (eds) (2002) Encompassing Gender: IntegratingInternational Studies and Women’s Studies. New York: Feminist Press.

Monk, J. (1971) ‘Preparing tests to measure course objectives’, Journal of Geography,70: 157–62.

Monk, J. (1974) ‘Australian aboriginal social and economic life: some community differ-ences and their causes’, in L.J. Evenden and F.F. Cunningham (eds), Cultural Discordin the Modern World. Vancouver: Tantalus, pp. 157–74.

Monk, J. (1978a) ‘Women in geographical games’, Journal of Geography, 77: 190–1.Monk, J. (1978b) ‘Preparation for teaching in a research degree’, Journal of Geography

in Higher Education, 2: 85–92.Monk, J. (1981) ‘Social change and sexual differences in Puerto Rican rural migration’,

in O. Horst (ed.), Papers in Latin American Geography in Honor of Lucia Harrison.Muncie, IN: CLAG, pp. 29–43.

Monk, J. (1983) ‘Asian professionals as immigrants: the Indians in Sydney’, Journal ofCultural Geography, 4: 1–16.

Monk, J. (1988) ‘Engendering a new geographic vision’, in J. Fien and R. Gerber (eds),Teaching Geography for a Better World. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, pp. 91–103.

Monk, J. (1992) ‘Gender in the landscape: expressions of power and meaning’, inK. Anderson and F. Gale (eds), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography.Melbourne: Longmans/Cheshire, pp. 123–38.

Monk, J. (1994) ‘Place matters: comparative international perspectives on feministgeography’, Professional Geographer, 46: 277–88.

Monk, J. (1997) ‘Marginal notes on representations’, in H.J. Nast, J.P. Jones III andS.M. Roberts (eds), Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, andRepresentation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 241–53.

Monk, J. (2000) ‘Finding a way: a road map for teaching about gender in geography’ inLearning Activities in Geography for Grades 7–11. Finding a Way: A Project of theNational Council for Geographic Education. Indiana, PA: National Council forGeographic Education.


Monk, J.J. and Alexander, C.S. (1973) ‘Developing skills in a physical geography laboratory’,Journal of Geography, 72: 18–24.

Monk, J.J. and Alexander, C.S. (1975) ‘Interaction between man and environment: anexperimental college course’, Journal of Geography, 74: 212–22.

Monk, J.J. and Alexander, C.S. (1979) ‘Modernization and rural population movements:western Puerto Rico’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 21: 523–50.

Monk, J.J. and Alexander, C.S. (1985) ‘Land abandonment in western Puerto Rico’,Caribbean Geography, 2: 1–15.

Monk, J.J. and Alexander, C.S. (1986) ‘Free port fallout: gender, employment, and migra-tion, Margarita Island’, Annals of Tourism Research, 13: 393–414.

Monk, J.J. and Hanson, S. (1982) ‘On not excluding half of the human in human geography’,Professional Geographer, 34: 11–23.

Monk, J. and Liepins, R. (2000) ‘Writing on/across the margins’, Australian GeographicalStudies, 38: 344–51.

Monk, J.J. and Stallings, W.M. (1975) ‘Classroom tests and achievement in problem solv-ing in physical geography’, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 12: 133–8.

Monk, J.J., Betteridge, A. and Newhall, A.W. (eds) (1991) ‘Reaching for GlobalFeminism: Approaches to Curriculum Change in the Southwestern United States’,collection, Women’s Studies International Forum, 14: 239–379.

Monk, J.J., Sanders, R., Smith, P.K., Tuason, J. and Wridt, P. (2000) ‘Finding A Way (FAW):a program to enhance gender equity in the K-12 classroom’, Women’s Studies Quarterly,28: 177–81.

Monk, J.J., Manning, P. and Denman, C. (2002) ‘Working together: feminist perspectiveson collaborative research and action’, ACME: An International E-Journal for CriticalGeographies, 2(1): 91–106.

Norwood, V. and Monk, J. (1997) The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes inWomen’s Writing and Art (1st edn 1987). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rengert, A. and Monk, J. (1982) Women and Spatial Change. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.Rowley, C.D. (1970a) The Destruction of Aboriginal Society: Aboriginal Policy and

Practice. Canberra: Australian National University Press.Rowley, C.D. (1970b) The Remote Aborigines. Canberra: Australian National University

Press.Rowley, C.D (1970c) Outcasts in White Australia. Canberra: Australian National

University Press.Shepherd, I.D., Monk, J.J. and Fortuijn, J.D. (2000) ‘Internationalizing geography in

higher education’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 24: 163–77.Williams, S. (1995) The Desert Is No Lady, video recording. London: Arts Council of

England.

232ÿÿPEOPLE


Part 3Practices

This part explores the relationships between theory and methodology/methods. Rather thanproviding a ‘how to do guide’, these chapters focus on explaining the links between researchdesigns, the development of particular methods and different philosophical approaches toknowledge (for example, what constitutes data or evidence).

In Chapter 22 Stewart Fotheringham makes the case for quantitative methods, arguingthat they are important because they provide strong evidence on the nature of spatialprocesses – much stronger, he claims, than can be produced by other methods. He showshow quantitative methods have their roots in positivistic philosophies, but points out that‘positivism’ and ‘quantification’ are not synonymous even though many people use theminterchangeably. For example, he argues that whereas the goal of a positivist would be touncover the truth about reality in the form of absolute laws, quantitative geographersrecognize that it is rare to find such absolutism. Rather, geographers use quantitative methodsto build up sufficient evidence on which to make judgements about reality. Fotheringhamparticularly stresses the role of quantitative methods as a bridge between human and physicalgeographers, providing them with a language to talk to each other and the basis for jointresearch. He concludes his chapter by outlining a defence for quantitative methods againstsome of the common criticisms levelled at them.

In the following chapter Mike Goodchild (Chapter 23) presents a brief history of theintroduction of GIS into geographic research. He then outlines two perspectives.The first,widely held among researchers working with GIS, is that the technology is value-neutral,and that its users reflect a wide range of approaches, from the strongly positivist stance ofresearchers in physical geography and some areas of human geography, to the morehuman-centric stance of those working in such areas as public participation GIS and criticalsocial theory.The second perspective, which stems from the strong critique of GIS whichemerged in the early 1990s, is that GIS is inherently value-laden. Goodchild goes on totrace this tension between these two positions, and to explore efforts at reconciliation andaccommodation. Like Fotheringam (Chapter 22), who recognizes the limits of rationality inpositivistic approaches and the need to develop quantitative methods to model irrationalhuman behaviour, Goodchild reflects on uncertainty and scientific norms as examples ofmethodological issues that still surround the use of GIS.

Rather than understanding knowledge as an object to be achieved, tested and verifiedby an impartial observer, Paul Rodaway’s chapter on people-centred methods (Chapter 24)is concerned with how geographers who understand knowledge to be subjective, partial andemergent have developed methodologies to explore the individual relationships that peoplehave with the worlds that they inhabit. Here, he identifies how humanistic geographers such

23-Aitken-3325 Part 3 (ch22).qxd 11/24/2005 6:23 PM Page 233

as Douglas Pocock and Graham Rowles have developed, or adapted from other disciplines,methods to look at the meaning of individual experiences and how people interpret theirencounters with place. Here, the emphasis is on methods of encounter, engagement andparticipation – including participant observation, interviewing and interpretive readings oftexts.

In Chapter 25 Mike Samers argues that the point of research is not just to understandthe world but to change it. In doing so he highlights the fluid and ambiguous nature of theboundary between social theory and activism, and traces some of the opportunities andlimitations inherent in trying to move between academic research and the wider world.For Samers, doing research and writing for academic audiences is itself a process of politicalactivism because it is through this process that we learn about and understand the processesof exclusion and marginalization. It is, however, a practice that is undercut by the problemof how to represent ‘oppressed’ or vulnerable groups (see also Chapter 12).The problems ofrepresentation are equally endemic in radical geographers’ attempts to make a difference byengaging with audiences outside the academy such as government officials, lawyers andcommunity groups.While Marxist activist geographers are concerned to work with‘vulnerable’ people to assist rather than lead their struggles, Samers argues that the boundariesbetween academic and activist can become very blurred.

The problem of the relationship between researcher and research participants is oneshared by feminist geographers. In Chapter 26 Kim England characterizes feministmethodologies as those which are sensitive to power relations between researcher andresearch subjects. For England, it is irrelevant whether a researcher uses a qualitative or aquantitative method.What defines research as feminist is whether researchers develop aresearch relationship that is based on empathy and respect and whether they seek to reducethe distance between themselves and those with whom they work.This means consciouslyseeking to connect or engage with participants rather than attempting to remain detached.Here, England outlines how feminists have theorized this relationship in terms of theconcepts of positionality (how people view the world from particular embodied locations;and how they in turn are positioned and responded to by others) and reflexivity (a processby which a researcher self-consciously reflects on their own role in the research process andtheir research relationships).

In Chapter 27 the focus shifts from reflections on methods for working with people totextual methods. Here, John Wylie demonstrates the importance of Derrida’s notion ofdeconstruction as well as Foucault’s articulation of discourse analysis as forms of geographicalpractice.Wylie then goes on to look at the more recent influences of Gilles Deleuze and hisemphasis on emotion, creativity and transformation. Rather than endless critique,Wylieshows how Deleuze favours experimental modes of writing and expression.

Chapter 28 reflects on how to reconcile philosophic approaches that are critical of thepower relations embedded within society and the academy with the need to develop researchmethods to address pressing social problems in sensitive ways. Here, Paul Robbins reflects onwhat he terms ‘the postcolonial contradiction’, in doing research in non-western contexts,namely that any project can inevitably be read in some senses as colonial in opposition tothe researcher’s effort or desire to do non-colonial research. Robbins does so by drawing onhis own research on conservation efforts in West Africa and India, to reflect on his efforts toresolve the colonial legacy with a different kind of environmental research suggested bypostcolonialism.



While some of the methods discussed in this part are associated with or have theirorigins in particular approaches, it is important to recognize that they are not exclusive tothem. For example quantitative methods are used by some positivistic geographers and alsoby some feminist geographers; likewise textual methods may be adopted – albeit in differentways – by those coming from humanistic perspectives or poststructuralist perspectives, and soon. Moreover, as Fotheringham’s chapter on the relationship between positivistic philosophiesand quantitative methods in particular highlights, there is often a tension betweenphilosophical purity and the need for pragmatism because of the practicalities and everydayconstraints (policy context, time, resources, funding contexts, etc.) under which academics(and students) carry out their work.

Finally, it is important to recognize that researchers do not necessarily use one type ofmethod alone but rather can mix methods in their research designs. For example, they mightcarry out a large-scale questionnaire survey that is analysed statistically, alongside conductingin-depth conversational-style interviews with some key informants, or doing textual analysisof appropriate documents/images.

PRACTICESÿÿ235


QUANTIFICATION, EVIDENCE AND POSITIVISM

A. Stewart Fotheringham

Setting the Scene

Quantitative geographers do not oftenconcern themselves with philosophy, andalthough externally we are often labelled(incorrectly in many cases) as positivists, sucha label has little or zero impact on the way inwhich we prosecute research.We do not, forexample, concern ourselves with whetherour intended research strategy breachessome tenet of positivist philosophy. Indeed,most of us would have scant knowledgeof what such tenets are. As Barnes (2001)observes, for many of us, our first experiencewith positivism occurs when it is directed atus as a form of criticism.We do not contin-ually scrutinize our particular modus operandiwith some philosophical checklist in hand.Our lack of engagement with the philo-sophical debates that seem to take up somuch of the energy of our colleagues ismore than compensated for by our concernwith statistical, mathematical and, above all,geographical theory. To a large extent, ourguiding principle is the question,‘Does whatI’m doing provide useful evidence towardsthe better understanding of spatial processes?’The continuous debates about which par-ticular philosophical approach or ‘ism’ is bestleaves most quantitative geographers shakingtheir heads and wondering what is happen-ing to the rest of their discipline.The wonder-ful quotation attributed to the late RichardFeynman that ‘philosophy of science is aboutas useful to scientists as ornithology is to

birds’ is rather apt here (inter alia Kitcher,1998: 32).

However, in the recent decade, the expo-nents of various philosophical trends thathave been co-opted into human geographyappear to be increasingly antagonistictowards the use of quantitative methods forreasons that often seem to be more emotivethan substantive. It is especially worryingthat some of our colleagues appear unwillingto engage at all with our work, despite itsrelevance to almost every substantive issuestudied by geographers. Instead, they dismissthe whole field because it does not fit inwith their particular philosophical credo. Ittherefore seems that some discussion anddefence of the approaches taken by quantita-tive geographers is appropriate in order togenerate a more balanced view of their con-tributions to the discipline. Consequently, inwhat follows I attempt to articulate whatdefines a quantitative geographer, given thatit is not that we have all joined some philo-sophical ‘club’ with strict membership guide-lines about how to and how not to prosecuteresearch. I also try to explain why we havetrouble with many of the current ‘isms’ thatabound in human geography. In addition,I also discuss some of the issues surround-ing the relative demise of the quantitativeapproach within geography during the 1980sand 1990s as well as its recent resurgence.All I ask is the impossible: that the readerapproach this with an open and unprejudicedmind.

22


So What Do QuantitativeGeographers Do?

As I state with colleagues elsewhere:

A major goal of geographical research,whether it be quantitative or qualitative,empirical or theoretical, humanistic orpositivist, is to generate knowledge aboutthe processes influencing the spatialpatterns, both human and physical, thatwe observe on the earth’s surface.(Fotheringham et al., 2000: 8)

Towards this goal, the work of quantitativegeographers can be grouped into four areas.

1 The reduction of large data sets to asmaller amount of more meaningfulinformation. This is important inanalysing the increasingly large spatialdata sets obtained from a variety ofsources such as satellite imagery, censuscounts, private companies and local gov-ernments. Summary statistics and a widerbody of data reduction techniques areoften needed to make sense of these verylarge, multidimensional data sets.

2 The exploration of spatial data sets.Exploratory data analysis consists of aset of techniques to explore data (andalso model outputs) in order to suggesthypotheses or to examine the presenceof unusual values in the data set. Often,exploratory data analysis involves thevisual display of spatial data generallylinked to a map.

3 Examining the role of randomness in gen-erating observed spatial patterns of dataand testing hypotheses about such patterns.In so doing, we can infer processes in apopulation from a sample and also providequantitative information on the likelihoodthat our inferences are incorrect. Forinstance, suppose we want to investigatethe spatial distribution of some disease inorder to examine if there might be anenvironmental link to that disease.We have

to decide first on some method of measur-ing the spatial clustering of the disease withrespect to the at-risk population and thenwe have to determine the probability thatsuch clusters could have arisen by chance.Third, if the clusters are very unlikely tohave arisen by chance, we must look at therelationship between the locations of theclusters and various environmental factors,such as the locations of toxic waste dumpsor contaminated water sources.We do notclaim such statistical tests would provide uswith a definite answer to what caused thedisease but we would have a better basis onwhich to judge the existence of a possiblerelationship.

4 The mathematical modelling and predic-tion of spatial processes. The calibrationof spatial models provides extremely use-ful information on the determinants ofprocesses through the estimates of themodels’ parameters. Spatial models alsoprovide a framework in which predic-tions can be made of the spatial impactsof various actions: examples include theeffects of building a new shopping devel-opment on traffic patterns, and the build-ing of a seawall on coastal erosion.

The goal of quantitative geography is there-fore a very simple one, but a very importantone: to add to our understanding of spatial processes.This might be done directly, as in the case ofstore choice modelling where mathematicalmodels are derived based on theories of howindividuals make choices from a set of spatialalternatives. Or, it might be done indirectly, asin the analysis of the incidence of a particulardisease, from which a spatial process mightbe inferred from a description of the spatialpattern of the incidence of the disease.

Quantitative geographers would arguethat their approach provides a robust testingground for ideas about such spatial processes.Particularly in the social sciences, ideasbecome accepted only very gradually andhave to be subject to fairly rigorous criticalexamination. Quantitative spatial analysis

238ÿÿPRACTICES


provides the means for strong evidence to beprovided either in support of or against theseideas. For these reasons, quantitative geo-graphers have skills which are much in demandin the real world and are sought after to pro-vide inputs into informed decision-making.

Positivism and Quantification

The terms ‘positivism’ and ‘quantification’ arenot synonymous even though many peopleuse them interchangeably.1 One can be a quan-titative geographer, for example, withoutnecessarily being a positivist.This fundamentalmisunderstanding has arisen because manygeographers I suspect have misconstrued themeaning of one or both of these expressions. Itis not difficult to see why this has happened:the term ‘positivism’, in particular, is laden withambiguity.As Couclelis and Golledge note:

Although there is usually little disagree-ment as to what argument or piece ofwork is in the positivist tradition, posi-tivism itself as a philosophy turns out to beextremely difficult to define … popular-ized accounts, ad hoc reformulations, work-ing philosophies, methodological credos,and several contrasting sets of ontologicalbeliefs, all sought and found a place underthe umbrella of ‘positivism’. (1983: 332)

However, it is possible to identify two of themore central tenets of positivism which are(in lay terms) that:

1 The only meaningful items of study arethose that can be verified. Strictly speak-ing this means we should be able tojudge absolute truth, which in geograph-ical studies we generally cannot; hence,more loosely, we often relax this condi-tion to mean we can judge a statement tobe either true or false.2

2 Items of study can be verified only when they can be directly measured andobserved.

Taken together, these tenets imply that ourability to generate knowledge is restricted tothose things that we can observe in reality.For instance, religious discussions are seen asirrelevant to positivists because the beliefsthat people hold can be neither proved nordisproved. Since we cannot measure emo-tions and thoughts, strict positivists wouldalso exclude these items from investigation.Clearly, empirical testing is an important ele-ment of positivism: knowledge cannot begained on those issues which do not lendthemselves to such testing.

When geographers use the word ‘posi-tivist’, they generally imply a somewhat broaderset of beliefs and often ascribe the term tosomeone who follows scientific principles inhis/her research. Gatrell, for instance, definesquantitative geography as that which

relies on accurate measurement andrecording and searches for statistical reg-ularities and associations. It emphasises,via mapping and spatial analysis, what isobservable and measurable. Because itthen seeks to establish testable hypotheses,in the same way that a natural scientistwould, it has many of the characteristicsof a positivist or naturalist approach toinvestigation. (2002: 26)

A positivist therefore is perceived as someonewhose focus is the search for order and regu-larities with the ultimate goal of producinguniversal laws (a weaker version of positivismthat is applied to human geography is onethat attempts to make generalizations aboutspatial processes rather than ‘laws’). Themethods used to achieve this are typicallyquantitative: data might be analysed, hypo-theses might be tested, theoretical relation-ships might be established, and mathematicalmodels might be formulated and calibrated.Quantitative geographers, being labelled aspositivists, are typically perceived as ignoringall the emotions and thought processes thatare behind what is sometimes, at least in thecase of human geography, highly idiosyncratic

QUANTIFICATION, EVIDENCE AND POSITIVISMÿÿ239


behaviour. In essence, positivism, science andquantification are all seen as synonymous,unemotional, mechanistic approaches to thestudy of geography.

It is therefore tempting to label all quan-titative geographers as positivists or naturalists(Graham, 1997) but this disguises someimportant differences both within quantita-tive geography and between quantitativegeography and positivism. For example,while quantitative geography has someadherents who believe in a search for global‘laws’ and global relationships, others recog-nize that there are possibly no such entities.The latter concentrate on examining varia-tions in relationships over space throughwhat are known as ‘local’ forms of analysis(Fotheringham, 1997; Fotheringham andBrunsdon, 1999; Fotheringham et al., 2002).Here the emphasis is on identifying areas ofexception where something unusual appearsto be happening; the approach does notnecessarily concern itself with establishing anylaws, or even generalities, and hence is con-tradictory to the spirit of positivism. Localtypes of investigation are increasingly findingfavour among quantitative geographers whorecognize that global methods of analysis canmask important local variations and thatthese variations can shed important light onour understanding of spatial processes.

As well as being less concerned with thesearch for global laws than some might ima-gine,quantitative geography is also not as sterileas some would argue in terms of understand-ing and modelling rather abstract conceptssuch as human feelings and psychologicalprocesses (Graham, 1997). There appears tobe a strong undercurrent of thought amongstthose who are not fully aware of the nuancesof current quantitative geography that it isdeficient in its treatment of human influenceson spatial behaviour and spatial processes.While there is some validity in this view,quantitative geographers increasingly recog-nize that spatial patterns resulting from human

decisions need to account for aspects of humandecision-making processes.This is exemplifiedby the current interest in spatial informationprocessing strategies and the linking of spatialcognition with spatial choice (see Fotheringhamet al., 2000, Chapter 9 for an example) andalso by the attempts of researchers such asOpenshaw (1997a) to incorporate qualitativeissues into modelling through the applicationof fuzzy logic. Indeed, I suspect it would be areal eye-opener for many critics of quantitativegeography to read works such as Openshaw(1997a) and to see the efforts some spatial ana-lysts have made to capture qualitative issueswithin their research.

Quantitative geographers believe thatquantification generally provides strong evi-dence towards understanding spatial processes –much stronger, for example, than is providedby any other competing methods. However,we recognize that, counter to one of thetenets of positivism, rarely can we prove any-thing absolutely.The usual goal of quantitativeanalysis in geography is to accrue sufficientevidence to make the adoption of a particularline of thought compelling. As Bradley andSchaefer note in discussing differences betweensocial and natural scientists:

the social scientist is more like SherlockHolmes, carefully gathering data to inves-tigate unique events over which he had nocontrol. Visions of a positive social scienceand a ‘social physics’ are unattainable,because so many social phenomena do notsatisfy the assumptions of empirical sci-ence. This does not mean that scientifictechniques, such as careful observation,measurement, and inference ought to berejected in the social sciences. Rather, thesocial scientist must be constantly vigilantabout whether the situation being studiedcan be modeled to fit the assumptions ofscience without grossly misrepresentingit ... Thus, the standard of persuasivenessin the social sciences is different from thatof the natural sciences. The standard is the

240ÿÿPRACTICES


compelling explanation that takes all of thedata into account and explicitly involvesinterpretation rather than controlledexperiment. The goals of investigation arealso different – the creation of such com-pelling explanations rather than the forma-tion of nomothetic laws. (1998: 71)

Hence, whereas the goal of a positivist wouldbe to uncover the truth about reality in theform of absolute laws, quantitative geographersrealize that such absolutism is extremely diff-icult to find in most instances and they hold tothe more acceptable goal of simply accruingsufficient evidence on which to base a judge-ment about reality that most reasonable peoplewould find acceptable. Judgements or hypo-theses about reality that are found unacceptableare discarded so that knowledge accumulatesvia a process of retention or rejection. Ofcourse, retention does not imply validation butmerely that the idea survives that particulartest. Ideas in social science tend to becomegenerally accepted only when they survive alarge number of such tests.

Related to this issue, and one of thestrengths of a quantitative approach, is that ofthe measurement of error. Suppose we wishto understand the spatial distribution of somephenomenon in terms of a set of explanatoryvariables that influence this distribution insome way. In most cases there are actuallytwo sets of explanatory variables: those whichwe know to have an effect on the spatial dis-tribution under investigation and which wecan measure; and those whose effects we areunaware of or which we cannot measure.A large advantage of a quantitative approach isthat it enables the measurement of the deter-minants that can be measured (and in manycases these provide very useful and very prac-tical information for real-world decision-making) whilst recognizing that, for variousreasons, these measurements might be subjectto some uncertainty. We can measure thisuncertainty and report it as a guide to the

degree of belief one should have in thereported results. If, for instance, the errors inthe modelling procedure are large, we wouldprobably conclude that something importanthas been omitted from the model and thatthe results are not very reliable. Being able toassess the likelihood that a model of the realworld is a reasonable one, and hence thedegree of belief to ascribe to the outcomesfrom such a model, is a big advantage of thequantitative approach. Ironically, it also allowsto us to be highly self-critical, a trait that isless obvious in what are termed ‘critical’approaches to human geography.

Differences between QuantitativeHuman Geography and QuantitativePhysical Geography

To this point I have ignored the differencesbetween quantitative human geography andquantitative physical geography, and this fail-ing should be redressed. Most, if not all, of theplethora of ‘isms’ that abound in geographyoriginate from, and dwell entirely within,human geography. Indeed, it could reasonablybe argued that the rise of the new ‘isms’within human geography, with their non-quantitative or even anti-quantitative stances,has widened the intellectual gap betweenhuman and physical geography.This division isnow so wide that some physical geographerssee little point in remaining in departmentsthat to them appear more rooted in sociologythan geography.As Graf notes:

While their human geographer col-leagues have been engaged in an ongoingdebate driven first by Marxism, and thenmore recently by post-structuralism,post-modernism, and a host of otherisms, physical geographers are perplexed,and not sure what all the fuss is about …They do not perceive a need to develop apost-modern climatology, for example,



and they suspect … that some isms arefundamentally anti-scientific. (1998: 2)

One argument for an increasing emphasis onthe quantitative approach within humangeography is that it acts as a bridge betweenhuman and physical geography rather than asa barrier.The common language and purposeof a quantitative approach allows human andphysical geographers not just to talk the samelanguage but also to pursue meaningful jointresearch.

However, despite the relative similaritiesin the approach of many quantitative humangeographers and their colleagues in physicalgeography, there are some differences in sub-ject matter that lead to somewhat differentanalytical approaches becoming prominent inthe two areas. At least four such differencesare apparent.

For physical geographers their subjectmatter can sometimes be completely separatedfrom our perceptions and therefore analysedentirely objectively. In some instances this isalso true in human geography. For instance, ifwe are measuring death rates across a regionthere is no perceptual issue in measuring whois dead and who is not.3 However, in general,perceptions of the real world are important inunderstanding much of human geography.Most, if not all, spatial decisions are made onthe basis of perceived reality and not realityitself. It might therefore be argued that quan-titative approaches that use objective measuresof reality to explain human behaviour areinappropriate. Indeed, some would use thisargument to defend their own non-quantitativeapproach to human processes. However, thequantitative approach can be defended intwo ways. First, various quantitative models inhuman geography do take account of people’sperceptions of their environment to under-stand their behaviour in that environment. Forinstance, quantitative geographers have usedinformation on perceived realities to modelspatial choice behaviour such as the choice of

shopping destination. People’s choices ofsupermarkets, for example, depend on theirperceptions of the various supermarkets theycan feasible patronize and on their perceptionsof how easy it is to get to each of them.Quantitative geographers have even includedwithin their models people’s perceptions ofthe arrangement of alternatives in space andtheir mode of making decisions betweenthem. Notions of hierarchical informationprocessing and mental maps are used to pro-duce more accurate models of human spatialdecision-making (Fotheringham et al., 2002:Chapter 9). Second, quantitative approachescan be defended by recognizing that in mostcases our perceptions of reality closely resem-ble our objective measurements of reality andthat models that use only objective measuresof reality are still useful. Arguing that thewhole of the quantitative approach should bethrown out because quite often informationon perceived reality is not available ignores thefact that models based solely on objectivemeasures of reality are still very useful and farbetter than any alternative.

The concept of rationality is irrelevant tomost physical processes. When we deal withthe human world we immediately have torecognize that not everyone will act likeautomatons and behave in a manner predictedby a mathematical model. Again, some ofthe adherents of various non-quantitativeapproaches to human geography seek to use thisas an argument against quantification. However,there are two issues that are at odds with suchan argument.One is that while we cannot hopeto model the actions of each human being, theactions of humans in aggregate are often quitepredictable. Hence, quantitative models ofshopping behaviour by groups of consumers ormodels predicting population movementsbetween regions are frequently used by privatecompanies and various government agencies.A second is that quantitative models of humanbehaviour increasingly seek to include seem-ingly irrational behaviour (see the recent

242ÿÿPRACTICES


developments in spatial interaction modelling,for example, as described in Fotheringhamet al., 2000: Chapter 9).This is a difficult andchallenging task but it is one that makes thequantitative approach interesting. It also bringsinto question whether people ever do act irra-tionally.Perhaps seemingly irrational behaviouris simply behaviour for which we have notdetermined the proper set of determinants?For instance, a person in a shopping surveywho buys groceries from a store that is20 miles farther away than another identicalone might be deemed to be behaving irra-tionally. However, the shopping trip might beentirely rational if that person has a relative liv-ing close to the selected store and combines ashopping trip with a family visit.

In physical geography there are somefundamental relationships that are the sameeverywhere. For instance, the rate at whichtemperature decreases with altitude or theinfiltration rate of water through soil areentirely predictable given the right informa-tion.This is probably not true in human geo-graphy,or at least if there are such fundamentals,we have not yet discovered what they are.Yetagain, this seems to have been used as a reasonwhy a quantitative approach to human geo-graphy is doomed to failure.However,one onlyhas to look at the huge literature now emer-ging on local statistics and local modellingtechniques to realize that quantitative humangeographers have solved this problem bydeveloping techniques that recognize intrinsiclocal differences in processes (Fotheringhamet al., 2002).We now have the tools by whichwe can measure not only if there are local dif-ferences but also what these local differences looklike.The latter provide a very good mechanismfor a better understanding of locality as a deter-minant of human behaviour.

Some results in physical geography canbe replicated and in this sense they are truly‘scientific’. Results in human geography areusually not replicable. Due to the nuances ofthe subject matter in human geography, the

calibration of the identical model in two ormore different systems generally leads to dif-ferent results. Fortunately, in some cases thesedifferences are small; in other cases the differ-ences have meaning in terms of the effects oflocation upon behaviour; in still other casesthe results vary because we have a poormodel and the variation is therefore a usefuldiagnostic indicator that we should try toimprove the model.

Given the above, it is hardly surprisingthat quantitative geography has evolvedslightly differently in human and physicalgeography. Typically, human geographers aremore concerned with stochastic modelsbecause their subject matter is less pre-dictable. Typically, human geographers drawmore on concepts from psychology and eco-nomics, again because of their subject matter.Some elements of physical geography, suchas climatology and meteorology, are moreclosely allied to physics and others, such asfluvial geomorphology, to engineering.

However, despite these differences there isa great deal of common ground betweenquantitative human and physical geographersbecause both groups share an interest inunderstanding spatial processes and bothbelieve that a better understanding of theseprocesses can be obtained through quantita-tive analysis. The common framework ofquantitative methodology is thus a potentiallyvery powerful mechanism to stop the slowdisintegration of geography as a discipline, asthe gap between physical geographers and theproponents of various non-quantitative ismsin human geography grows ever wider.

What Quantitative GeographersFind Problematic about SomeNon-Quantitative Approaches

Until recently, most quantitative geographerstended to view the various non-quantitativeapproaches within human geography with



some bemusement; the currently fashionable‘ism’ seemed to change on a 5–10-year cycleand some people seemed to jump on whateverbandwagon rolled by. The only commonalityamongst the ‘isms’ that we could perceivewas an anti-quantitative bias. However, theincreasingly marginalized treatment given toquantitative methods has produced a reactionnot dissimilar to the broader scientificresponse to the anti-science attacks of thepostmodernists. For example, consider thefollowing two quotations:

I discern a disturbing implication of rela-tivist accounts of the sciences. A genera-tion ago, the British sociologist StanislavAndreski depicted the social sciences assorcery, as gibberish designed to placatespecial-interest groups (Andreski, 1972).More recently, Alan Bloom comparedthe humanities to the old Paris flea mar-ket: Among the masses of rubbish, onecan, by diligent searching, find the occa-sional under-valued intellectual nugget(Bloom, 1987, p. 371). One’s first reactionis to dismiss the authors of the remarks ascrabbed reactionaries. But my encounterwith cultural studies of science leads meto conclude that such views must be takenseriously. (Sullivan, 1998)

‘Whatever the correct explanation for thecurrent malaise, Alan Sokal’s hoax hasserved as a flash point for what has beena gathering storm of protest against thecollapse in standards of scholarship andintellectual responsibility that vast sectorsof the humanities and social sciences arecurrently afflicted with … Anyone stillinclined to doubt the seriousness of theproblem has only to read Sokal’s parody’(Koertge, 1998)

The Sokal parody referred to can be found inSokal (1996a; 1996b) and can be downloaded,along with a great deal of other interestingmaterial related to the hoax, at Sokal’s website:http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal.

For those unaware of it, the paper in questionis a complete fabrication published as a hoaxin a supposedly highly regarded journal ofcritical studies. It highlights a major problemthat quantitative geographers have with someof the recent ‘isms’. If there is no value systemwhereby research can be assessed, then howdoes one differentiate ‘good’research from ‘bad’research?

As an example, try this test.Read the fourquotations in Table 22.1. Three of these areeither paraphrased or direct quotations fromprestigious geographic publications; one ofthem is complete gibberish. Can you tellwhich is which? The answer is given in note 4to this chapter. If you are in any doubt aboutthe correct answer, then you probably shareat least some of the concerns of quantitativegeographers.

The Sokal hoax and the recent attacks oncritical studies (see Koertge, 1998 for a sam-ple of these) highlight the current lowesteem in which much of the so-called criti-cal theorist school of social science is held byothers. It mirrors the view of many quantita-tive geographers who cannot see what distin-guishes good from bad research in much ofwhat now passes for human geography. It isalso indicative of the strength of the feelingsthat have been aroused in some quantitativegeographers about what they see as theexcessive proliferation of the adherents ofanti-science and anti-quantitative viewswithin the discipline. For example, considerthis from Openshaw:

Maybe human geography is about toexperience a new age of extreme techno-phobic Ludditism advocated by anuncomfortable mix of well-intendedscholars and nasty minded voyeurs whoare steadfastly intent on navel gazing andnihilistic destruction by seemingly end-less and rampant deconstruction of any-thing for which there is a publicationopportunity. (1997b: 8)

244ÿÿPRACTICES


Another problem many quantitative geo-graphers have with some (although not all) ofthe work done under the banner of variousother ‘isms’ in human geography is that weoften cannot see where the ‘geography’ is inthe research. Much of the research publishedin ostensibly geographical journals looks tous very much like sociology or political sci-ence: in many instances, the role of spaceseems secondary or even non-existent.

If geography is to survive as a discipline,it needs a common theme that separates itfrom other disciplines. Quantitative geo-graphers make it explicit that we need toinvestigate spatial processes and tend to bequite critical of research conducted underany philosophical banner that purports to begeography but is not concerned with spaceor spatial issues. We are not convinced that

the adherents of some other approaches tothe study of geography share our vigilance inthis regard.

The final problem quantitative geo-graphers have with the non-quantitative‘isms’ concerns the lack of strong and impar-tial evidence that emanates from these latterdomains. Research, for instance, in whichonly a handful of people might be inter-viewed, to us does not constitute a reliablesample. Often there is no discussion of howthe sample was obtained and what the levelof uncertainty is in the inferences drawnfrom such a small sample (it is undoubtedlyextremely high in most cases). In many cases,the writing style resembles more that of anewspaper report in which a few selectedquotations are taken (possibly out of context)to support the author’s viewpoint. In this


Table 22.1 Sample quotations

To recognize the performativity of discourse is to recognize its power – its ability to produce ‘theeffects that it names’. But the process of repetition by which discourse produces its effects ischaracterized by hesitancies and interruptions. Unlike the coherent and rational modernist subject,the poststructuralist economic subject is incompletely ‘subjected’. Her identity is always underconstruction, constituted in part through daily and discontinuous practices that leave openings for(re)invention and ‘perversion’.

This reinscription lays bare the constitutive relationship between the conditions that make possible agiven phenomenon in the apparent fullness of its identity or meaning, and how these same condi-tions also mark the impossibility of such phenomena ever being realized in their ideal purity.Deconstruction therefore involves an exposure of conditions of possibility and impossibility.This doesnot refer to two separate sets of opposed conditions. Rather, possibility and impossibility are doubledup in the same conditions. This doubling of (im)possibility excludes an emphasis solely on the poleof either enabling or disabling conditions.

The dialectic untranslatability between empiricism and ‘vanguardist theoreticism’ continues tobefuddle geographic epistemology. For some, the duality is predetermined as essentially semantic;for others, it represents an oscillation between articulation and disarticulation. However, there islittle doubt that the irreducible differences in the hermeneutics of theoretical versus empiricalresearch have created a division that is beyond either ontology or metonymy. The aporetic ‘space-between’ is an example of a binary conceptualization of methodology that has led to an extremeschism within parts of geography.

The semiotic is where a not-yet subject deals with objects and spaces that are not-yet demarcated.This is a space of ‘fluid demarcations’ of yet unstable territories where an ‘I’ that is taking shapeis ceaselessly straying, where the not-yet-subject experiences ‘above all ambiguity’, ‘perpetualdanger’ and is engaged in a ‘violent, clumsy breaking away’ from the mother. The mapping of thebody, then, its initial territorialization, takes place in this primary (‘maternal’) arena, already socialand meaningful (at least partly because the mother is a social subject), but not yet linguistic, thatis, prior to the subject’s advent into language and the (‘paternal’) law.


way, we see such articles as potentially verybiased, inevitably supporting the author’spolitical or cultural stance.Thinking in termsof a court of law,or the quotation from Bradleyand Schaefer reported above in which theydescribe the need to accumulate evidence, tomost quantitative geographers a great deal ofqualitative ‘evidence’ just does not stand upto a good cross-examination. In many waysthe acceptance of such weak evidence in thevarious anti-quantitative and anti-science‘isms’ is a worrying trend that is mirrored insociety by a growing belief in things such ascreationism, astrology, angels, alien encoun-ters and faith healing. If there is no logicalframework in which to reject false claims,essentially anything becomes acceptable:there is no basis for distinguishing betweengood research and nonsense – as the Sokalhoax aptly demonstrated.

So Why Has Quantitative GeographyBeen in Decline until Recently?

It is difficult to say exactly when geographersbegan to turn to quantitative methods in theirsearch for understanding, but it is generallyagreed that it began in earnest at some timein the late 1950s and early 1960s, althoughmuch earlier examples of individual pioneer-ing work can be found.Certainly, the decadesof the 1960s and 1970s were periods whenquantitative methodologies diffused rapidlythroughout the discipline. Throughout the1980s and through much of the 1990s quan-titative geography then suffered a reversal offortune. Elsewhere, my colleagues and I notethere are several possible reasons for this(Fotheringham et al., 2000: Chapter 1).

Certainly the growth of many newer par-adigms in human geography, such as Marxism,postmodernism, structuralism and humanism(Johnston, 1997; Graham, 1997), attractedadherents united in their anti-quantitative sen-timents and their lack of quantitative ability.

There was also the seemingly never-endingdesire for some new paradigm or, in less politeterms,‘bandwagon’ to act as a cornerstone ofgeographic research. The methodology ofquantitative geography had, for some, run itscourse by 1980 and it was time to try some-thing new. As de Leeuw observes of the socialsciences in general:

This is one of the peculiar things aboutthe social sciences. They do not seem toaccumulate knowledge, there are veryfew giants, and every once in a while themidgets destroy the heaps. (1994: 13)

Another reason for the relative demise ofquantitative geography was that as it devel-oped into a well-established paradigm, itbecame, inevitably, a focal point for criticism.Unfortunately, much of this criticism origi-nated from individuals who had little or nounderstanding of quantitative methods. AsGould notes:

few of those who reacted against the latermathematical methodologies knew whatthey were really dealing with, if for noother reason than they had little or nomathematics as a linguistic key to gainentry to a different framework, and nothoughtful experience into the actualemployment of such techniques to judgein an informed and reasoned way.Furthermore, by associating mathematicswith the devil incarnate, they evincedlittle desire to comprehend. As a result,they constantly appeared to be againstsomething, but could seldom articulatetheir reasons except in distressingly emo-tional terms. (1984: 26)

A final reason is that quantitative geographyis relatively ‘difficult’, especially for thosewith limited mathematical or scientificbackgrounds. It is perceived by many tobe easier to follow other approaches togeographical enquiry and, consequently,

246ÿÿPRACTICES


they obtain remarkably little exposure toquantitative research even in the substantiveareas in which they undertake research.Thismakes it virtually impossible for many geo-graphers to understand the nature of thedebates that have emerged and will continueto emerge within the broad field of spatialanalysis. It also makes it tempting to dismissthe whole field of quantitative geographythrough criticisms that have limited validityrather than trying to understand it. AsRobinson states:

It can be argued that much of the anti-pathy towards quantitative methods stillrests upon criticisms based on considera-tion of quantitative work carried out inthe 1950s and 1960s rather than uponattempts to examine the more completerange of quantitative work performedduring the last two decades. (1998: 9)

It is true that the early examples of quanti-tative geography were overly concernedwith form rather than with process and withthe establishment of nomothetic laws, butthe retention of such criticisms as almost ananti-quantitative mantra indicates a woefullack of understanding of much of the quan-titative geography that has been undertakenover the past 20 years. In fact, I suspectmany of the criticisms of earlier quantitativework stemmed originally from quantitativegeographers themselves who, recognizingsome shortcomings within a very youthfulpart of the discipline, strove to improve itas part of the natural evolution of a vitalresearch area.

The relative difficulty of spatial analysisprobably also encouraged some researchers to‘jump ship’ from quantitative geography (forsome interesting anecdotes along these lines,see Billinge et al., 1984) as they struggled tokeep up with the development of an increas-ingly wide array of techniques and methods.As Hepple (1998) notes:

I am inclined to the view that somegeographers lost interest in quantitativework when it became too mathematicallydemanding, and the ‘hunter-gatherer’phase of locating the latest option inSPSS or some other package dried up.

It is difficult to know which of the above rea-sons explain the actions and attitudes of par-ticular individuals (the last reason is certainlynot one to which many will admit), but what-ever the cause, it is both a shame and an ironythat many geographers choose to remain igno-rant about the value of quantitative methodsjust when there is a rapid and sustained growthin spatial data analysis in other disciplines andin society in general. There is now a strongdemand for students who can analyse spatialdata and a need for geographers to provideleadership in this area. Unless we increase theunderstanding and acceptance of quantitativemethods within geography, historians of thediscipline will probably view this era withsome bemusement and a great deal of regret.

Summary

Quantitative methods will always have animportant role to play in both human andphysical geography, not just for pragmaticreasons but because they provide strongevidence on the nature of spatial processes.Unfortunately, many geography students willnever realize the potential of such methods intheir own research because they are given out-dated and heavily biased views of the use ofsuch techniques, often from individuals whohave no direct experience in this area and whoseem intent on transmitting their own short-comings and prejudices to their students. Oneof the saddest ramifications of the deep philo-sophical schism within geography currently isthat many students are being robbed of a well-rounded geographic education.As Openshawstates:



There is a risk of ideological intolerancethat has not been so visible previouslybecause the gulf is no longer just philo-sophical or paradigmatic but is reinforcedby serious deficiencies in research train-ing. (1997b: 22)

Consequently, I pose the following questionsthat geographers should ask themselves:

• Can I envisage situations where quantita-tive evidence could be useful to supportmy own research interests?

• Do I have sufficient knowledge to make areasoned and impartial judgement aboutthe role of quantitative methods withingeography?

• To what extent are my attitudes or those ofothers towards quantitative methods theresult of ignorance and prejudice ratherthan reason and altruism?

Answering such questions truthfully mighteventually lead to a greater awareness andacceptance of what quantitative geographycan offer than currently exists.

If geography is to survive as a discipline itneeds to demonstrate the following traits:

1 That it has a core subject area, under-standing spatial patterns and processes,which defines the subject and differenti-ates it from all others.

2 That geography is relevant to the worldoutside academia and that students cangain employment using skills they havelearned in geography courses.

3 That human and physical geographerscan work together sharing similar goalsand methodologies.

Quantitative geography provides all three;some other paradigms currently in vogue ingeography appear to provide none, which iswhy I worry about the future of the discipline.

NOTESThis work has its origins in rather peculiar geo-graphical circumstances.The first draft was writtenon the island of Rarotonga in the South Pacific.The latitude of the island was matched only bythat of the administrator at the University ofNewcastle who approved my travel expenses.

1 I will exhibit my philosophical ignorance here(and probably elsewhere) by using the term‘positivism’ as shorthand for ‘logical posi-tivism’, ‘logical empiricism’, ‘scientific empiri-cism’, ‘neopositivism’, ‘logical neopositivism’and probably half a dozen other, related,‘isms’.

2 Following the work of Popper (1959), quanti-tative geographers tend to follow the principleof critical rationalism: that hypotheses cannotbe proven as ‘true’ but can be demonstratedas ‘false’. Strictly speaking this runs counter tothe tenet of verifiability and therefore immedi-ately puts most of quantitative geography out-side the realms of logical positivism. However,the falsification modus operandi is still a very use-ful process that allows us to be critical of ideasand which is absent in competing philosophies.

3 There is an issue of what the appropriate spa-tial units are for which death rates are reported,but this is a separate issue.

4 The first quotation is from Gibson-Graham(2000: 104), the second from Barnett (1999:279) and the fourth from Robinson (2000:296). The third is a concoction of randomlyselected words and phrases from several paperson critical theory and is, as far as I can tell,complete nonsense.

248ÿÿPRACTICES

ReferencesAndreski, S. (1972) Social Sciences as Sorcery. London: Deutsch.Barnes, T. (2001) ‘Retheorizing economic geography: from the quantitative revolution to

the “cultural turn” ’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91: 546–65.Barnett, C. (1999) ‘Deconstructing context: exposing Derrida’, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, 24: 277–93.


Billinge, M., Gregory, D. and Martin, R. (eds) (1984) Recollections of a Revolution.New York: St Martin’s.

Bloom, A. (1987) The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.Bradley, W.J. and Schaefer, K.C. (1998) The Uses and Misuses of Data and Models: The

Mathematization of the Human Sciences. London: Sage.Couclelis, H. and Golledge, R. (1983) ‘Analytical research, positivism, and behavioral

geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73: 331–9.De Leeuw, J. (1994) ‘Statistics and the sciences’, unpublished manuscript, UCLA

Statistics Program.Fotheringham, A.S. (1997) Trends in quantitative methods I: stressing the local’, Progress

in Human Geography, 21: 88–96.Fotheringham, A.S. and Brunsdon, C. (1999) ‘Local forms of spatial analysis’,

Geographical Analysis, 31: 340–58.Fotheringham, A.S., Brunsdon, C.B. and Charlton, M.E. (2000) Quantitative Geography:

Perspectives on Spatial Data Analysis. London: Sage.Fotheringham, A.S., Brunsdon, C.B. and Charlton, M.E. (2002) Geographically Weighted

Regression: The Analysis of Spatially Varying Relationships. Chichester: Wiley.Gatrell, A.C. (2002) Geographies of Health. Oxford: Blackwell.Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2000) ‘Poststructural interventions’, in E. Sheppard and

T.J. Barnes (eds), A Companion to Economic Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 95–110.Gould, P.R. (1984) ‘Statistics and human geography: historical, philosophical, and

algebraic reflections’, in G.L. Gaile and C.L. Wilmott (eds), Spatial Statistics andModels. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 17–32.

Graf, W. (1998) ‘Why physical geographers whine so much’, The Association ofAmerican Geographers’ Newsletter, 33(8): 2.

Graham, E. (1997) ‘Philosophies underlying human geography research’, in R. Flowerdewand D. Martin (eds), Methods in Human Geography: A Guide for Students doing aResearch Project. Harlow: Longman, pp. 6–30.

Hepple, L. (1998) ‘Context, social construction and statistics: regression, social scienceand human geography’, Environment and Planning A, 30: 225–34.

Johnston, R.J. (1997) ‘W(h)ither spatial science and spatial analysis’, Futures, 29:323–36.

Kitcher, P. (1998) ‘A plea for science studies’, in N. Koertge (ed.), A House Built on Sand:Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science. New York: Oxford University Press,pp. 35–56.

Koertge, N. (ed.) (1998) A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths aboutScience. New York: Oxford University Press.

Openshaw, S. (1997a) ‘Building fuzzy spatial interaction models’, in RecentDevelopments in Spatial Analysis: Spatial Statistics, Behavioural Modelling andComputational Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, pp. 360–83.

Openshaw, S. (1997b) ‘The truth about ground truth’, Transactions in GIS, 2: 7–24.Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson.Robinson, G.M. (1998) Methods and Techniques in Human Geography. Chichester:

Wiley.Robinson, J. (2000) ‘Feminism and the spaces of transformation’, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, 25: 285–301.



Sokal, A.D. (1996a) ‘Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneuticsof quantum gravity’, Social Text, 46/47: 217–52.

Sokal, A.D. (1996b) ‘A physicist experiments with cultural studies’, Lingua Franca, 6: 62–4.Sullivan, P.A. (1998) ‘An engineer dissects two case studies: Hayles on fluid mechanics

and Mackenzie on statistics’, in N. Koertge (ed.), A House Built on Sand: ExposingPostmodernist Myths about Science. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–98.

250ÿÿPRACTICES


GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Michael F. Goodchild

Introduction

Geographic information systems (GIS) aremassive software packages providing a rangeof functions for creating, acquiring, integrat-ing, transforming, visualizing, analyzing,modeling, and archiving information aboutthe surface and near-surface of the earth.They associate locations in space, and oftenin space–time, with properties such as tem-perature, population density, land use, or ele-vation, and are widely used today in supportof research in geography, and in any otherdisciplines concerned with phenomena on ornear the earth’s surface (for an introductionto GIS see Longley et al., 2001).

The notion that GIS could raise questionsof an ethical or a philosophical nature wouldnot have occurred to early developers andusers, who tended to see these tools as value-neutral, much as one sees a calculator orkitchen appliance. But in the past 15 years alively social critique has emerged, and users ofGIS have begun to ask new kinds of questions.This chapter is about that critique and its rami-fications.The chapter begins with a brief his-tory of GIS.This is followed by a comparisonbetween the value-neutral stance of the earlyyears, and the more human-centric stance thatnow characterizes the field. Confounding thistransformation is another that has occurred inGIS since the popularization of the Internetin the mid 1990s, and which sees GIS as amedium for communication of knowledge,rather than as a personal analytic engine.Thechapter reviews the underpinnings of this

transformation, and its consequences for theGIS landscape of the new millennium. Thefinal section focuses on the limitations of GIS,and on prospects for further development.

A Short History of GIS

People have been using information tech-nologies to store and handle geographicinformation for centuries, since well beforethe advent of digital computers in the twen-tieth century. Paper is a form of informationtechnology, and paper maps are an ancientway of representing knowledge about theearth’s surface. Although a paper map is afairly cumbersome way of organizing geo-graphic information, it can be reproduced inlarge quantities very cheaply, and it has sig-nificant advantages in providing ready visualaccess, and in allowing simple measurementsof distance (Maling, 1989).The atlas is some-what more powerful, since its plates can belinked through indexes, but both paper mapand atlas technologies have remained essen-tially limited in their ability to supportdetailed analysis of mapped information, oraccurate measurement.

There are intriguing instances of technicaladvances on simple paper maps in the histori-cal record: atlases that allowed different platesto be superimposed, in order to compare andcombine different themes for the same area,and machines that allowed measurement ofarea from maps. McHarg (1969) popularizedthe use of manual map overlay, using simple

23


transparencies, as a method of combining thevarious factors involved in complex land usedecisions. But the real potential of digital

computers to facilitate the analysis of geo-graphic information was not apparent untilwell into the 1970s. Once the contents of a

252ÿÿPRACTICES

BOX 23.1 THE POWER OF GIS

Figure 23.1 shows a simple application of contemporary GIS technology. The area isSan Diego, California, showing downtown and Mission Bay, the Mexican border, andpart of San Diego County. Several data sets have been accessed and superimposedto create this image. Through an Internet connection, the GIS has accessed theNational Interagency Fire Center’s GeoMAC Wildfire Information System website andextracted the boundaries of the major fires of October 2003 (the Cedar fire is the largearea extending across the top of the image), along with shaded relief and major high-ways. Census databases have been accessed to obtain the boundaries of censustracts, and these are shown in black. Also available are all of the standard publishedstatistics for these tracts, so the analysis could now proceed to examine relationshipsbetween the fire and population density, housing value, and so on. The power of GISlies in its ability (1) to access and retrieve complex data sets at electronic speed, (2)to superimpose different data sets, allowing comparison and analysis, (3) to applynumerous statistical and other procedures to the data, and (4) to enlist a powerfulbattery of visualization methods. This illustration was made using ESRI’s ArcGIS soft-ware (http://www.esri.com) and Geography Network technology (http://www.geographynetwork.com) for discovery and retrieval of data from remote sites.

Figure 23.1 A simple GIS application comparing wildfires with demographic data from the census


map are represented in digital form, itbecomes a simple matter of programming toobtain accurate measurements of area; to com-bine and compare different themes; and toconduct detailed statistical analysis.

The actual roots of GIS are complex, andat least four projects, all dating from the1960s, have at least some claim to the title oforiginator. Most authorities cite the CanadaGeographic Information System (CGIS),designed around 1965 as a means for obtain-ing summaries and tabulations of areas ofland from the Canada Land Inventory, a mas-sive federal-provincial effort to assess the uti-lization and potential of the Canadian landbase. In essence, CGIS was designed to solvetwo simple, technical problems: to measureaccurately the areas of irregular geographicpatches of homogeneous utilization orpotential, and to overlay and compare differ-ent themes. It is remarkable that a detailedcost/benefit analysis clearly demonstrated thenet benefit of computerization, despite thevery limited capabilities and massive costs ofcomputers at the time. Other contributionsto the origins of GIS came from the ChicagoArea Transportation Studies, from efforts tocomputerize the geographic aspects of the1970 US Census, and from the computeriza-tion of McHarg’s overlay process by land-scape architects (for a comprehensive historyof GIS see Foresman, 1998; Maguire et al.,1991). In all of these cases GIS was seen as acost-effective technical solution to a simpleadministrative problem.

The period of the 1970s was character-ized by rapid invention, and the solution of awide range of technical issues that stood inthe way of successful GIS.The costs of com-puters remained high, however, and it wasnot until the early 1980s that GIS started tobecome popular as a standard computerapplication in government departments, uni-versities, and private corporations.Two signi-ficant innovations led to the first commercialviability of GIS: the development of relational

database management systems, which tookover the details of data management, allowingGIS designers to concentrate on measure-ment and analysis; and the near-order-of-magnitude fall in the price of computers withthe introduction of the mini-computer.Today, of course, the speed of the averagedesktop computer is orders of magnitudehigher, and the cost is orders of magnitudelower.

Once the foundations for handling a par-ticular type of information have been built, itis possible for programmers to add new func-tions very rapidly and cheaply, and over thepast three decades the power of GIS hasgrown explosively.Today, a typical GIS is cap-able of handling all of the major types of geo-graphic information and of performing a vastarray of functions, from visualization andtransformation to detailed analysis and model-ing.This power, and the low cost of entry intoGIS,have meant that GIS tools are now widelyadopted for purposes ranging from administra-tion to scientific research, and from educationto policy formulation.Virtually any field thatdeals with the surface and near-surface of theearth now accepts GIS as essential to its suc-cess, and ranks it with other computer appli-cations such as the statistical packages, email,or word processors as a permanent feature ofthe information technology landscape.

Underlying this increasing reliance on GISis a simple proposition: that numerical analysisof geographic data is too tedious, inaccurate,or costly to perform by hand.The computerbecomes in effect a calculating device, the per-sonal servant of the researcher or administra-tor. It would probably have surprised observersin the 1960s that computers designed largelyto perform vast numbers of calculations couldbe useful for the analysis of maps, and it isno accident that the development of GIScoincided with the turn to quantitative analysisin geography. Quantitative geographers werequick to recognize the power of GIS for spa-tial analysis, just as statisticians had exploited

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMSÿÿ253


the power of computers to perform statisticalanalysis (Fotheringham and Rogerson, 1994;Goodchild, 1988; O’Sullivan and Unwin,2003).The commercial GIS industry is drivenby its sales to users, however, and the mostlucrative markets for GIS software oftenturned out to be those that used GIS forinventory and management, rather than forsophisticated analysis and modeling. Thus animportant part of the academic agenda in GISover the past three decades has been to pushfor more powerful spatial analytic capabilitiesin commercial software.The academic researchcommunity has also developed GIS packagesof its own, that are more closely aligned indesign with the needs of geographic research.

The Emergence of Critique

To its early users a GIS was simply a tool,designed to perform a series of straightfor-ward mechanical operations. To those whohad programmed them, or understood howthey were put together, they seemed as value-neutral as the hand calculator, the typewriter,or the toothbrush. But to those outside thefield, the fascination with GIS that emergedin the late 1980s seemed much more mys-terious and potentially sinister. Users of GISseemed to be saying that they could see pat-terns and trends in data, through the mediumof GIS, that others could not see. Students inGIS classes seemed to be approaching thesesystems as black boxes, and not demandingthe same kind of detailed understanding thatone would expect, for example, with handcalculation or manual measurement.

In the late 1980s a series of papers byBrian Harley examined the notion that mapscan reveal the hidden agendas of theirmakers (many of the papers are available as aposthumously published collection: Harley,2001).This concept of deconstructing the mapattracted significant attention, as it addressedan issue that had long simmered under the

surface of cartography, and more generally ofgeography: the role of both disciplines inestablishing and modifying power relations.Mapping and surveying were importantinstruments of the imperial powers of thenineteenth century, and geography has alwaysflourished in wartime, in response to thedemands of armies for detailed geographicinformation and analysis. Harley’s theme wastaken up by several followers, includingDenis Wood, whose book The Power of Maps(1992) accompanied an exhibition mountedby the Smithsonian Museum and included achapter entitled ‘Whose agenda is in yourglove compartment?’

At first it seemed that GIS would be some-how insulated from these critiques,which weredirected more at traditional cartography. But aseries of papers in the early 1990s made it clearthat these and many other dimensions of cri-tique could be leveled at GIS. Taylor (1990)focused on the perception of GIS as an inven-tory of facts about the earth’s surface, and thedistinction between such a concern for factsand the traditional and more fundamental con-cern of academic geography for more sophisti-cated forms of knowledge, particularly of howthe geographic landscape is impacted byhuman and physical processes, and contem-porary human geography’s concern for powerrelations.To Taylor, GIS seemed mired in thetrivial, and unlikely to add to geography’sunderstanding of the world; what were neededinstead were geographic knowledge systems,orGKS. Moreover, GIS seemed to be the directdescendant of the concern in the 1960s and1970s for a scientific approach to geography,under a positivist umbrella, and to be ignoringthe extensive critiques of that approach: GISwas ‘the positivists’ revenge’ (but see myresponse, Goodchild, 1991; and the extendeddebate between Taylor and Openshaw inOpenshaw, 1991; 1992; Taylor and Overton,1991).

Smith (1992) added more fuel to the crit-ical fire in a paper that addressed the military

254ÿÿPRACTICES


and intelligence applications of GIS.As notedearlier, geography and GIS have a particularrelevance to warfare, and it is possible to tracemany of the technical developments in GISand remote sensing to the military. Remotesensing developed as an intelligence-gatheringactivity in the Cold War; modern geodesyowes much of its progress to the need foraccurate targeting of intercontinental ballisticmissiles; much of the technology for thedigital representation of terrain was devel-oped in support of cruise missile programs;and so on. Smith noted the distinct absence ofopen academic literature on military applica-tions of GIS, and a distinct reluctance toacknowledge its military roots, and arguedthat GIS developers should bear some degreeof responsibility for the use of their technology,in an echo of the debates over the Manhattanproject among that era’s scientific leadership.Do developers of technology bear responsi-bility for the eventual uses of that technology,or is development inherently value-neutral,independent of eventual use? The debate hasbecome stronger through the 1990s as detailshave emerged about the close historic linksbetween GIS and the military and intelli-gence communities. Cloud and Clarke (1999)have studied the Corona spy satellite programof the 1960s, and documented the close rela-tionship between that secret program andcivilian mapping, and the extent to whichmuch of the early technical progress on GISand remote sensing depended on classifiedresearch.

The publication in 1995 of John Pickles’book Ground Truth was perhaps the most sig-nificant event in this early period, as the cri-tique was gathering momentum. Chapters inthis edited collection reworked much of theearlier ground, while adding new dimen-sions, such as the potential role of GIS in sur-veillance and the invasion of personal privacy(Curry, 1997; 1998). Some of it was clearlymisguided, driven by naive assumptionsabout GIS. For example, much was made of

the representation of geographic phenomenaas a series of layers, a common icon of GISbut by no means a requirement of GIS rep-resentations. Similarly, much was made of thelimitations of crisp classification, a practicethat was inherited from maps of land use,land cover, or soil type, despite the fact that inprinciple GIS allows geographers to movebeyond such crisp limitations into fuzzy clas-sifications and other approaches that are lessdistorting of geographic reality (Burroughand Frank, 1996).

In summary, the critiques focused on twothemes: the limitations of GIS representations,through an inability to represent aspects ofphenomena that are of particular interest toresearchers, and the implications of those lim-itations for power relations; and the misuse ofGIS for sinister, malevolent, manipulative, orunacceptable purposes. Both clearly havesubstance, and in the years since they firstappeared many efforts have been made toaddress them, in various ways. The critiqueshave also been clarified, and it is probably trueto say that naive assumptions about GIS areno longer as common. An extensive discus-sion of the debate, its highlights, and its out-comes has been published by Pickles (1999),and my interview with Schuurman (1999)also provides an overview.Conferences on thesocial context and impacts of GIS have beenconvened, an extensive literature has accumu-lated, and the topic appears on most publishedresearch agendas for GIS (UCGIS, 1996).Today, the old view of GIS as a personal assis-tant found on the desk of a researcher, andperforming tasks in an essentially value-neutral context that the researcher finds tootedious, inaccurate, or time consuming to per-form by hand has largely disappeared, to bereplaced by a more human-centered view inwhich users are now much more sensitized tothe social context of GIS use, the comparativearbitrariness and non-replicability of many ofits tasks, and the unattainability of the purescientific concept of objectivity.



On the other hand, most GIS userswould subscribe to the notion that objectiv-ity is an important goal, and that every effortshould be made to adhere as closely as possi-ble to the norms of science. It is only throughsuch norms, they would argue, that the workof one person can be fully understood byanother; and accepted by the broader com-munity, or a court of law, as a reasoned andappropriate approach to a problem.

One of the most focused topics toemerge from the debate has been public-participation GIS (PPGIS), the study of theuse of GIS in community decision-making.Interest in PPGIS arose from the followingargument. In the early days of GIS the neces-sary hardware and software were availableonly to government agencies and corpora-tions, because of their high cost. The geo-graphic data needed to populate the GISwere produced by government, throughagencies such as the US Geological Survey,again because of the high cost and highlevels of expertise needed. The perspectivesadvanced by GIS were therefore those of thepowerful, and GIS became an instrument ofthat power, and a means of reinforcing it. GISdesigns accommodated only a single perspec-tive,which its managers and protagonists heldto be the truth. In reality, many geographicvariables are vague, and cannot satisfy the sci-entific norm of replicability; two specialistsasked to map independently the soils of thesame area will not produce identical maps.

What, then, would evolve if GIS wereredesigned from scratch, as a vehicle for themaintenance of multiple viewpoints, ratherthan the privileging of a single viewpoint?The concept was code-named ‘GIS/2’, andgreat interest was expressed in research into itsdesign, while the broader subject of decision-making in diverse communities evolved intothe research area of PPGIS. Progress has beenmade in understanding how geographic infor-mation is created within communities; howdecisions are made using GIS in complexsettings; how multiple perspectives can be

identified, stored, and displayed in GIS; andhow GIS and other information technologiesimpact the balance of power within communi-ties (Craig et al., 2002; Jankowski and Nyerges,2001;Thill, 1999).

The Impact of the Internet

Although the earliest efforts to link comput-ers through wide-area networks occurred inthe 1960s, the growth in use of the Internetand the invention of the World Wide Web inthe early 1990s came as an almost completesurprise to most observers. In less than adecade, these networking technologies havecompletely revolutionized the world of com-puting, creating massive demand where vir-tually none existed before, and helping toredefine the modern economy. Nowhere hasthe impact been more dramatic than in GIS,where these new technologies have enabled avast new industry dedicated to the sharingand dissemination of geographic information(Peng and Tsou, 2003; Plewe, 1997). In theearly years of GIS much effort had to bedevoted to the task of digitizing, the conver-sion of paper and photographic records todigital form.Today, few GIS projects requireextensive digitizing, since the necessary dataare almost always available in some suitableform somewhere on the WWW.

Several new technologies have beendeveloped over the past decade to facilitatedata sharing. They include digital libraries,and the special form known as the geolibrary(National Research Council, 1999), definedas a collection of information objects thatis searchable by geographic location as theprimary key. Since this was essentially impos-sible in the predigital era, geolibraries arean important innovation of the Internet age.The Alexandria Digital Library at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara (http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu) is an instance of ageolibrary, and currently provides access toseveral million information objects. Standards

256ÿÿPRACTICES


have been devised for the description of datasets, enabling the creation of vast catalogsof records, and automated procedures forsearching across catalogs in distributed archives.The National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse(http://www.fgdc.gov/clearinghouse/clear-inghouse.html) is an instance of a geolibrarythat uses a standard metadata format to tietogether several hundred archives of geo-graphic data, allowing them all to be searchedby a single operation. Standards have beendevised to support automated requests forgeographic information from remote archives(http://www.opengeospatial.org), allowingany GIS user to access remote data as easily asdata stored on the user’s own hard drive.

Of equal importance to these technicaldevelopments have been the institutionalchanges that have occurred in the pastdecade. US national policy regarding geo-graphic data production and dissemination isnow enshrined in the National Spatial DataInfrastructure (National Research Council,1993), a collection of arrangements andprotocols coordinated by the federal govern-ment through the Federal Geographic DataCommittee (http://www.fgdc.gov). Theseinclude the concept of patchwork: that theproduction of geographic data should be dis-tributed, and conducted at scales appropriateto local needs, with information technologyproviding the means to coordinate the patch-work into a consistent whole. Productionshould be distributed over many levels of theadministrative hierarchy, and conducted inpartnership with the private sector, througharrangements that largely replace the old, cen-tralized system of production by the federalgovernment.

Sui and I (Goodchild, 2000; Sui andGoodchild, 2001; 2003) have argued that thesechanges constitute a fundamental paradigmshift in GIS, from the old model of an intelli-gent assistant serving the needs of a single userseated at a desk, to a new model in which GISacts as a medium for communicating and shar-ing knowledge about the planet’s surface.The

shift of paradigm implies a simultaneous shiftof technical focus, from local performance tonetwork bandwidth, and an increasing interestin issues of semantic interoperability in placeof earlier concerns with syntactic inter-operability: in other words, sharing requires acommon understanding of meaning, as well asa set of common standards of format. Fromthis new perspective the earlier concern forspatial analysis is relegated to a subsidiary role,as a means for enhancing the message, and fordrawing attention to patterns and anomalies ingeographic information that receivers of theinformation might not otherwise notice.

From the perspective of the social cri-tique, this attention to the communication ofgeographic information raises a series ofinteresting questions.Are there types of geo-graphic information that cannot be repre-sented in GIS, or to which GIS is inherentlyhostile, and that cannot therefore be commu-nicated through the medium of GIS? Is itpossible to rank types of geographic informa-tion according to their ease of representationand communication? And to what extentdoes GIS impose itself as a filter, compared toother media for communication, such asspeech, or the written word?

Technologies such as the NationalGeospatial Data Clearinghouse provide asingle WWW portal to a distributed collectionof archives.This notion that information tech-nology is capable of integrating disparate datasources, and providing a uniform view, hasstimulated more far-reaching visions, culmi-nating in the vision of Digital Earth.The con-cept was originally proposed by Gore (1992),and substantially elaborated during his vice-presidency. The most comprehensive state-ment of the vision appears in a speech writtenin 1998 for the opening of the CaliforniaScience Center, of which the following is akey passage:

Imagine, for example, a young childgoing to a Digital Earth exhibit at a localmuseum. After donning a head-mounted



display, she sees Earth as it appears fromspace. Using a data glove, she zooms in,using higher and higher levels of resolu-tion, to see continents, then regions,countries, cities, and finally individualhouses, trees, and other natural and man-made objects. Having found an area ofthe planet she is interested in exploring,she takes the equivalent of a ‘magic car-pet ride’ through a 3–D visualization ofthe terrain. (http://digitalearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/VP19980131.html)

Digital Earth poses what one might regard asthe grand challenge of GIS: the creation of asingle, unified perspective on distributed geo-graphic information, together with the abilityto visualize that information in a virtual reality.I have argued (Goodchild, 2001) that DigitalEarth is feasible with today’s technology,despite the enormous volumes of data poten-tially involved, and the high rate at whichthose data would need to be accessed, andtoday Google Earth (http://www.google.com)exhibits many of the features of the DigitalEarth vision.But Digital Earth raises numerousquestions of an ethical and philosophicalnature, and some of these are reviewed in thenext section.

Outstanding Issues

Although the debates of the 1990s led toaccommodation and reconciliation on someissues, a number of more fundamental issuescontinue to haunt the world of GIS, and itsrelationship with critical social theory. In thissection two such issues are reviewed, as high-lights of the current state of the GIS critique.

Mirror worlds and uncertainty

To the GIS user seated at a desk, the computerscreen provides a window on the geographicworld. But the contents of the window are

entirely determined by the contents of thedatabase, rather than by reality. In essence, GISuse occurs in a virtual environment that acts asa replacement for physical presence in the realworld (Fisher and Unwin, 2002). Since theuser has no sensory contact with that realworld during GIS use, unless the applicationconcerns the user’s immediate environment, itfollows that his or her understanding of theworld is limited to the contents of the data-base, together with any information alreadystored in the user’s brain. Moreover, the natureof digital representations, which are con-strained to an alphabet of two symbols, neces-sarily means that the virtual world is far cruderand truncated than the real world that itattempts to emulate. In effect, GIS is a mirrorworld, a representation that purports to be afaithful copy of certain aspects of the realworld.

The contrast between reality and its vir-tual mirror is nowhere more obvious than inthe vision of Digital Earth, as captured in theGore quotation above. Nothing in the visionsuggests that the world the child is exploringis limited in any way; the message is clearlythat the child’s exploration is the equivalentin every way of real exploration.This cannotbe so, but one inevitably wonders if the childwill realize this, or will simply accept themagic carpet ride as truth.

Over the past decade the topic of uncer-tainty has emerged as one of the most signi-ficant in the GIScience research agenda.Uncertainty is defined through the relation-ship between the real and virtual worlds,as the degree to which the virtual worldleaves its user uncertain about the real world.Uncertainty arises from numerous sources,including traditional measurement error, thevagueness inherent in many of the definitionsthat are used in compiling geographic data,the process of generalization which omitsexcessive detail in many data sources, and theapproximations that result from economies indata compilation or representation. Zhang

258ÿÿPRACTICES


and I (Zhang and Goodchild, 2002) providea recent review of the state of research in thefield.

Despite the inevitable presence of uncer-tainty in geographic representations, there arefew if any accepted methods for making usersaware of that uncertainty during GIS use.While most uncertainties are clearly benign,the possibility exists to manipulate the differ-ences between the real and virtual worlds tospecific ends. A variety of methods have beenproposed for visualizing uncertainty, throughthe graying or blurring of objects, or throughanimation (Hearnshaw and Unwin, 1994). Butdespite the extensive research progress of thepast two decades, in practice most GIS applica-tions still present data as if they were the truth,opening the possibility of legal liability, as wellas of social critique. The developers of com-mercial software seem unwilling to implementeven the simplest methods for tracking, visual-izing, and reporting uncertainty, preferring towait until such methods are demanded by theircustomers; and in this situation, the academiccommunity clearly has a responsibility to con-tinue to draw attention to the problems ofuncertainty, to educate future GIS users to beaware of them, and to make simple solutionsavailable in the form of software tools andreadily implemented methods.

Scientific norms

Mention was made earlier of the difficulty ofachieving the elusive scientific goals of objec-tivity in a world of GIS that must acceptdegrees of subjectivity in some of its aspects.As Harley and Wood showed, maps are notalways the simple results of scientific mea-surement that many GIS users assume themto be. Cartographers frequently distort con-tours, or move roads apart, in order to makemaps more readable, and to convey generalimpressions, rather than precise representa-tions. While map readers are used to suchpractices, and anyway lack the tools to make

precise measurements from maps, the precisionof GIS often encourages a false sense of objec-tivity, and a false belief in GIS accuracy.Measurements of area made in a GIS are typi-cally printed to the limits of the computer’sprecision, and are generally far more detailedthan is justified by the true accuracy of the data.

For most types of geographic data there isa clear relationship between the cost of dataon the one hand, and their accuracy and levelof detail on the other. For example, greateraccuracy in the measurement of elevationrequires greater expenditure, because fullyautomated systems such as interferometricradar or LiDAR cannot produce the samelevels of accuracy as expensive, ground-basedmeasurement. Greater levels of detail, in theform of denser sampling, similarly add to thecost of data capture and compilation. Clearlysuch situations require compromises betweenthe scientific desire for the truth and thepractical cost of accuracy. But science pro-vides no framework for making such com-promises between its pure objectives and thepractical realities of decision-making andproblem-solving.

Another conflict over scientific normsoccurs in the application of GIS to decision-making.Consider an increasingly common sit-uation – the use of a GIS to evaluate alternativeoptions against multiple criteria. Such evalua-tions often occur in meetings of stakeholders,and several methods have been devised for for-malizing the process of determining weightsfor the various criteria, and obtaining a con-sensus solution. Saaty’s (1980) analytic hier-archy process is one of the best known:comparative ratings of the importance of vari-ous factors are elicited from stakeholders, andthen analyzed to produce a set of consensusweights using a fairly common form of matrixalgebra. In such situations it is clear that thedegree of satisfaction of the stakeholders withthe process is the primary measure of success.Stakeholders will often express support inprinciple for the goals of science, and will be



satisfied only if they believe the approach to bescientific – but the precise meaning of thatterm, and the precise process by which theapproach was determined to be scientific,is often unclear, as it will be to a participantunfamiliar with basic matrix manipulation.

Finally, consider the traditional scientificstandard that results should be reported insufficient detail to allow replication of theexperiment. Much modern science is con-ducted by teams, each member being a spe-cialist in one field, and no member being aspecialist in all fields. Moreover, it is commontoday for the computer to be in effect amember of the team, programmed by anunknown programmer who is not a memberof the team. The levels of documentationcommonly available for GIS software oftendo not provide sufficient detail to allow repli-cation, let alone reprogramming. As a resultmuch modern science, and many GIS appli-cations, fail to satisfy the reporting standard.

It is clear from these examples that mod-ern science, typified by the use of GIS in teamresearch, often deviates from the traditionalmethodological principles that were estab-lished in an earlier era of monastic, single-investigator science underpinned by manualanalysis.A new philosophy of science is badlyneeded that helps today’s scientists to operateeffectively in a world of massive computation,team research, and complex interactions withthe real world of decision-makers.

Conclusions

The critique of GIS that emerged in the early1990s was in large part well founded, andresulted in a lively and largely productivedebate.There is no doubt that GIS is better forthe experience, that GIS users are more sensi-tized to the social implications and social con-text of what they do, and that much importantliterature has accumulated. Their knowledgeof the real world and of the social critiquepositions geographers well to lead the

application of GIS,and to educate and persuadeusers from other disciplines to be similarlysensitive to the complex relationships that existbetween the technology, the real world, andsociety.For the most part,however,users of GIS,particularly those outside the scientific researchcommunity, will continue to show impatiencewith issues of scientific philosophy, to echo thecomments of Fotheringham (Chapter 22) andKitchin (Chapter 2) in this book.

Two outstanding issues were identified inthe previous section. One, the implicationsof uncertainty, has been the focus of muchresearch over the past 15 years, but remains amajor area of concern.The GIS vendor com-munity has made it clear that it will respondwith implemented methods only when themarket demands them; one senses a distincttendency to sweep the uncertainty issue underthe carpet.Yet many GIS applications are sub-ject to massive uncertainties,and as a result theiroutputs are similarly uncertain. A cynic oncedescribed soil maps as showing ‘boundaries thatdo not exist surrounding areas that have little incommon’, and although this comment isdecidedly unfair, it contains enough truth thateven the staunchest advocates of GIS should beconcerned. Uncertainty might be described asthe Achilles’ heel of GIS; or to use anothermetaphor, the problem that has the potential tobring down the entire house of cards.

The other issue identified in the previoussection concerns the methodology of science,and the danger that when GIS applicationsmove too far away from the context of scien-tific peer review and rigorous analysis theiressential objectivity will be badly compro-mised.As late as the 1970s it was common forinstructors in statistics classes to require thattheir students first execute every test by hand,before being allowed to use computers; itwas felt that hand computation was moreconducive to student understanding. Today,of course, this principle and its relatives arelong forgotten, in a world brimming withsuch mental aids as calculators, spelling andgrammar checkers, and computerized driving

260ÿÿPRACTICES


directions. Amid these practical realities, it issurely more important than ever to demanddetailed software documentation, and to beaware of what is happening inside the increas-ingly complex and opaque ‘black box’.

Although there are celebrated exceptions,for the most part the technology that is GISplays a value-neutral role in a science that

strives to adhere to principles of objectivity.There is a social context for GIS, and the his-tory of the field depends to a substantial extenton the personalities of its pioneers. But thisseems a far cry from the opposite extreme, oftreating GIS as a social construction, and giv-ing equal time to all of its possibilities, how-ever far they stray from scientific norms.


ReferencesBurrough, P.A. and Frank, A.U. (eds) (1996) Geographic Objects with Indeterminate

Boundaries. London: Taylor and Francis.Cloud, J. and Clarke, K.C. (1999) ‘Through a shutter darkly: the tangled relationships

between civilian, military and intelligence remote sensing in the early U.S. spaceprogram’, in J. Reppy (ed.), Secrecy and Knowledge Production. Occasional Paper 23.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Peace Studies Program.

Craig, W.J., Harris, T.M. and Weiner, D. (eds) (2002) Community Participation andGeographic Information Systems. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Curry, M.R. (1997) ‘Geodemographics and the end of the private realm’, Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers, 87: 681–9.

Curry, M.R. (1998) Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies.New York: Routledge.

Fisher, P.F. and Unwin, D.J. (eds) (2002) Virtual Reality in Geography. New York: Taylorand Francis.

Foresman, T.W. (ed.) (1998) The History of GIS: Perspectives from the Pioneers. UpperSaddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Fotheringham, A.S. and Rogerson, P. (1994) Spatial Analysis and GIS. London: Taylorand Francis.

Goodchild, M.F. (1988) ‘A spatial analytic perspective on geographical information systems’,International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 1: 327–34.

Goodchild, M.F. (1991) ‘Just the facts’, Political Geography Quarterly, 10: 192–3.Goodchild, M.F. (2000) ‘Communicating geographic information in a digital age’, Annals

of the Association of American Geographers, 90: 344–55.Goodchild, M.F. (2001) ‘Metrics of scale in remote sensing and GIS’, International

Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 3: 114–20.Gore, A. (1992) Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston, MA:

Houghton Mifflin.Harley, J.B. (2001) The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Hearnshaw, H.M. and Unwin, D.J. (eds) (1994) Visualization in Geographical Information

Systems. New York: Wiley.Jankowski, P. and Nyerges, T. (2001) Geographic Information Systems for Group

Decision Making: Towards a Participatory Geographic Information Science. New York:Taylor and Francis.

Longley, P.A., Goodchild, M.F., Maguire, D.J. and Rhind, D.W. (2005) GeographicInformation Systems and Science, 2nd edn. New York: Wiley.


Maguire, D.J., Goodchild, M.F. and Rhind, D.W. (1991) Geographical InformationSystems: Principles and Applications. Harlow: Longman.

Maling, D.H. (1989) Measurement from Maps: Principles and Methods of Cartometry.New York: Pergamon.

McHarg, I.H. (1969) Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.National Research Council (1993) Toward a Coordinated Spatial Data Infrastructure for

the Nation. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.National Research Council (1999) Distributed Geolibraries: Spatial Information

Resources. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.Openshaw, S. (1991) ‘A view on the GIS crisis in geography: or, using GIS to put Humpty

Dumpty back together again’, Environment and Planning A, 23: 621–8.Openshaw, S. (1992) ‘Further thoughts on geography and GIS: a reply’, Environment

and Planning A, 24: 463–6.O’Sullivan, D. and Unwin, D.J. (2003) Geographic Information Analysis. Hoboken, NJ:

Wiley.Peng, Z.R. and Tsou, M.H. (2003) Internet GIS: Distributed Geographic Information

Services for the Internet and Wireless Network. New York: Wiley.Pickles, J. (ed.) (1995) Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information

Systems. New York: Guilford.Pickles, J. (1999) ‘Arguments, debates and dialogues: the GIS – social theory debate

and the concern for alternatives’, in P.A. Longley, M.F. Goodchild, D.J. Maguire andD.W. Rhind (eds), Geographical Information Systems: Principles, Techniques,Management and Applications. New York: Wiley, pp. 49–60.

Plewe, B. (1997) GIS Online: Information Retrieval, Mapping, and the Internet. Santa Fe,NM: OnWord.

Saaty, T.L. (1980) The Analytic Hierarchy Process: Planning, Priority Setting, ResourceAllocation. New York: McGraw Hill.

Schuurman, N. (1999) ‘Speaking with the enemy: an interview with Michael Goodchild,January 6, 1998’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17: 3–15.

Smith, N. (1992) ‘Real wars, theory wars’, Progress in Human Geography, 16: 257–71.Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. (2001) ‘Guest editorial: GIS as media?’, International

Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15: 387–9.Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. (2003) ‘A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using

McLuhan’s law of the media’, Canadian Geographer, 47: 5–17.Taylor, P.J. (1990) ‘GKS’, Political Geography Quarterly, 9: 211–12.Taylor, P.J. and Overton, M. (1991) ‘Further thoughts on geography and GIS’, Environment

and Planning A, 23: 1087–90.Thill, J.C. (1999) Spatial Multicriteria Decision Making and Analysis: A Geographic

Information Sciences Approach. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate.UCGIS: University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (1996) ‘Research

priorities for geographic information science’, Cartography and GeographicInformation Systems, 23: 115–27.

Wood, A.D.B. (1992) The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford.Zhang, J.X., and Goodchild, M.F. (2002) Uncertainty in Geographical Information.

New York: Taylor and Francis.

262ÿÿPRACTICES


HUMANISM AND PEOPLE-CENTRED METHODS

Paul Rodaway

Introduction

Humanism has variously impacted upongeographic practice, most notably in the sec-ond half of the twentieth century as in largepart a reaction against positivist social science.Manifest as ‘humanistic geography’, it gavegeographers the opportunity to reassert theimportance of human experience, that is aconcern with the individual and the unique,the subjective experience of people and place,a geography of feeling and emotion, involve-ment and participation. Humanistic geo-graphers developed a distinct research strategyand a series of people-centred methods (oradaptations of existing methodologies) toexplicate a detailed and reflective understand-ing of the relationship between people andplace, a geography of the world as home(Tuan,1974;1977;Relph,1976;1985;Seamonand Mugerauer, 1985). Reflecting back overmore than a decade of humanistic geography,Pocock was to note the key characteristic:‘a sensitivity towards, respect for, empathy – orcommunion – with the people and placesbeing studied’ (1988a: 3).

Humanistic geographies were under-pinned to varying degrees by the philosophiesof idealism, existentialism and in particularphenomenology (especially the work ofHeidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty). Incontrast to positivist geographers (with theiritemization of facts, search for general laws, andcausal explanations), humanistic geographerswere more concerned with the subjectiveexperience, the particular and the unique.

The focus was an interpretation and reflectionon the meaning of what it is to be human andliving in a world (Tuan, 1979; Relph, 1985).Humanistic approaches sought to explicatethe meaning of individual (and social) experi-ence, and the sense of place (and a world) asit were from within or with the flow of theliving wholeness of being, that is our being-in-the-world or dwelling (see Heidegger,1983). The researcher is always and alreadyembedded in the world he/she studies andthis study impacts on one’s own sense of self,as well as one’s understanding of the world(see Pocock, 1988a: 6).There can be no ‘facts’unaffected by the personal values of theresearcher (Olsson, 1980).

It has been observed that ‘methodologi-cally, however, humanistic ideas of phenom-enology and existentialism did not translateeasily into practice’ (Hubbard et al., 2002: 41).Nevertheless, a number of leading geographersdid successfully develop practical researchmethodologies (e.g. Rowles, 1976; Seamon,1979; Pocock, 1992). Some humanistic geo-graphers adopted self-reflective strategies whichwere in essence ‘researcher centred’, or reliedexclusively upon the interpretation by theresearcher of cultural texts, images and prac-tices.This focus on a close reading and criticalreflection aimed to discern the essential andunique character of particular places and com-munities (e.g.Tuan, 1974; 1979; 1993; Pocock,1981; Seamon, 1985). The interpretation isultimately a personal one, and tells us as muchabout the researcher as what is researchedperhaps (Monaghan, 2001).1

24


People-centred methodologies take a moreempirical approach and have been developedby humanistic geographers to explicate andexplore the geographical experience of indi-viduals and communities, in particular placesand times. Here methods of direct encounter,engagement and participation were devel-oped (e.g. Rowles, 1976; Seamon, 1979;Pocock, 1996; Meth, 2003).The present essayconcentrates upon this humanism as a practicalapproach (Harper, 1987).

Characteristics of a HumanisticStrategy

Despite reference to humanistic philosophy,geographers tended not to adopt specificallyphilosophical techniques but to more prag-matically adapt existing research methodolo-gies in geography, social science and thehumanities. The key characteristic is there-fore one of approach, the choice of subjectmatter to study, the definition of evidenceand the basis of truth claims.

In particular, three key and interlinkedideas underpin this research strategy:

• A desire to avoid imposing preconceivedideas (concepts, theories) and to get ‘backto the things themselves’ (see Husserl,1983).The phenomenological philosopherHeidegger describes this approach or atti-tude as ‘to let that which shows itself beseen from itself in the very way in whichit shows itself from itself ’ (1983: 58).Fundamental to this attitude is humility,respect and a kind of empathy with theworld (see Pocock, 1988a; Relph, 1985;Tuan, 1971).

• An essentially anthropocentric or people-centred approach in the sense that allmeaningful knowledge is understood asthat which begins and ends with human‘intentionality’, that is subjectivity. Inother words, knowledge of the worldderives from human consciousness and

our relationship to other things (objects,people, places) that make up our everydayindividual and social environment (or‘lifeworld’). Our knowledge of the worldarises though our conscious relationshipto that world – feelings and emotions,memories and expectation. It is not pos-sible to sustain an objective and detachedview of the world.What we study affectsus and we affect it.

• Understanding is essentially holistic, butpartial and implicative, as research seeks toappreciate the complexity of our ‘being-in-the-world’ or ‘dwelling’ (see Heidegger,1983). Humanistic geographers are there-fore interested in complex and dynamicwholes – experiences, places, lifeworlds.

As Pocock summarizes this strategy:

the humanist rejects the dualism of anouter, objective world and an inner, sub-jective world or representation. Theworld is the ‘lived world’ and is what itseems – which is not to admit solipsism,which is where the mind creates its ownworld. There are multiple-emergentworlds or realities which can only bestudied holistically. Again, the humanistrejects that the knower and the knownconstitute a discrete dualism; rather, theyare inseparable, interacting and influen-cing each other. Consequently, any enquiryis value-bound. (1988a: 2)

In many ways, humanism interpreted in thisway generates an approach or attitude ratherthan a set of specific and unique people-centred methods.The emphasis is on holism,participation, empathy, explication, induction,authentication and trust.

Humanistic geographers have thereforeadapted and developed a number of existingmethodologies – notably participant observa-tion, in-depth interviewing, and group-basedapproaches – supplemented with the inter-pretive reading of texts, images and cultural

264ÿÿPRACTICES


practices and critical reflection on their owninvolvement in the research process itself as a‘participant’ in the world being studied.

Empathy and Experiential Knowing

Over a number of years, Douglas Pocock hasexplored place evocation through a series ofempathetic and experiential research strategies.Examples include producing a tape recordingof the Sound Portrait of a Cathedral City (Pocock,1987; commentary, 1988b), engaging with thetourist experience of ‘Catherine CooksonCountry’ (Pocock, 1992) and developingpractical fieldwork exercises to excite students’experiential engagement and understanding ofthe environment (Pocock, 1983). Underlyinghis long-term commitment to a practical andpeople-centred approach has been a belief that‘an epistemology of the heart concerns know-ledge acquired by union or communion. It isfounded on an intimate engagement, an inti-mate sensing’ (Pocock, 1996: 379).

This personal approach is perhaps moststrongly illustrated in his extended study ofplace evocation in the Galilee Chapel inDurham Cathedral (Pocock, 1996). Hisapproach is grounded in phenomenology, butis practical, eclectic and self-reflective. Centralto this project was over two decades of being‘engaged on a personal odyssey, compiling apersonal diary’ where ‘discourse and text havethus been a personal affair, representing astruggle to give outward expression to a myr-iad of inner feelings and promptings’ (1996:384).Through engagement with the literatureabout the history and meanings associatedwith the Chapel, repeated personal visits andcontemplation, and observations of and con-versations with other visitors, Pocock hassought to engage with the ‘unique characterof this place’.

This empathy and experiential knowingrequires respect, patience and critical reflec-tion, drawing on personal experience, literature

and observation. It is a seeking for authenticknowledge. Pocock’s approach is holistic,experiential, intimate (sensually and emotion-ally) and (self-) reflective (see also Pocock,1983). It does not seek to impose or test priortheories. It does not seek an objective detach-ment, but rather seeks to ‘participate in’ orengage with phenomena, to find place evoca-tion through facilitating or allowing it to berevealed through the researcher’s own per-sonal engagement.Tellingly in the importantafterword to his paper, Pocock writes:

The Galilee is my world … My sketchingrepresents a personal experience of com-ing to know through understandinggained reciprocally: the world gave itselfto me in so far as I opened myself to it.The result of such sharing is a social con-struct. I am part of a common humanity,sharing a particular culture and language:the Galilee is in turn a world suspended inthe webs of significance spun over eightcenturies. (1996: 384)

Although the researcher in this processbecomes a kind of channel through which thephenomenon – here the place character ofthe Galilee Chapel – reveals itself to us, theresearch draws upon considerably more evi-dence than that of personal experience of thespace. Pocock has drawn upon texts about thehistory and traditions of the Galilee Chapel,and observation of other actors or visitors tothe space and their reactions. However, in thisapproach the researcher is very much subjec-tively involved and ‘it was I who was changedand made richer’ (1996: 384). The Chapel isnot so much an object for study, and certainlynot set at an objective distance, but more asubject with which the research becomesengaged, or involved intimately, ‘a subject towhich I was happily subject’.The relationshipis therefore intimate, participatory and recipro-cal, involving respect and patience to allow ‘theChapel to disclose itself on its terms, in its time’(1996: 384).

HUMANISM AND PEOPLE-CENTRED METHODSÿÿ265


The researcher seeks not to verify ana priori theory, but to authenticate a particu-lar knowledge of the place.Therefore, Pocockdescribes his text as variously a sketch, atranslation or an interpretation, and arguesthat its success is judged by ‘the extent towhich it conveys, convinces or authenticatesa sense of being there.A comparison of wordand world is the challenge, then, to bothauthor and reader’ (1996: 384). He refers tohis authorship as ‘perhaps firstly talking tohimself, with a text revealing as much abouthimself as the world described’ (1996:385–6). In common with other humanisticgeographers (notably Tuan, 1999; Rowles,1976), he sees the approach as fundamentallyas much a journey of self-discovery as discov-ery about the world. In a sense the process ofwriting up the research is contradictory andpotentially destructive as it inevitably gives adegree of fixity, or privilege, to a particular(partial or moment of ) insight, and objectifies.In other words, for the phenomenologicallyinspired engagement with place, dynamic,authentic knowledge and understanding,emerge through intimacy and ongoing reflec-tion. Writing, whilst offering one route tosharing such knowing and understanding, isless authentic than the actual engagement.

Pocock argues that the author shares theirauthority not only with the subject (as notedabove) but also ‘with the reader who engageswith and activates the text’ (1996: 386; also1988a).Truth is therefore always presented asemergent, implicated or partial, and any writ-ten record (research paper, for instance) can-not be an authoritative statement in itself, butmust be a sketch, and a kind of tool to engagethe reader in the journey of reflection andauthentication. This work illustrates know-ledge as process rather than product, and thefundamental humility and respect required ofthe researcher/author and reader/interpreter.Methodologically central is an intimateengagement experientially with the space,through repeated visits to the Galilee Chapel,

observation, quiet contemplation and reflec-tion. This is not a quick process, but oneinvolving repeated visits, time spent sub-merged in the ‘feel’ of the place, observingand reflecting on its ‘lifeworld’. It is supple-mented by reading of texts about the historyand meanings of the place, not to identify‘theories’ to test, not to crowd preconceptionsinto the view, but to follow up possible linesof reflection and understanding. Judgement issuspended to allow the phenomenon to revealitself, to ‘speak of itself to us’. In place of spe-cific techniques of observation and interpre-tive method, we have principles of intimatesensing – patience, respect, observing, listening,reflection, and authentication.

Interpersonal Knowing andParticipatory Approaches

Pocock’s work illustrates an essentially personalexperiential engagement and self-reflectivestrategy. Several geographers have sought toadopt a more social approach and engage withindividuals and communities.These participa-tory approaches have adapted in-depth inter-views, group discussion, reflective diaries, andparticipant observation techniques as primarysources of evidence (see Rowles, 1976; 1978;1988; Seamon, 1979; Rodaway, 1988; Harper,1987). Here an authentic understanding issought through a concept of shared know-ledge, or ‘interpersonal knowing’.

Graham Rowles (1978: 175–6) notes adilemma: subjective knowing is ultimatelyinaccessible as it lies at the level of individualfeelings, and objective knowledge is oftenoverly abstracted, generalized, and so at aremove from actual experience. Drawing onMaslow, he argues that there is a third modeof knowing: interpersonal knowing.Examplesmight be a friend knowing a friend, two per-sons loving each other, a parent knowing achild or a child knowing a parent (and it isnot always reciprocal). The key characteristic

266ÿÿPRACTICES


here is that knowing is emergent and partial,subsisting in a relationship between knowerand world (objects or beings). It is livedthrough day-to-day activities, interpersonalrelationships, conversations, gestures andactions. The knower is involved with whatthey know. They participate in, are influencedby and influence what is known.There is nota distance or a detachment, but an intimacyand an involvement. It is a sensual and emo-tional relationship.What is known may be asmuch a feeling as something which is or canbe expressed. Essential to the notion of inter-personal knowing is the idea of empathy,intuition and feeling. In Rowles’ approachthe traditional hierarchy between researcher(knower) and subject (to be known) is brokendown and the research process becomes oneof partnership. Trust and friendship becomeimportant components of the researcher’s rela-tionship to the participants. Rowles describeshis relationship to one participant, Stan, asbecoming ‘close friends’, involving doing theshopping together and having a drink in thebar, as much as more formal conversations inStan’s own home to further ‘the research’.This intimacy is reflected in the impact whichStan’s death had upon Rowles himself, a con-flict between ‘my human sensibility and myscholarly purpose’ (1976: 19).

In Prisoners of Space: Exploring theGeographical Experience of Older People (1976),Graham Rowles used an explicitly humanis-tic and people-centred methodology. In par-ticular, his work challenged the notion of theresearcher as the knowing subject and theelderly as an object to be studied and writ-ten about. In contrast, he worked alongside/with a group of individual elderly people,using in-depth interview techniques, enga-ging in conversations, sharing reflections, shad-owing everyday lives, and being an observantparticipant. He sought to bracket out thepreconceptions of the research literature onthe geographical (and social) experience ofthe elderly, and to seek to understand their

experience as they perceived and lived itthemselves. His interest was not only in anauthentic understanding through a form ofinterpersonal knowing, but also in a holisticapproach through a study of individuals intheir own homes and neighbourhoods – thatis ‘lifeworlds’. Key to the research process wasfriendship and trust. In writing up his researchhe chose to present a series of vignettes onthe distinctive characters, lifeworlds and expe-riences of each of the five participants.

Rowles (1976) described his researchapproach as inductive, the piecing together ofthe evidence of conversations and observationsof everyday lives and participants’ reflectionsupon them. In seeking to authenticate hisunderstanding of their lives, Rowles did notseek to match up his insights to a prior aca-demic literature (or theories). Instead he tooktwo basic strategies. He looked for consisten-cies and shared themes across the participants’experiences and reflections, and sought to sharehis interpretations with the participants torefine, develop or negotiate an authenticunderstanding. In other words, the researchprocess was not only inductive but also nego-tiated and reflective, involving internal feed-back and refinement, to identify salient themes.He sought to derive his insights solely or pri-marily from the ‘text’ of his encounters, theexperiences and the reflections of the elderlyparticipants, each person and their individual‘lifeworld’. To reduce the distortion ofresearcher interpretation and translation heused participants’ own words or phrases, andpresented ‘results’ back to participants for feed-back and refinement. Rowles describes his roleas translator – a term also used by Pocock. Hedescribes the process as an open relationship,with no attempt to minimize ‘contamination’,and with emphasis placed on sharing ideas.The research interaction became ‘a mutuallycreative process … my job therefore would beone of translating this text and distilling theessential geographical themes within a coher-ent conceptual framework’ (1976: 39).



In seeking to take his research beyond theinsights gained into individual lifeworlds, hedeveloped a perceptual model.This consistedof the identification of four modalities ofexperience – a meshing of space and time,physical and cognitive, contemporary neigh-bourhood, and vicarious participation in dis-placed environments. These experientialmodalities were overlapping and configureddynamically and uniquely in the lifeworldsof each participant. However, in identifyingthe modalities of action, orientation, feelingand fantasy, Rowles presented these not assome kind of abstract theory or model, butas a dynamic framework for reflection onhis individual character vignettes and a pointof potential lines of enquiry for future reflec-tive engagements with people and place.Summarizing his approach, Rowles writes:‘a quest for intimacy is the essence of theresearch strategy. I developed strong interper-sonal relationships with five older people. Myconclusions result from almost two years’contact with these individuals’ (1976: xviii).Whilst the most intense interaction with hisparticipants was within broadly a six-monthperiod, the extended nature of the engage-ment is typical of this kind of participatory,explicative and authenticating approach toresearch.

Reflections on a Humanistic Strategy

Pocock writes of the humanistic approach asrelying ‘heavily on the intuition and initiativeof the researcher. Success – or failure – istherefore reliant on personal ability and per-sonality to an extent unthinkable in conven-tional studies.Humanistic work is individually,and not socially, reflective. It is also person-centred, elevating individual or human agencyover societal structure’ (1988a: 5). Whilst notrelying on structural explanation, throughinterpersonal knowing and group reflective

approaches (e.g. Seamon, 1979; Rodaway,1987; 1988), it could be counterargued thatthe person-centred approach can also besocially reflective. However, fundamentally, thepeople-centred approach of humanistic strat-egies means that knowledge, or knowing, isprimarily subjective, and subsists in the rela-tionship between researcher and what isresearched. Although humanistic geographersmake claims to ‘authentic’ knowledge throughcritical self-reflection, empathy, interpersonalknowing and negotiation with subjects, ulti-mately much relies upon the quality of thehuman relationships sustained in the researchand the integrity and honesty of the researcher.

For humanistic geographers, knowledgeis not produced, nor is the object achievedand understanding tested against repeatablephenomena. Rather, knowledge is a process;it is knowing (or coming to know) throughengagement. It is always and already subjec-tive, partial and emergent. The researchermust engage in continued critical reflectionon the research process and their role withinit, refining the specific methods employed tothe context of the study.

Writing up research findings is also prob-lematic since it is a process which objectifies,gives a certain fixity to what has come to be‘known’, and is separated from or disconnectsfrom the living flow of the phenomenon thatwas engaged with during the research. Severalstrategies have been developed to militateagainst this. Some researchers seek to feedback their ‘findings’ to subjects, to involvethem in the refinement of interpretations andthe ‘authentication’ of the research ‘report’(Rowles, 1976; Rodaway, 1987). Otherresearchers have sought to ‘authenticate’ researchfindings through extended self-reflection anda call to the reader to continue the process ofreflection and authentication against their ownexperience (Pocock, 1988a; 1996).

People-centred approaches as developed byhumanistic geographers have been criticized

268ÿÿPRACTICES


for their explicit subjectivity. However, as anumber of humanistic geographers havenoted, what is important is that ‘appropriatetests of proof ’ (Pocock, 1988a: 6) are appliedto evaluating research ‘findings’. Since know-ledge is defined as a continuous and incom-plete process of knowing, and subsists in aweb of relationships between the researcherand the phenomena studied (includingresearch subjects and the reader), any evalua-tion of the ‘findings’ must be both contextualto this and partial (‘interim’ might be a usefulword). The positivist science abstraction ofverification against a preconceived set of con-cepts, theories and previous research findings(conducted at a different time and place by adifferent agent, etc.) is inadequate to the evalu-ation of the evidence of empathetic, experi-ential and interpersonal knowing. Evaluationneeds to take into account the characterand performance of the researcher, the natureof the relationships established betweenthe researcher and his research phenomena(environment, subjects, etc.), and the particu-lar design and operation of the methodologyemployed to generate the ‘findings’ (as well ashow the interpretations were compiled andpresented).

From phenomenology, humanistic geo-graphers have also made much use of the term‘authenticity’. Here the notion of ‘proof ’ ortruth is asserted in terms of the very subjec-tive human relationships of a lifeworld, thepractical engagement in interpersonal know-ing, and the coherence of ‘making sense’ inthe practice of everyday lives. Authenticity isnot easily defined, but rather corroboratedin lived experience, in a genuine sense ofempathy or tuning in to the phenomenon asit really is, in itself. Pocock describes it asachieved ‘intersubjective corroboration’ andthe ‘ultimate test is not only whether findingsare plausible (the common sense factor), butinformative, confirmatory (the aha! factor),and whether they do something to the reader’

(1988a: 7). In other words, do the findings orresearch report move the reader to a kind ofemotional engagement with, or recognitionof, the people (characters), spaces (places) andexperiences revealed, which gives that deepersense of ‘reality’, akin to aesthetic enlighten-ment? More technically, the ‘test’ of authen-ticity is not the verification of an abstract factor causal relationship, but a kind of confirma-tion or assertion, and ultimately a sharing ofan insight into the wholeness, the character oressence of a place, its people, its lifeworlds.Theultimate test of authenticity lies not in abstractresearch findings (and in particular theories),but in the response of those studied (whetherit rings true to their lives and situation) and ofthe readers (especially other researchers whohave also engaged in such detailed and in-depthempathetic, experiential and interpersonalresearch).

The focus on the particular, the uniqueand the emergent inevitably has con-sequences for any generalizations and claimsto wider understanding of the human con-dition and geography.Yet, humanists do seekto identify wider insights which might be‘authenticated’ against other situations. Forexample, Seamon (1979) identified a con-tinuum of environmental engagement fromimmersive to detached; Rowles (1976) sum-marized his insights as four modalities ofperception; Relph (1976) developed atypology of insideness/outsideness of placeexperience. These generalizations are, how-ever, not attempts to identify laws or causalrelationships, nor are they theories to betested; rather they act as summaries toinform future critical reflection.This mighton the surface run the risk of setting upframeworks of presuppositions for futureresearch, but each of these researchers waskeen to emphasize the particular context oftheir insights and the provisional nature oftheir ‘findings’. From a humanistic perspec-tive, all claims to truth are subjective, and



relative to particular conditions of theirrealization. Positivists might infer ‘truth’from statistical inference, notably therepeatability of phenomena. Humanists aremore likely to relay ‘logical inference’ fromthe case study. Pocock suggests: ‘it is not thecase of the particular being representative ofthe generalisation, but rather, of the gener-alisation not applying to the particular’(1988a: 6).

Beyond Humanistic Geographies

The legacy of humanistic geographiescontinues in contemporary interests inpeople-centred methodologies – the use ofself-reflection and biographical strategies(e.g. Kruse, 2003), participant observationapproaches (e.g. Mabon, 1998), in-depthinterviews and focus groups (various in Area,1996).

Feminist geographers have drawn on adiversity of methods, both quantitative andqualitative, but also have made much use ofself-reflection and empathetic strategies (e.g.Women and Geography Study Group, 1997).‘Activist’ geographers have made radical com-mitment to people-centred methodologies,seeking direct engagement with people andplaces, identifying a political role for theresearcher as agent of change (e.g. Ticknell,1995; Routledge, 1997). However, this workis rooted in different and diverse philosophiesand research traditions, e.g. situated know-ledge (Rose, 1997), grounded theory andactor-network theory.

Whilst these ‘new’ geographies haveabandoned reference to phenomenology andother humanistic philosophies, in many waysthe humanistic geographers opened the doorto the value of a focus on subjective experi-ence, feelings and meanings. A range of newdirections were legitimized in part by this

earlier engagement with people-centredmethods:

• critical reflection on the role of theresearcher as involved agent

• deliberate eclecticism and adaptation ofmethodologies to meet the specific needsof given research contexts

• the potential of research as a process ofempowerment to subjects

• engagement with knowledge as process(implicative, contextual, situated, political).

Referring back to Rowles’ work,Widdowfield(2000) has more recently reminded geo-graphers of the importance of the reflexivityand emotion in relationship between theresearcher and what they study.She argues that:

despite the trend in recent years towardsmore qualitative and reflexive research,discussion and critiques of the researchprocess to date have rarely involvedan explicit examination of how theresearcher’s emotions may impact uponthat process. It is almost as if we havebecome so concerned about how far orindeed whether we can speak for andarticulate the experience and emotions of‘others’ that we have forgotten or dis-missed the ability to speak for ourselves.(2000: 205)

People-centred methodologies involve com-ing to terms with a subjectivity in howresearch is conducted, an explicitness aboutpeople’s involvement, and an emphasis onhow research is communicated and shared.

NOTE1 Less common in humanistic geography have

been self-reflective essays of a more biograph-ical kind where geographers reflect upon theirown experience (e.g. Hart, 1979;Tuan, 1999).

270ÿÿPRACTICES


ReferencesArea (1996) ‘Focus Groups’, Special issue, 28(2): 113–14. Introduction by J. Goss, with

following articles by Goss, Zeigler, Burgess, Jackson, Longhurst.Harper, S. (1987) ‘A humanistic approach to the study of rural population’, Journal of

Rural Studies, 5:161–84.Hart, R. (1979) Children's Experience of Place. New York: Irvington.Heidegger, M (1983) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell.Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R., Bartley, B. and Fuller, D. (2002) Thinking Geographically: Space,

Theory and Contemporary Human Geography. London: Continuum.Husserl, E. (1983) Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. The

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Kruse, R.J. II (2003) ‘Imagining Strawberry Fields as a place of pilgrimage’, Area, 35: 154–62.Mabon, B. (1998) ‘Clubbing’, in T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds), Cool Geographies:

Youth Cultures. London: Routledge, pp. 266–86.Meth, P. (2003) ‘Entries and omissions: using solicited diaries in geographical research’,

Area, 35: 195–205.Monaghan, P. (2001) ‘Lost in place’, The Chronicle, 16 March. www.chronicle.com/free/

v47/i27/27a01401.htm.Olsson, G. (1980) Bird in Egg: Eggs in Bird. London: Pion.Pocock, D. (ed.) (1981) Humanistic Geography and Literature. London: Croom Helm.Pocock, D. (1983) ‘Geographical fieldwork: an experiential perspective’, Geography, 68:

319–25.Pocock, D. (1987) A Sound Portrait of a Cathedral City, tape recording. Presented to the

Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 1987, Department of Geography,University of Durham.

Pocock, D. (1988a) ‘Aspects of humanistic perspectives in geography’, in D. Pocock(ed.), Humanistic Approaches to Geography. Occasional Paper (New Series) 22,pp. 1–11. Department of Geography, University of Durham.

Pocock, D. (1988b) ‘The music of geography’, in D. Pocock (ed.), Humanistic Approachesto Geography. Occasional Paper (New Series) 22, pp.62–71. Department of Geography,University of Durham.

Pocock, D. (1992) ‘Catherine Cookson Country: tourist expectation and experience’,Geography, 77: 236–43.

Pocock, D. (1996) ‘Place evocation: the Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral’, Transactionsof the Institute of British Geographers, 21: 379–86.

Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.Relph, E. (1985) ‘Geographical experience and being-in-the-world: the phenomenologi-

cal origins of geography’, in D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer (eds), Dwelling, Place andEnvironment. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, pp. 15–32.

Rodaway, P. (1987) ‘Experience and the everyday environment: a group reflectivestrategy’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Durham.

Rodaway, P. (1988) ‘Opening environmental experience’, in D. Pocock (ed.), HumanisticApproaches to Geography. Occasional Paper (New Series) 22, pp. 50–61. Departmentof Geography, University of Durham.



Rose, G. (1997) ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivity and other tactics’,Progress in Human Geography, 21: 305–20.

Routledge, P. (1997) ‘The imagery of resistance’, Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers, 22: 359–76.

Rowles, G. (1976) Prisoners of Space: Exploring the Geographical Experience of OlderPeople. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Rowles, G. (1978) ‘Reflections on experiential fieldwork’, in D. Ley and D. Samuels (eds),Humanistic Geography: Problems and Prospects. London: Croom Helm, Chapter 11.

Rowles, G. (1988) ‘What’s rural about rural ageing? An Appalachian perspective’,Journal of Rural Studies, 4: 115–24.

Seamon, D. (1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld. London: Croom Helm.Seamon, D. (1985) ‘Reconciling old and new worlds: the dwelling-journey relationship as

portrayed in Vilhelm Moberg’s “Emigrant” novels’, in D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer(eds), Dwelling, Place and Environment. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, pp. 227–46.

Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R. (eds) (1985) Dwelling, Place and Environment.Dordrecht: Nijhoff.

Ticknell, A. (1995) ‘Reflections on activism and the academy’, Environment and PlanningD: Society and Space, 13: 235–8.

Tuan, Yi-Fu (1971) ‘Geography, phenomenology and the study of human nature’,Canadian Geographer, 15.

Tuan, Yi-Fu (1974) Tophophilia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Tuan, Yi Fu (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London: Arnold.Tuan, Yi Fu (1979) Landscapes of Fear. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.Tuan, Yi-Fu (1993) Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature and Culture.

Washington, DC: Island/Shearwater.Tuan, Yi Fu (1999) Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit. Madison,

WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Widdowfield, R (2000) ‘The place of emotion in academic research’, Area, 32(2):

199–208.Women and Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers (1997)

Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow: Longman.

272ÿÿPRACTICES


CHANGING THE WORLD: GEOGRAPHY,POLITICAL ACTIVISM, AND MARXISM

Michael Samers

25

The philosophers have only interpretedthe world, in various ways, the point isto change it. (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach,number XI)

Introduction

This chapter explores the relationship betweengeography, activism, and Marxism. While fewgeographers would consider themselvesMarxists today, more than a handful probablysee themselves as activists, or at least inspiredby the activism of others. My purpose here,then, is to show how Marxism can, does, andshould inform practical interventions in theworld. However, I do not offer a ‘blueprint’for potential activists, nor do I outline thecontours of Marxism (this is accomplished inChapter 5 of this volume).And while there isa cavernous literature on activism in general,I focus on only a limited number of contri-butions by geographers who are or have beenworking from a Marxist tradition. Thus, inthe first section of this chapter, I review somegeneral criticisms of Marxism and then pro-vide a defence. This is followed in the sub-sequent section by a discussion of what DavidHarvey calls ‘dialectical, spatiotemporal utopi-anism’ in order to provide a foundation fora renewed Marxist geographical activism.This in turn lays the groundwork for honinga definition of Marxist geographical activismin the following section, and I discuss someof the promises and pitfalls of the difficult

movement between academic work andactivism.

Defending Marxism

Marxism and after-Marxismin geography

My purpose in this section is to focus onsome objections by the ‘after-Marxist’ or‘postmodern’ left to the ‘old’ or ‘modern’ left –that is, those who subscribe to one degree oranother to certain principles of Marxism,and who tend to focus on class inequalitiesand issues of political economy (see e.g.Castree, 1999a; Chouinard, 1994; Corbridge,1993; Fraser, 1995; Laclau and Mouffe, 1987;Sayer, 1995). After reviewing these objec-tions, I then provide a certain defence ofMarxism.

First, those associated with the after-Marxist/postmodern left are critical of theold/modern left for what they perceive tobe the obliteration of ‘difference’ (this wordusually refers to cultural differences between(groups of ) people) through class-alone dis-courses.They object not to the importance ofclass per se, but to the notion that class typi-cally implies the white male, heterosexual,able-bodied working classes (often workingin factories), to the exclusion of other kindsof oppressions and ‘identity politics’ such asthose based around ‘race’, ethnicity, gender,sexuality, age, (dis)ability, and so forth, and


occurring in different sites (e.g. the ‘home’rather than simply the factory). In fact, interms of the focus on factories, the after-Marxist/postmodern left was equally criticalof the undue focus on production rather thanconsumption (the latter would tie in particu-larly well with questions of identity).To para-phrase the political theorist Nancy Fraser(1995), social theory in general became pre-occupied with questions of recognition (thatis recognizing particular ‘cultural’ identities orinterests) to the detriment of redistribution(inequality and the redistribution of wealth,or in Marxist terms, surplus value). Second, interms of postmodern environmental thought,many associated Marxism with a (western)philosophy that – instead of a more ‘sustain-able’ dialogue with nature – entailed thedomination over the non-human world andan obsession with ‘productivism’. The latterrefers to a political philosophy of workers thatfavours a strategy of increasing production toprovide work for themselves, rather than amore revolutionary stance.Third, they arguedthat theories such as Marxism involved a ‘godtrick’ (a term used by the feminist historian ofscience Donna Haraway) by which the worldcould be understood through a dubiouslydetached and disembodied ‘scientific objec-tivity’. In other words, many geographerswanted to dismiss metatheory (that is ‘grand’or ‘totalizing’ theory that attempted to explaineverything through a single theoretical lens).Rather, knowledge should be ‘situated’ (so-called ‘situated knowledges’) in which theresearcher’s position should be explicit and‘locatable’. As Merrifield puts it, ‘Under suchcircumstances, knowledge is always embeddedin a particular time and space; it doesn’t seeeverything from nowhere but sees somethingfrom somewhere’ (1995: 51). Fourth, Marxismbecame associated negatively with ‘actuallyexisting socialism’ – meaning the sort ofpolitical economic systems that were to befound in China, Eastern Europe, and the for-mer Soviet Union prior to 1989, and their

record of non-democratic, authoritarian, andultimately repressive regimes symbolized bythe horrors of Stalinism. And thus, as Smithwrites, ‘many no longer saw revolutionarytransformation as achievable, realistic, or evennecessarily desirable’ (2000: 1019).

A response to critics and a shortdefence of Marxism

Most non-Marxist human geographers (andcertainly others) were quite right to highlightthe limits of Marxism, but in doing so theymanaged to jettison what remains useful inMarxism for building an activist geography. Inthe discussion below, then, I provide a defenceagainst some of the criticisms of Marxismdiscussed above.To reiterate, the first criticismof Marxist analysis centred on ‘class-alone’explanations, and at the same time, humangeographers seemed to write less and lessabout class. As a consequence, the economicgeographer Ray Hudson argued that: ‘It is ofthe utmost importance to stress that we livein a world in which capitalist social relationsare dominant, the rationale for production isprofit, class and class inequalities do remain,and that wealth distribution does matter’(2001: 2). Hudson leaves no doubt as to thestate of the world, but his reference to ‘class’and ‘class inequalities’ deserves at least someattention. Indeed, we need to focus on class asa concept, if only because the notion of a(potentially) ‘classless’ society is so pervasive,and because of the objections to class-alonediscourses, as discussed above.

The question of class and class struggle

Marx never offered any systematic theory ofclass conflict, nor did he have a fixed notionof class; nor, at least as Smith (2000) claims,did he privilege class in his analysis, despitethis image of his work as ‘class centred’. Itwould be left to Marxists, rather than Marxhimself, to expound on this matter. In this

274ÿÿPRACTICES


sense, the Hungarian Marxist György Lukácsdistinguished between ‘class-in-itself ’ and ‘class-for-itself ’. Class-in-itself implies that peopleconstitute a ‘class’ (such as the ‘working class’)by their relationship to the ‘means of produc-tion’, their control of the labour process, andtheir position in terms of the extraction ofsurplus value (see Chapter 5 in this volume).These are otherwise known as their ‘objectiveclass conditions’, regardless of whether theydemonstrate politically as a ‘class’.The conceptof class-in-itself is by no means accepted uncrit-ically. First, as I have noted above, Marxist classanalysis has been the subject of sustainedattack by feminist geographers for its neglectof gender and sexuality. Indeed, women whoperform unpaid domestic labour (‘house-work’) do not constitute a class in traditionalMarxist terms, and therefore have no place inMarxist analysis.

There are certainly other weaknesses or‘silences’ in Marxist class analysis, and in thisregard the geographer Richard Walker andthe sociologist-geographer Andrew Sayerargued in their book The New Social Economy(Sayer and Walker, 1992) that the study of classhas neglected the ‘division of labour’. (Thedivision of labour can be defined simply aswork specialization, either between families,firms, groups of people, and so on – in otherwords, the ‘social division of labour’ – orwithin specific firms – commonly called the‘technical division of labour’). Sayer andWalker maintain that the division of labour, inall its forms, has acted upon class formation,and class in turn has shaped the division oflabour throughout the history of capitalism.Thus, ‘One cannot settle on a tidy definitionof class that stops history in its tracks’ (1992:22).This has undeniable implications for theconcept of ‘class-for-itself ’, since the ever-changing division of labour has divided work-ers by age, gender, ethnicity, and so forth,which means they may have very differentpolitical interests – a point which Marxistshad either neglected or denied. Today, most

Marxists would presumably agree that theglobal working classes are diverse and frag-mented, and that gender, ethnicity, and so forthare not simply to be added to ‘class’. Rather,they acknowledge that class is constituted (i.e.constructed) through these different dimen-sions in the first instance (Blunt and Wills,2000; Sayer and Walker, 1992).That is, despitethe temptation to separate class and these otherdimensions analytically, we can argue that oneis disadvantaged partly because one’s body ismarked through racial and sexual coding, bynational citizenship, regional accent, mannerof dress and so forth.

With this in mind, let us turn toward thesecond of Lukács’ concepts: ‘class-for-itself ’.By this, Lukács meant that the ‘working classes’recognize themselves as such and organizepolitically on these grounds. In this sense,many may perceive the concept of ‘class’ to beobsolete because of the decline of traditionalindustrial (class) struggles. And there is morethan sufficient evidence to argue that the kindof production politics (that is the mobilizationof workers at particular sites of production)that punctuated industrial plants across theadvanced economies prior to the late 1980shas waned. But it has hardly disappeared (aca-demics in my own university are planning astrike as I write this) and geographers such asJane Wills and Andrew Herod have shown justhow resilient such struggles can be (Wills andWaterman, 2001; Herod, 2001a). And thereare other reasons to doubt the end of classstruggle. To begin with, much (industrial)strike activity against multinational corpora-tions has simply been displaced to the ‘globalsouth’ (the so-called ‘Third World’) while thecommand, control, advertising, marketing,and much of the distribution of multi-national products has remained in the advancedeconomies. The result is that to observers inthe advanced economies, industrial strugglesunder capitalism (the ‘bad old days of the1970s’ according to the UK Prime MinisterTony Blair) seem to have disappeared. Second,

GEOGRAPHY, POLITICAL ACTIVISM, AND MARXISMÿÿ275


class struggles can assume many forms, otherthan those we associate with traditional pro-duction politics.They can involve multi-issue,anti-globalization/anti-capitalist protests (suchas those that transpired at Seattle and Genoa,orthe traditional May Day protests in London).Similarly, traditional class struggle is increas-ingly indistinguishable from so-called ‘socialmovements’. Social movements refer to grass-roots activity around a particular set of politicalinterests such as environmental degradation,affordable housing, gay/lesbian rights, theprotest of domestic migrant workers, and soon. Nonetheless, the rise of such social move-ments is also affecting the strategies of what isconsidered to be the traditional class struggle –that is transnational workerist activism. Indeed,the academic activist Kim Moody (1997) hascalled this ‘social movement unionism’, bywhich he means such activism is movingtowards a ‘looser, more inclusive, more grass-roots way of working’ (Castree et al., 2003:224–5).

The problem of metatheory andthe ‘god trick’

Another objection to Marxist theory by thepostmodern and feminist left focused onMarxism’s ideological veil of objectivity –what Haraway calls the ‘god trick’ – and sucha critique is actually vital for a reinvigoratedMarxist activism. Let me explain. To recall,Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledges’insists on the partial nature of understand-ing the world (‘seeing something fromsomewhere’, rather than ‘everything fromnowhere’) that is always open, and makes noclaim to absolute privileged knowledge. AsMerrifield puts it, ‘There are always differentand contrasting ways of knowing the world,equally partial and equally contestable’ (1995:51). And yet, this can lead us down a pathof hopeless relativism that Haraway herselfacknowledges. Indeed, for Haraway rela-tivism and objectivism/absolutism (the ‘god

trick’) are mirror images. Merrifield arguesthen:

To this extent a committed and situatedknowledge offers a corrective to the god-tricks of positivism and some post-modernism: situatedness implies that anunderstanding of reality is accountableand responsible for an enabling politicalpractice. Ultimately then, the realm ofpolitics conditions what may count as trueknowledge. (1995: 51)

Thus, Merrifield shows how (in his discussionof a radical expedition in Detroit in the late1960s, which I consider later in the chapter)situated knowledges can be deployed in anactivist geography that is able to ‘circumventthe current paralysis within “strong” post-modern critical theory’ (1995: 52) – strong inthe sense that some versions of postmodernismrelativize all knowledge.

On the death of ‘actually existingsocialism’ and the rise of ‘criticalgeographies’

The last of the criticisms of Marxism I discussconsisted of a damning assessment of theregimes of China, the former Soviet Unionand the Soviet bloc countries. I do not havethe space here to elaborate on the nature ofthese regimes, but criticisms of authoritarian-ism and repression are more than justified.However, their failure as socialist projects hascontributed (along with potent doses of whathas come to be called ‘neoliberal’ ideology) toa lack of political imagination about alterna-tives to capitalist social relations, or at least to‘neoliberalism’. As a consequence, interest inMarxism has declined as an analytical lens andsocialism as a practical project. Indeed, theformer Prime Minister of Britain, MargaretThatcher, proclaimed ‘the end of society’ and‘there is no alternative’ (to capitalism). Thus,in reference to the Seattle protests against the

276ÿÿPRACTICES


WTO and global neoliberalism, Merrifieldlaments: ‘protesters are denounced as idiotic,juvenile, naïve: listen up, wise up, grow up.There is no alternative’ (2002: 133).As a con-sequence, the Marxist geographer DavidHarvey (2000) proclaims, utopianism hasdeveloped a bad name.

The response to such conservative cyni-cism is not an easy one, since many academicson the ‘left’ can no longer envision an alter-native to capitalist social relations, and Marxist(or radical) geography seems to have beensuperseded by a wider hue of what has cometo be called critical geographies. So much so,that we might say that ‘all geographers arecritical geographers now’ (The term ‘criticalgeography’ even appeared in the subtitle ofone of Harvey’s most recent books Spaces ofCapital ). Curiously, the distinction betweenMarxist and critical geography is one that hassomehow escaped substantial debate in geo-graphy (but see Castree, 2000a; 2000b), andit begs the question whether one ought todistinguish between the two at all. If we donot, some burning questions remain, suchas: do struggles that are not defined by classreally challenge capitalism as a system? Inother words, are ‘new’ critical geographiessimply liberal and reformist in contrast to pre-vious and (apparently) more revolutionaryMarxist geographies? Kathy Gibson and JulieGraham (Gibson-Graham, 1996; CommunityEconomies Collective, 2001) have even ques-tioned whether capitalism is a system at all,and stress the need to see the world as a com-position of a variety of ‘economies’. In such away, they seek to emphasize and celebratenon-capitalist spaces (communal enterprises,local currency initiatives, and so forth) inorder to construct a non-capitalist imagina-tion that moves from the local to the global,and does not rely on an overwhelmingly dif-ficult blueprint for socialism. In a way, KathyGibson, Julie Graham, and the CommunityEconomies Collective have reawakened ananti-capitalist sensibility without having us

suffocate under the heavy weight of a largelyunimaginable socialism.

Nonetheless, what began with the radicaljournal Antipode in 1969 continues with achorus of geographers who may not wear the‘Marxist badge’ so prominently, but who arenonetheless committed to a rainbow of oppo-sitional social change. For example, DonMitchell (currently a Professor at SyracuseUniversity in the United States and in factmore unwilling to jettison the Marxist badge)established in 1999 the People’s GeographyProject’– a network of geographers and schol-ars engaged in projects that are about contest-ing existing power relations (see http://www.peoplesgeography.org).At the same time,oppo-sitional geographers held the first ‘InternationalConference of Critical Geography’ inVancouver in 1997 as a response to morestatus quo academic institutions, and out ofthis, some of its principal organizers launcheda free-access online journal ACME: AnInternational E-Journal for Critical Geographies in2002 (see http://www.acme-journal.org).Apparently, the flame of anti-capitalism has yetto be extinguished.

Dialectical, spatiotemporal utopianism

Beginning with Harvey’s ‘historical geo-graphical manifesto’ in 1984 (from which thePeople’s Geography Project draws its inspira-tion), we find the root of what Harvey (2000)has recently called ‘a dialectical and spatio-temporal utopianism’. In other words, he seeksa utopian project – not one that is based on‘pious universalisms’, not one divorced fromthe materiality of the social world, but onethat is forged with a vision of space and time,and from the material circumstances in whichwe find ourselves. Spatiotemporal dialecticalutopianism calls for the integration of the‘particular’ (particular spatial and temporallydefined interests) and the ‘universal’ (per-ceived or envisioned commonalities that areproduced through space and time).



A short example will suffice to illustratewhat Harvey means.While Harvey occupiedthe prestigious Halford Mackinder Chair atOxford University, he, along with a localactivist (Teresa Hayter), published a book enti-tled The Factory and the City (1994). In thiswork, Harvey recounts the problems and dis-agreements of their involvement in a cam-paign to save the Rover plant in Cowley, nearOxford. In particular, Hayter questionedHarvey’s allegiances. Did he really support theCowley workers, or was he just a ‘free-floatingintellectual’ musing about the internationalbut abstract cause of socialism? Harveyresponded that he supported the Cowleyworkers (the particular if you will) but was alsoconcerned about overcapacity in the Europeanautomobile industry and what eventual impli-cations this had for all automobile workers(the universal).

Yet for Harvey, his version of utopia mustalso involve certain ‘closures’. That is, againstthe after-Marxist/postmodern left, he arguesthat universal absolutes are both unavoidableand necessary. But Harvey demands opennessas well for his utopia – the kind of ‘hetero-topia’ imagined by the social and political the-orist Michel Foucault, and so praised by thepostmodernists. Certainly, Harvey’s utopiaraises questions about ‘commonalities’ or ‘uni-versals’ and how these are supposed to be con-structed through time and space, and it is tosome of these thorny issues that we now turn.

Building universals

Just as white-male-led trade unionism failed toengage (and sometimes continues to activelyexclude) working-class people of colour (e.g.immigrants) in their struggle for economicjustice, so too have some critical and opposi-tional movements based on allegedly non-class-based issues (e.g. affluent feminists) failedto engage with other struggles by working-class feminists and therefore did not galva-nize a broader coalition of people. Similarly,

Smith (2000) recounts the limitations of theanti-AIDS struggles in New York City in theform of the ACT UP organization. He arguesthat the otherwise remarkably imaginative andsuccessful campaign of ACT UP (led primar-ily by wealthier gay men) eventually collapsedbecause of its failure to engage with a widerset of struggles, namely those of working-classactivists, intravenous drug users, people ofcolour, and lesbians.That is, the levelling off ofHIV infection among white gay men meantthat this particular group had less reason tocarry on the struggle, and therefore missed anopportunity for a much wider oppositionalmovement.

As Harvey and Smith argue, the point isthat the interests of certain groups (the ‘partic-ular’) must be aligned with a search for com-monalities (the universal). In fact, locally basedstruggles, situated as they are within a widerpolitical economy, can actually underminemore global forms of activism.The search forcommonalities is premised upon the idea that‘universals are socially constructed not given’(Harvey, 2000: 247), and we ‘know a great dealabout what divides people but nowhere nearenough about what we have in common’(2000:245). It is only in seeing commonalities –or what Castree et al. call, in the context ofwage workers, ‘contingent universals … Thatis, commonalities that appear to be “inherent”to all wage workers but which are, in fact,strategically useful concoctions’ (2003: 242) –that collective struggle can be carried out.The importance of vision for Marxist orsocialist struggle is one that is emphasizedby a number of Marxist geographers (see espe-cially DeFilippis, 2001; Merrifield, 2002).Nonetheless, not all geographers workingfrom a Marxist or anti-capitalist tradition areso comfortable with universals.As I suggestedabove, the Community Economies Collective(2001), for example, is more concerned withmoving from local oppositional movements toa wider scale of anti-capitalist struggle withoutthe construction of universals.

278ÿÿPRACTICES


Coping with scale

The Marxist cultural geographer DonMitchell (2000) writes that any strong notionof worker in/justice must be ‘fully situatedwithin a politics of scale’. Thus, from Marx’sfamous dictum at the close of the CommunistManifesto – ‘WORKING MEN OF ALLCOUNTRIES UNITE!’ – it has been tacitlyassumed that trade unions for example (as rep-resentatives of the working classes) have toorganize internationally or globally in order tocombat global capitalism.Perhaps not coincid-entally, in the 1980s – a time when Marxismbecame increasingly discredited – the apho-rism ‘Think globally, act locally’ emerged aspopular on the bumper stickers of Americancars). In other words, one had to have a cos-mopolitan, multicultural, global understandingof injustice, but any political action could notrealistically take place (or so the bumper stick-ers proclaimed) at the global level. In short,one had to act locally for any meaningfulchange to be fruitful.Who was right, Marx orthat ubiquitous slogan?

Certainly, not all geographers agree withwhat might be considered ‘Marx’s implicitpolitics of scale’. I will discuss two such objec-tions here. First, Herod (2001b) provides ananalysis of two disputes between workers andmanagement, the first at Ravenswood, WestVirginia and the other at a General Motorsplant in Flint, Michigan. While Herod con-cedes that in the case of Ravenswood a moretranslocal and global strategy worked, in thecase of the latter a local strategy proved suc-cessful owing to the particular importance ofFlint’s factory to GM’s national production sys-tem.As he writes, the success of the Flint strike‘is testimony to the power that locally focusedindustrial actions on the part of workers maysometimes have in an increasingly integratedglobal economy’ (2001b: 114). Nonetheless,his paper concludes that neither strategyamong workers,‘going global’ or ‘going local’,is necessarily more successful. Similarly, James

DeFilippis (2001) stresses the importance ofthe local and ‘community’ in acting up againstglobal capitalism.Here, I can do no better thanrepeat a passage he cites from Naomi Klein:

There are clearly moments to demon-strate, but perhaps more importantly,there are moments to build the connec-tions that make demonstration somethingmore than theatre. There are clearly timeswhen radicalism means standing up to thepolice, but there are many more timeswhen it means talking to your neighbor.(cited in De Filippis, 2001: 5)

For DeFilippis,his objection to only focusing onglobal-level interventions rested on how certainpeoples and places were left out of the protest-ing equation. As he notices, ‘One of the keycritiques leveled against the anti-globalizationprotesters is that they are overwhelminglywhite and middle class’ (2001:5).Global protesthad not included the poor of the global south,nor disenfranchised African Americans andLatinos, for example. However, like Herod,he is certainly not dismissing the spectacu-lar forms of anti-capitalist/anti-globalizationprotests that transpired in Seattle in November1999. That is, he is not rejecting the protestsagainst the capitalist system as a whole (some-times associated with the global scale). Rather,he echoes Harvey who claims: ‘the choice ofspatial scale [concerning politics or protest] isnot “either/or” but “both/and”, even thoughthe latter entails confronting serious contra-dictions’ (2001: 391).

Towards a Marxist GeographicalActivism

Defining a Marxistgeographical activism

There is no unambiguous or uncontesteddefinition of activism, let alone Marxist



geographical activism. Let us, however, definethe latter tentatively as active engagement withsocial movements against capitalist oppressionthrough collective struggle. Collective implies atendency to universalism without neglectingparticularism. It means that Marxist activistsneed not be restricted to oppression definedin strictly ‘class’ terms, and that such activismagainst class oppression should not excludeother protest movements. Indeed, as Smithsuggested earlier, ‘‘‘Back to class” in any narrowsense is its own self-defeating cul-de-sac’(2000: 1028).

At the very least, this distinguishesMarxist geographical activism from both par-ticipatory research and status quo policy-making. Let me elaborate on this. First,Marxist geographical activism should not beconfused with all ‘participatory action (PA)research’. For Rachel Pain, the common ele-ment of PA research is that ‘research is under-taken collaboratively with and for theindividuals, groups or communities who areits subject. Participatory approaches present apromising means of making real in practicethe stated goals and ideals of critical geo-graphy’ (2003: 653). If we ignore her failure todefine what is meant by ‘critical geography’ –a crucial omission – Pain notes that PA researchhas grown in part because of the need by pro-fessional geographers to look towards non-academic bodies for funding, or because theresearch should have ‘user relevance’ (2003:651). On the one hand, this careerist rationalefor PA research probably does not rank highamong the reasons for which the politicallycommitted Marxist geographer becomesinvolved (after all, ‘user relevance’ could alsomean developing GIS applications for militaryoppression). On the other hand, PA researchcan certainly rest on more Marxist motivationsfor action and does not necessarily exclude aMarxist perspective.

Second, activism can indeed involvepolicy-making. As Merrifield writes, throughactivism, ‘academic geographers can articulate

the “collective will” of a people (Gramsci’sphrase) by gaining access and speaking topower elites, or by giving evidence at publicinquiries and the like’ (1995: 62).And as DavidHarvey (2001) has maintained, the issue is notso much whether Marxists should be involvedin policy-making but what kind of publicpolicy is necessary. Thus, activist researchshould not be deemed ‘good’ if it is grassrootsand bottom up, and ‘bad’ if it is top down andstate policy oriented (Pain, 2003). The ques-tion of the relationship between activism andthe state has long historical antecedents.During the nineteenth century, an agonizingdivide existed between Marxist anarchists (likeKropotkin) and those Marxists who believedthe control of the state remained key to secur-ing a better future for the world’s proletariat.

This debate more or less repeated itself inthe 1990s, when Nick Blomley (1994) pub-lished an editorial calling for a renewal of theactivist tradition. In an editorial reply, AdamTickell (1994) argued for an activist engage-ment with the state (absent in large measurefrom Blomley’s editorial). Such engagementremained indispensable, Tickell claimed,because it meant a way of building a reformist‘meso-level social order’ in response to theravages of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, heasserted, neoliberalism was being meted out atthe national and international scales, andtherefore activist geographers had to inter-vene at these scales, rather than at the level of‘local communities’ that Blomley seemed toprivilege. Blomley replied in the same issueand, while tending to agree with Tickell, alsocautioned him that the boundary betweenthe state and community was not always clearand that activism through the state, ratherthan through Blomley’s own experience ofactivism – that is through local communityorganizing – ‘can all too easily be blunted, andeven redefined and positioned for conserva-tive ends’ (1994: 240).

Third, for academics, activism is generallyassociated with doing something ‘out there’,

280ÿÿPRACTICES


but universities can be oppressive places aswell, and therefore (Marxist geographical)activism should also be turned ‘inwards’ towardsuniversities themselves. Castree (1999b) callsthis ‘domesticating critical geography’. Suchactivism could begin, for example, by studentand academic involvement in fighting forhigher wages for those cleaners and otherworkers who maintain university campuses orlow-paid teaching assistants and/or those ontemporary contracts.

Fourth, Maxey (1999) points out that themedia have popularized a view of activismthat has ‘emphasized dramatic, physical,“macho” forms of activism with short-termpublic impacts’. Using feminist theory, heargues instead that activism should seek to‘inspire, encourage, and engage as manypeople as possible’ (1999: 200). Fifth, Maxeyinsists on the value of ‘reflexivity’ for activism,and seeks to emphasize the false divide betweentheory and activism (see also the special issueof Area, 1999 and the papers from the ‘Beyondthe Academy: Critical Geographies in Action’conference1). It is to this question of theory(and writing) and activism to which we shallnow turn.

Theory, writing and activism

When geographers theorize or write from aMarxist perspective, they are Marxist activists.In other words, theory and writing are formsof activism. Indeed,as Frank Lentricchia wrote,‘struggles for hegemony are sometimes foughtout in (certainly relayed through) colleges anduniversities; fought undramatically, yard foryard, and sometimes over minor texts ofBalzac: no epic heroes, no epic acts’ (cited inBarnes, 2002: 9).

But there are two issues here. One is therelationship between theory and activism andthe other is the question of writing. First, theborder between academic theory and practiceis fluid and ambiguous, as many activist geo-graphers insist. For example, what happens,

asks the activist James DeFilippis, if the‘community’ is wrong?2 Indeed, can a ‘com-munity’ be wrong? In general, the geographerPaul Routledge (1996) refers to the challengeof moving between the academy and the‘outside’ as ‘critical engagement’.

An early example in geography of thedifficulty of ‘critical engagement’ is witnessedin William Bunge’s famous (and at thattime surely infamous) Detroit GeographicalExpedition. During the 1960s, Bungeremained a theoretical geographer mostlyconcerned with abstract mathematical mod-elling. However, expelled from Detroit’sWayne State University in 1967, Bunge cre-ated the Detroit Geographical Expeditionand Institute (later the Society for HumanExploration) because he became enraged atthe striking social differences between thewhite suburbs of Detroit and the ‘black’‘inner city’. Young black kids were literallystarving and being run over by cars in frontof their homes. Infant mortality had reachedalarming rates. The Society for HumanExploration sought to engage local people asboth students and professors in an ‘expedi-tion’ to inner city Detroit. (Bunge used theterm ‘expedition’ apparently as a way ofsubverting more traditional geographicalexpeditions and any given starting point forthe expedition in Detroit would become the‘base camp’.) By 1970, the education wing ofthe Society offered 11 alternative coursesthroughout southern Michigan educationalinstitutions to black students – tuition oftenbeing paid from voluntary contributionsby professors. In 1972, after moving toToronto,Bunge established CAGE (Canadian–American Geographical Expedition) involv-ing both Toronto and Vancouver. However,Bunge points out that the Vancouver expedi-tion failed because it ‘lacked a true commu-nity base and was never self-critical about itsdemocratic failings’ (cited in Merrifield,1995: 63). Furthermore, by 1973 the Detroitinstitute eventually fell apart as activist



students graduated and left the university andBunge himself departed for Toronto, in partbecause local universities no longer toleratedthe ‘alternativeness’ and volunteer nature of theproject. (For an extended discussion of Bungeand the Detroit Geographical Expedition, seeBunge,1977;Horvath,1971;Merrifield, 1995;Peet, 1977.) And yet Peet recounts the signi-ficance of Bunge’s efforts:

Expeditions provided an alternative sourceof information and planning skills tohelp low income communities bargainfor power over their own affairs. Likewiseadvocate geographers and planners offeredtheir professional experience to disenfran-chised groups to help them deal withpowerful institutions and eventually to shiftpower to the presently powerless. (1997: 15)

Similarly, Merrifield claims:

expeditions become more than anattempt to learn about the impoverished:they become an effort to learn with themthe oppressive reality that confronts ordi-nary people in their daily lives. (1995: 63)

In this context, the task of writing is notimmune to difficulty. But there can be twointerrelated ‘moments’ of writing. The firstconsists of writing for an academic or studentaudience usually ‘post-expedition’ (althoughas I suggested all oppositional writing is a formof activism and need not be generated fromthe so-called ‘field’). When writing for suchan audience, the problem of how to representthe ‘oppressed’ is a chief issue. On the onehand, Richard Peet asserts: ‘We have to getover the blockage to action formed by a reluc-tance to speak for others’ (2000: 953). Thismay be necessary to galvanize the more reflec-tive of us into action, but the problem of rep-resentation is unlikely to go away so easily.On the other hand, Merrifield (1995) seeks toemploy a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ (afterPaolo Freire), in which one writes with the‘oppressed’. At any rate, writing only for an

academic or student audience has its limitsbecause of a limited readership.This is not todenigrate the seriousness, purpose, and effectof academic writing (including this chapter!)but, as Bunge put it, we need less ‘citing’ andmore ‘siting’ (Merrifield, 1995).

The second – which would appeal moreto Bunge – is writing for an audience beyondthe academy (public or governmental officials,lawyers, etc.) in the form of reports, petitions,and so forth. In this case too, the problems ofrepresentation do not disappear. Even writingin a collective with other non-academic com-munity activists raises problems, since theymay not represent the opinions of the whole‘community’. Furthermore, while academicpapers often demand theoretical nuance, andan exclusive scholarly lexicon, such complexityand ‘jargon’ would be usually out of place in,for example, an oppositional report addressedto public officials.

In sum, Marxist activist geography is notsimply concerned with an ethnography of thepoor (that is through a close dialogue withthe oppressed), nor is it just participatoryaction research; rather it is about working withpeople in a non-patronizing way to assist –rather than necessarily direct – their organizationand protest against (collectively determined)oppression. This may involve writing andcareful planning with an inspirational vision(as DeFilippis reminds us), non-violent worksuch as cyber-protests, petition gathering,marching, and boycotting, or (despite thecontentions of Maxey) spontaneous and vio-lent protest as we saw at Seattle, Genoa, orQuebec City (Merrifield, 2002). In the lastcase, the distinction between scholar andactivist becomes very blurry indeed.

Conclusions

While few geographers would label them-selves ‘Marxists’ today, this does not diminishthe value of the Marxist legacy. What seemsto have changed among Marxist geographers is

282ÿÿPRACTICES


that ‘class-alone’ arguments – either theoreticallyor as a basis for action – have been relin-quished in favour of nurturing an imagina-tion for a broader coalition of contestationagainst capitalist social relations. (I use thisterm, instead of the more systemic word ‘cap-italism’, after Gibson-Graham.) This does notmean that ‘class’ as a social relation (ratherthan a category of people) has become anyless important for Marxists. Indeed, geo-graphers working in the Marxist vein may bemore concerned with class exploitation andquestions of economic justice than with whatappears to be non-economic (cultural) formsof justice.

Nonetheless, Marxist geographers do notsee local, particularist or cultural struggles asnecessarily inadequate to the task of fightingcapitalist oppression (although local strugglescan potentially undermine more global formsof activism, as Harvey argues). Rather, theysee a contradiction between the particular andthe universal and the need to reconcile these,somehow. Thus, the Marxist geographicalactivist treads a difficult path between a hope-fulness about an emancipatory future – a col-lectivist vision if you will – and a realizationthat the world is a complex place.

Yet complexity, and the difficulty of con-structing commonalities or universals beyondthose strictly defined by class, should notseduce us into a hopeless relativism or a cyn-ical scepticism about the necessity of activism,and the possibility of socialism or someother emancipatory form of society (see e.g.Corbridge, 1993).Again, referring to Bunge’sDetroit Geographical Expedition, Merrifieldpoints out that ‘through expeditions it isincumbent upon the geographer to becomea person of action, a radical problem-raiser,

a responsible critical analyst participating withthe oppressed.That said, the ambit of the geo-grapher’s responsibility is always ambiguous’(1995: 63).

No doubt, amongst this ambiguity, there ispotentially a substantial price to pay for mostprofessional geographers. One’s activism maybe deemed too ‘radical’. Furthermore, to beactively involved in such anti-capitalist move-ments takes time, and this may clash withprofessional expectations like publishing inrecognized academic journals (Castree, 2000a;Routledge, 1996). Nonetheless, Marxist activistgeographers tend not to be primarily con-cerned about career advancement, and at anyrate, active engagement may be as fruitful andrewarding for one’s professional life as it can bedamaging. In any case, somewhere in the spaceof a geographer’s professional life (teaching,publishing, earning grant money) there is lim-ited room for activism. Professional obligationneed not mean all or nothing.

In fact, inaction means capitalist socialrelations will perpetuate inequality and thebulk of the globe will suffer. There is toomuch injustice for us to be relativist aboutthis. How can we be, in a world in whichsome live comfortably – even lavishly – whileothers die of toil, starvation and disease? Thisis precisely why the Marxist critique of capi-talist social relations is so vital for understand-ing and acting in the world, and for sharing ageographical project that is less oppressivethan the one in which we currently live.

NOTES1 http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/

ss/gem/conferences/timetable.html2 Personal communication, February 2004.


ReferencesArea (1999) ‘Research, Action and “Critical Geographies” ’, theme issue, 31: 195–246.Barnes, T.J. (2002) ‘Critical notes on economic geography from an aging radical: or,

radical notes on economic geography from a critical age’, ACME: An InternationalE-Journal for Critical Geographies, 1: 8–14.


Blomley, N. (1994) ‘Activism and the academy’, Environment and Planning D: Societyand Space, 12: 383–5.

Blunt, A. and Wills, J. (2000) Dissident Geographies. Harlow: Prentice Hall.Bunge, W. (1977) ‘The first years of the Detroit Geographical Expedition: a personal

report’, in R. Peet (ed.), Radical Geography: Alternative Viewpoints on ContemporarySocial Issues. Chicago, IL: Maaroufa.

Castree, N. (1999a) ‘Envisioning capitalism: geography and the renewal of Marxist politicaleconomy’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24: 137–58.

Castree, N. (1999b) ‘ “Out there”? “In here”? Domesticating critical geography’, Area, 31:81–6.

Castree, N. (2000a) ‘Professionalisation, activism, and the university: whither “criticalgeography” ’, Environment and Planning A, 32: 955–70.

Castree, N. (2000b) ‘What kind of critical geography for what kind of politics?’,Environment and Planning A, 32: 2091–270.

Castree, N., Coe, N., Ward, K. and Samers, M. (2003) Spaces of Work: Global Capitalismand Geographies of Labour. London: Sage.

Chouinard, V. (1994) ‘Reinventing radical geography: is all that’s Left Right?’,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12: 2–6.

Community Economies Collective (2001) ‘Imagining and enacting noncapitalist futures’,Socialist Review, 28: 93–135.

Corbridge, S. (1993) ‘Marxisms, modernities, and moralities: development praxis and theclaims of distant strangers’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11:449–72.

DeFilippis, J. (2001) http://comm-org.utoledo.edu/papers2001/defilippis.htm, accessed26 December 2003.

Fraser, N. (1995) ‘From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “post-socialist” age’, New Left Review, 212: 68–93.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.Harvey, D. (2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: University

of Edinburgh Press.Harvey, D. and Hayter, T. (1994) The Factory and the City: The Story of the Cowley

Automobile Workers in Oxford. London: Mansell.Herod, A. (2001a) Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism.

New York: Guilford.Herod, A. (2001b) ‘Labor internationalisms and the contradictions of globalization: or,

why the local is sometimes still important in the global economy’, in P. Waterman andJ. Wills (eds), Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms. Oxford: Blackwell.

Horvath, R. (1971) ‘“The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute” experience’,Antipode, 3: 73–85.

Hudson, R. (2001) Producing Places. New York: Guilford Press.Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1987) ‘Post-Marxism without apologies’, New Left Review,

166: 79–106.Maxey, I. (1999) ‘Beyond boundaries? Activism, academia, reflexivity and research’,

Area, 31(3): 199–208.

284ÿÿPRACTICES


Merrifield, A. (1993) ‘The Canary Wharf debacle: From TINA there is no alternative toTHEMBA there must be an alternative’, Environment and Planning A, 25: 1247–65.

Merrifield, A. (1995) ‘Situated knowledge through exploration: reflections on Bunge’sgeographical expeditions’, Antipode, 27: 49–70.

Merrifield, A. (2002) ‘Guest editorial: Seattle, Quebec, Genoa: Après le Déluge … HenriLefebvre’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20: 127–34.

Mitchell, D. (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Moody, K. (1997) Workers in a Lean World. London: Verso.Pain, R. (2003) ‘Social geography: on action-oriented research’, Progress in Human

Geography, 27: 649–57.Peet, R. (1977) ‘The development of radical geography in the United States’, in R. Peet

(ed.), Radical Geography: Alternative Viewpoints on Contemporary Social Issues.Chicago, IL: Maaroufa.

Peet, R. (2000) ‘Celebrating thirty years of radical geography’, Environment andPlanning A.

Routledge, P. (1996) ‘The third space as critical engagement’, Antipode, 28: 398–419.Sayer, A. (1995) Radical Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell.Sayer, A. and Walker, R. (1992) The New Social Economy: Reworking the Social Division

of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell.Smith, N. (2000) ‘What happened to class?’, Environment and Planning A, 32: 1011–32.Tickell, A. (1994) ‘Reflections on “Activism and the academy” ’, Environment and Planning

D: Society and Space, 13: 235–7.Wills, J. and Waterman, P. (2001) Place, Space, and the New Labour Internationalisms.

Oxford: Blackwell.



PRODUCING FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES: THEORY,METHODOLOGIES AND RESEARCH STRATEGIES

Kim England

For some time now feminist geographershave been engaged in a lively debate aboutresearch methods and methodology. Debatesare an important part of knowledge produc-tion, and feminist geographers have not (anddo not) all agree on the best way to producefeminist understandings of the world. In partthis is because there is not a singular feministgeography but rather several strands existingsimultaneously. So there are multiple, evencompeting visions of feminist geographies,with disagreements, negotiations and com-promises around different approaches to prac-ticing and producing feminist geographies.That said, there are commonalities among thestrands of feminist geography. At the heart offeminist geographies are analyses of the com-plexities of power, privilege, oppression andrepresentation, with gender foregrounded asthe primary social relation (although genderis increasingly understood as constructedacross a multiplicity of social relations of dif-ference). Feminist geographers expose the(often ‘naturalized’) power relations in pastand contemporary constructions of gender.And feminist geographers share the politicaland intellectual goal of socially and politicallychanging the world they seek to understand.

Feminist research challenges and redefinesdisciplinary assumptions and methods, anddevelops new understandings of what countsas knowledge. In this chapter I discuss oneof the most important aspects of ‘the femi-nist challenge’: our debates about methods

(techniques used to collect and analyze ‘data’)and methodologies (the epistemological ortheoretical stance taken towards a particularresearch problem).1 The task of the first feministgeographers was to recover women in humangeography and to address geographers’ persis-tent erasure of gender differences. Thus earlyfeminist scholarship closely focused on chal-lenging male dominance, making women’slives visible and counting and ‘mapping’ gen-der inequalities. Debates about methods andmethodologies were about the usefulness forfeminists of existing (gender-blind, sexist,malestream) methods of inquiry, especiallyquantitative methods, standardized surveys and‘traditional’ interviews conducted ‘objec-tively’. Debates focused on ‘Is there a feministmethod?’ and ‘Which method is most femi-nist?’‘Feminist’ here is adjectival in the sense ofwhether certain research methods are ‘femi-nist’ in they way that some are ‘quantitative’or ‘qualitative’. Qualitative methods, especiallyinteractive interviews, were generally consid-ered best suited to the goals and politics offeminist analysis (Reinharz, 1979; Oakley,1981; Stanley and Wise, 1993). In their recol-lections about these early feminist debates,Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (1993) assert thatthey were not really about method as such,but about sexist methodologies and competingepistemologies. In fact they and others arguethat there is nothing inherently feminist ineither quantitative or qualitative methods, butthat what is ‘feminist’ is the epistemological stance

26


taken towards methods and the uses to whichresearchers put them. No single methodprovides privileged access to the ‘truth’, and asit becomes less imperative (and less expedient)to associate certain methods with particularepistemologies, there has been a move towardsthe choice of appropriate method dependingon the research question being asked.

The argument I make in this chapter isthat feminists’ contributions to research prac-tices in human geography are generally moreabout epistemology (ways of knowing theworld), methodology, and politics than aboutinventing new research methods. In the firstsection I discuss the various epistemologicalclaims feminist scholars make about researchmethods and methodologies. In the secondsection I turn to the methods feminist geo-graphers rely on to produce and representfeminist understandings of the world.

Methods and Methodology in FeministGeographies

Since its inception in the 1970s, feministgeography has deconstructed the ‘taken-for-granted’ and offered profound and influentialcritiques of conventional concepts and cat-egories in human geography (see Chapter 4).Across the academy, feminist scholars chal-lenged conventional wisdom that ‘goodresearch’ requires impartiality and ‘scientific’objectivity. Since then feminist scholars havecontinued to challenge conventional wisdomand to develop feminist approaches to know-ledge production. Feminists have produced asizeable literature about feminist methods andmethodologies, and in the last several yearsgeographers have published many book chap-ters and journal articles on this topic (e.g.McDowell,1992; special issues of The CanadianGeographer, 1993; The Professional Geographer,1994;1995;Gibson-Graham,1994; Jones et al.,

1997; Moss, 2001; 2002;ACME, 2003). In thissection I describe the major elements of thediscussion regarding the epistemological claimsand politics of practicing feminist researchthat are entwined in the ongoing processof feminist knowledges creation and femi-nists’ commitment to progressive researchpractices. (Much of my description of thisdiscussion is about face-to-face researchencounters, but similar arguments are madeabout other methods: see Gillian Rose, 2001on visual cultures and methodologies; andMona Domosh, 1997 on feminist historicalgeography.)

Critique of positivism and situatedknowledges

The ‘western industrial scientific approachvalues the orderly, rational, quantifiable, pre-dictable, abstract and theoretical: feminismspat in its eye’ (Stanley and Wise, 1993: 66).Early on, feminists raised suspicions that ‘goodresearch’ could be produced only by unbiased‘experts’ seeking universal truths by usingvalue-free data where ‘the facts speak forthemselves’. Research informed by the ‘west-ern industrial scientific approach’ is anchoredby a positivist epistemology of objectivity.Positivism, what it values (rationality, etc.),and the search for universal truths and all-encompassing knowledge constitute anapproach Donna Haraway describes as an all-seeing ‘god trick … seeing everything fromnowhere’ (1991: 189). No research inquiry,whether positivist or indeed humanist orfeminist, exists outside the realms of ideologyand politics; research is never value-free (even‘hard science’ research). Instead, feministsunderstand research to be produced in aworld already interpreted by people, includ-ing ourselves, who live their lives in it. Bybecoming ‘researchers’, whether physicists orfeminists, we cannot put aside common-sense

PRODUCING FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIESÿÿ287


understandings of the world. Instead, feministsargue,‘good research’ must be sensitive to howvalues, power and politics frame what we taketo be ‘facts’, how we develop a particularresearch approach and what research questionswe ask and what we see when conductingresearch.

Since the early 1990s, feminist critiques ofobjectivity have been enriched by feministscholars of science and technology studies (e.g.Fox-Keller, 1985; Harding, 1986; Haraway,1991). Evelyn Fox-Keller argues that tradi-tional western thought rests on an ontology (atheory of what is, and the relations betweenwhat is) of self/other opposition, and a binaryopposition between (male) objectivity and(female) subjectivity. Her alternative is a femi-nist relational ontology of self–other mutual-ity and continual process (rather than stasis).Haraway argues for an embodied feminist objec-tivity where both researchers and participantsare appreciated for their situated knowledges andpartial perspectives. Situated knowledges meansthat there is no one truth waiting to be dis-covered; and those knowledges are situational,marked by the contexts in which they are pro-duced, by their specificity, limited location,and partiality.

Researcher–researched relationshipand power relations

Sensitivity to power relations lies at the veryheart of feminists’ discussions about method/methodology. Traditional objectivist socialscience methods (be they quantitative orqualitative) position researchers as detachedomniscient experts in control of the researchprocess, the (passive) objects of their research,and themselves (remaining unbiased by beingdetached, uninvolved and distant). Feministrelational ontology and embodied feministobjectivity challenge this strict dichotomybetween object and subject. In feministresearch, especially in face-to-face fieldwork,

the researched are not passive, they areknowledgeable agents accepted as ‘experts’ oftheir own experience. Instead of attemptingto minimize interaction (in order to minimizeobserver bias), feminists deliberately andconsciously seek interaction. Feministresearchers try to reduce the distance betweenourselves and the researched by building onour commonalities, working collaborativelyand sharing knowledge. By seeking researchrelationships based on empathy, mutuality andrespect, feminists focus on the informant’sown understanding of their circumstancesand the social structures in which they areimplicated (rather than imposing our expla-nations). In practice this usually means beingflexible in question asking, and shifting thedirection of the interview according to whatthe interviewee wants to, or is able to talkabout.As a research strategy this may providedeeper understandings of the subtle nuancesof meaning that structure and shape theeveryday lives of informants, and politically itgrounds feminist knowledge and politics inwomen’s everyday experiences.

More recent poststructural feminist theor-izing sees researchers and the researched ascaught up in complex webs of power and priv-ilege. Much feminist research is about margin-alized groups, and there is a great deal of socialpower associated with being a scholar. Thusresearch strategies based on an embodiedfeminist objectivity have the potential to min-imize the hierarchical relationship betweenresearcher and interviewee, and to avoidexploiting less powerful people as mere sourcesof data. At the same time, the researchencounter is now understood as beingstructured by both the researcher and theresearched, both of whom construct theirworlds. Poststructural understandings of theresearcher–researched relation see it as onewhere both discursively produce ‘the field’ andcreate a co-produced project.This idea is alsouseful when considering the power relations

288ÿÿPRACTICES


and research relation in feminist geographers’interviews with elites (see for exampleMcDowell, 1998; England, 2002). In this case,we are in positions of less power relative to theresearched who are accustomed to having agreat deal of control and authority over others,but nevertheless the researcher and researchedare still engaged in co-produced research.

Positionality and reflexivity

Among of the most influential elements infeminists’ theorizing about the researchprocess are the concepts of positionality andreflexivity (England, 1994; Rose, 1997;Falconer Al-Hindi and Kawabata,2002).Theseconcepts raise important questions about thepolitics and ethics of research, and have beenhighly influential concepts both within andbeyond feminist geography. Positionality isabout how people view the world from dif-ferent embodied locations.The situatedness ofknowledge means whether we are researchersor participants, we are differently situated byour social, intellectual and spatial locations, byour intellectual history and our lived experi-ence, all of which shape our understandings ofthe world and the knowledge we produce.Positionality also refers to how we are posi-tioned (by ourselves, by others, by particulardiscourses) in relation to multiple, relationalsocial processes of difference (gender, class,‘race’/ethnicity, age, sexuality and so on),which also means we are differently posi-tioned in hierarchies of power and privilege.Our positionality shapes our research, andmay inhibit or enable certain research insights(see Moss, 2001 where geographers discusstheir autobiographies in relation to theirresearch). Positionality has been furtherextended to include considering others’ reac-tions to us as researchers.As researchers we area visible, indeed embodied and integral partof the research process (rather than external,detached observers). So both our embodied

presence as researchers and the participants’response to us mediate the information col-lected in the research encounter.

In a research context, reflexivity meansthe self-conscious, analytical scrutiny of one’sself as a researcher.Within feminist methodo-logies, reflexivity extends to a considerationof power and its consequences within theresearch relationship. Gillian Rose (1997)raises concerns about a possible emergingfeminist orthodoxy about reflexivity. Sheargues that being reflexive cannot makeeverything completely transparent and wecannot fully locate ourselves in our research,because we never fully understand (or arefully aware of) our position in webs of power.Her concerns remind us to constantly inter-rogate our assumptions and remember thatknowledge is always partial, including thatabout ourselves. Nevertheless, reflexivity getsus to think about the consequences of ourinteractions with the researched. For instance,is what we might find out actually worth theintrusion into other people’s lives? Are weengaging in appropriation or even theft ofother people’s knowledges? However, whilereflexivity can make us more aware of powerrelations, and asymmetrical or exploitativeresearch relations, it does not remove them, sowe alone have to accept responsibility for ourresearch.

Politics and accountability

Feminist geographers argue that we must beaccountable for our research, for our intru-sions into people’s lives, and for our represen-tations of those lives in our final papers. Westill need to acknowledge our own position-ality and our locations in systems of privilegeand oppression, and be sure that we write thisinto our papers.As Lawrence Berg and JulianaMansvelt argue, ‘The process of writing con-structs what we know about our research butit also speaks powerfully about who we are



and where we speak from’ (2000: 173). Weneed to be accountable for the consequencesof our interactions with those we research(and many university ethics review boardsrequire it). This is acutely important whereour research might expose previously invisi-ble practices to those who could use thatinformation in oppressive ways, even whenour goal was to make systems of oppressionmore transparent to the oppressed (Katz,1994; Kobayashi, 1994). For example, someresearchers studying lesbian communities donot reveal the location of their fieldwork (seefor example Valentine, 1993), out of respectboth for the participants’ desire not to be‘outed’, and for the participants’ concernsabout reprisals, including physical attack.

Feminist geographers share the political andintellectual goal of socially and politically chang-ing the world our research seeks to understand.The increased popularity of reflexivity and posi-tionality in research has raised serious politicaland ethical dilemmas, a crisis even, about work-ing with groups we do not belong to.This raisesdifficult questions about the politics of location(both socially and geographically, includingwhite women from the global north researchingwomen from/in the global south).This has beenan especially contentious and even painfuldebate for feminists, both inside and outside theacademy. Some academic feminists have aban-doned research projects involving groups towhich they have no social claim, leaving themto those with ‘insider status’. This discussionescalated just as (or because?) feminist geo-graphers are becoming increasingly committedto taking account of the diverse positionings ofwomen (and men and children) across a widerange of social and spatial settings.

This impasse is especially troubling forthose feminists wishing to address multiple andcross-cutting positions of privilege and oppres-sion, and who are committed to effect change.However,Audrey Kobayashi argues that ‘com-monality is always partial … [and so] fieldresearch and theoretical analyses have more to

gain from building commonality than fromessentializing difference’ (1994: 76).This is notto suggest that problematizing essentialism(reifying categories and naturalizing difference)means ignoring difference or dismissing theexperiences of marginalized groups; quitethe opposite. Rather it means building on thenotion that everyone is entangled in multiplewebs of privilege and oppression, so that thereare really few pure oppressors and pureoppressed. Materially engaged transformativepolitics can emerge from accepting that privi-lege results from historical and contempo-rary conditions of oppression, and people arevariously located in the resulting webs ofpower. This means for instance that whetherI acknowledge it or not, as a white womanI participate in and benefit from white privi-lege. For those of us with more social privilege(including being scholars), rather than agoniz-ing over our culpability, it may be more pro-ductive to address our complicity, to make ourlives as sites of resistance and to work hard tounlearn our privilege (Peake and Kobayashi,2002). Feminists argue that we are committedto the political and intellectual goals not onlyof exposing power and privilege, but also oftransforming them.An important part of that isto understand how the world works, and totheorize how power operates and expose it,because this means we are better able to gaugethe possibilities for transformation, and providesituated knowledges that can most effectivelyproduce change.

Producing Feminist Understandings

In this section I discuss how methods areemployed by feminist geographers to pro-duce and represent feminist understandingsof the world. Generally, methods aredescribed as either qualitative or quantitative,so I begin with broad definitions of each.Then I will provide some examples of howmethods are used in feminist geographers’

290ÿÿPRACTICES


research (see Box 26.1). Finally I address theso-called ‘quantitative–qualitative debate’.

Quantitative, qualitative andmixed methods

Quantitative research focuses on questions like‘how many?’ and ‘how often?’ and seeks tomeasure general patterns among representativesamples of the population. Statistical techniquesare used to analyze data, for example, descrip-tive statistics, spatial statistics and geographicinformation systems (GIS).The data are oftensecondary data (usually collected in an ‘offi-cial’ capacity, like the census) and are basedon standardized measures (again like those inthe census). Primary data may also be used;the researcher collects their own data usuallybased on large samples using highly structuredquestionnaires containing easily quantifiablecategories. For examples, see Box 26.1

Qualitative research focuses on the ques-tion of ‘why?’ and seeks to decipher experi-ences within broader webs of meanings andwithin sets of social structures and processes.Techniques are interpretive- and meanings-centered and include oral methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and oralhistories), participant observation and textualanalysis (of, for example, diaries, historical doc-uments, maps, landscapes, films, photographs,and print media). Samples are usually small andare often purposefully selected (to relate to theresearch topic), and if oral methods are used itis not uncommon for researchers to ask infor-mants to help find other participants (known assnowballing). For examples see Box 26.1

In some instances, feminist understand-ings of the world are best produced with apolitically informed combination of researchmethods, variously described as mixed methods,multimethods or triangulation. In human geo-graphy we commonly think of mixedmethods as mixing qualitative and quantita-tive methods as complementary strategies.For example in their extensive study of gender,

work and space in Worcester, Massachusetts,Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt (1995)sought to understand more fully the complexlinks between domestic responsibilities,occupational segregation, job search and res-idential choice.Their research involved statis-tical analyses and mapping of census data; andthe quantitative and qualitative analyses ofsemi-structured questionnaires gathered ininterviews with 700 working-age women andmen from across Worcester, and 150 employersand 200 employees in four different Worcestercommunities.

‘Mixed methods’ also refers to mixingmethods or a variety of ‘data’ within a broadlyqualitative or quantitative research project.In the examples in Box 26.1, Richa Nagar’sDar es Salaam project includes oral histories,interviews and participant observation; andSara McLafferty’s breast cancer projectinvolved statistical techniques and GIS. Mixedmethods can also involve a research designwith different investigators coming at theresearch question from different fields ofresearch or epistemological positions. Forexample, Susan Hanson and Geraldine Prattdescribe how their collaboration was basednot only on their ‘shared interest in feminismand urban social geography but in our differ-ences: one of us having roots in transportationand quantitative geography; the other inhousing and cultural geography’ (1995: xiv).Mixed methods can allow all of these sorts ofdifferences to be held in productive tension,and may keep our research sensitive to a rangeof questions and debates.

The quantitative–qualitative divide?

The sorts of epistemological claims Idescribed in the previous section mean thatfeminists do tend to use qualitative rather thanquantitative methods. But Liz Stanley and SueWise (1993: 188) point out that even in theearly 1980s, few feminist scholars called for anoutright rejection of quantitative methods,



292ÿÿPRACTICES

BOX 26.1 SOME EXAMPLES OF QUALITATIVE ANDQUANTITATIVE RESEARCH IN FEMINIST GEOGRAPHY

An example of qualitative feminist research is Richa Nagar’s work on the genderedand classed communal and racial politics in South Asian communities in postcolo-nial Dar es Salaam. Richa’s fieldwork in Tanzania included analyzing documentsfrom Hindi and caste-based organizations and the Tanzanian government; gathering36 life histories and 98 shorter interviews with Hindi and Ithna Asheri (Muslim)women and men of South Asian descent; and conducting participant observationsof communal places, homes and neighborhoods. In her paper ‘I’d rather be rudethan ruled’ (Nagar, 2000), she tells the stories of four economically privilegedwomen and focuses on their spatial tactics and subversive acts against the domi-nant gendered practices and codes of conduct in communal public places. Anotherexample of qualitative feminist research is Gillian Rose’s research about interpret-ing meanings in landscapes and visual representations. Gillian’s recent work inves-tigates visual culture, especially contemporary and historical photographs (see her2001 book on reading visual culture). In a recent paper (Rose, 2003) about familyphotographs she explores the idea that the meanings of photographs are estab-lished through their uses, in this instance being a ‘proper mother’ and the productionof domestic space that extends beyond their house to include, for example, relativeselsewhere (in other places and other times). She conducted semi-structured inter-views with 14 white, middle-class mothers with young children. The women showedGillian family photos, and she took note of where and how the women stored anddisplayed the photos.

Both Richa and Gillian are posing ‘why?’ questions, and seek to understand mean-ings within broader social processes and structures. Richa looks at the creation andmodification of social identity in a context of rapid political and economic change,while Gillian explores the multiple meanings of mothering, ‘the’ family and domesticspace. In each project the samples are small (four women in Richa’s case, 14 inGillian’s) and the research strategies were based on the participants’ own under-standing of their circumstances, which Richa and Gillian interpret in relation tobroader social structures and processes. Also, as is common in qualitative research,they write about the research using extensive quotes from the participants, anddetailed textual descriptions of the cultural codes and webs of significance evident inand beyond the research setting.

In feminist geography, quantitative methods are frequently employed in what canbroadly be described as accessibility studies (such as access to child care, jobs andsocial services). For example, in a series of papers, Orna Blumen uses census datafor Israeli cities to measure quantifiable aspects of gendered intra-urban labour mar-kets (e.g. commuting distances). In a paper with Iris Zamir (Blumen and Zamir, 2001),Orna used census categories of occupations to look at social differentiation in paidemployment and residential spaces. They analyzed the data using a weighted indexof dissimilarity (a commonly used measure of occupational segregation that capturesthe segregation of one group relative to another) and smallest space analysis (to pro-duces a graphic presentation – a sort of map – of relative occupational segregation).



(Continued)

A second example of employing quantitative methods in feminist geography isSara McLafferty’s research on geographic inequalities in health and social wellbeingin US cities. In a piece with Linda Timander (McLafferty and Timander, 1998), Saraexplored the elevated incidence of breast cancer in West Islip, New York, using indi-vidual-address-level data from a survey of 816 women (39 with a history of breastcancer, 777 without). The survey data were collected by a group of women in WestIslip. Sara and Linda employed statistical techniques (chi-squared and logistic regres-sion analysis) to analyze the relationship between breast cancer and ‘known risk fac-tors’ (such as a family history of breast cancer). Then for those women where ‘knownrisk factors’ did not explain the incidence of breast cancer, Linda and Sara usedGIS to analyze spatial clustering to see whether local environmental exposure was afactor.

In these two examples, the authors’ ask ‘how many?’ Orna counts how manypeople are in particular occupations in the employment and home spaces of Tel Aviv;Sara asks how many women have breast cancer in specific locations on Long Island.They also show how quantitative techniques can be applied to primary (an individual-level, large survey) and secondary (standardized census categories) data. Eachstudy involves measuring some quantifiable occurrence (occupational segregationand the incidence of breast cancer) and employing spatial statistics and mapping.

and they urged feminists to use any and everymeans possible to produce critically awarefeminist understandings of the world. Sincethe mid 1990s there has been a spirited dis-cussion among feminist geographers aboutemploying quantitative methods, but adapt-ing them as appropriate (The ProfessionalGeographer, 1995; Gender, Place and Culture,2002). Vicky Lawson argues that ‘feministscholars can and should employ quantitativetechniques within the context of relationalontologies to answer particular kinds of ques-tions’ (1995: 453, emphasis in the original).Some feminist geographers argue that certainlong-standing feminist critiques of quantita-tive methods need reconsidering. For exam-ple, one criticism is that quantitative researchcan only analyze a particular cross-section intime (e.g. the census), whereas qualitativeresearch captures changing historical andsocial contexts. Damaris Rose (2001) suggests

that recent innovation in quantitativetechniques blurs this distinction. For exam-ple, event history analysis involves longitu-dinal studies and documents the historicalsequencing of events to predict statisticalprobabilities of a particular event generatinga particular action. Others claim that criti-cally aware quantitative methodologies arepossible. For instance, Sara McLafferty(2002) describes how she was approached inWest Islip,New York by women for help in ana-lyzing their breast cancer survey and conduct-ing further statistical analysis (see Box 26.1).Thus, Sara argues, GIS has potential as a toolfor feminist activism and women’s empow-erment. And Mei-Po Kwan (2002a; 2002b)makes a case for feminist GIS (especially 3Dvisualization methods), arguing that con-verting quantitative data into visual repre-sentations ‘allows, to a certain extent, a moreinterpretative mode of analysis than what


conventional quantitative methods wouldpermit’ (2002b: 271).

My descriptions of qualitative and quanti-tative methods at the beginning of this sec-tion were represented as dichotomies,which isoften the way they are represented in method/methodology debates. Potent dichotomiesstructure our concepts of research (object/subject, researcher/researched) and for femi-nist geographers an enduring dualism is thequantitative–qualitative divide. But disagree-ments over methods are often really disagree-ments about epistemology and methodologies,and the use to which the methods are put.Quantitative and qualitative methods do havedifferent strengths and weaknesses, but ratherthan a clear epistemological break betweenquantitative and qualitative methods, there isa fundamental link between the two, because,for instance, one often involves an element ofthe other. For example, interview data can becoded using both qualitative and quantitativetechniques and the same data set can be ana-lyzed using qualitative and quantitative analy-ses (e.g. Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt’sproject described above). Rather than assum-ing that qualitative and quantitative researchmethods are mutually exclusive, it is moreproductive to think of methods forming acontinuum from which we pick those bestsuited to the purpose of our inquiry. Soalthough qualitative methods continue to befavoured by feminist scholars, since the early1990s feminist geographers have employedan increasing range of methods, includingquantitative techniques, and ‘newer’ qualita-tive techniques such as textual and visualanalysis.

Conclusion

Today, feminist geography strides confidentlyacross human geography’s terrain. Because of

feminist theorizing, it is now common (andincreasingly expected) for all human geo-graphers to locate themselves socially, polit-ically and intellectually within their research.Human geographers are now likely to con-sider themselves producing partial, embod-ied, situated knowledges rather than fixed,universal truths. Feminist geographies havetransformed human geographies. Feministreconceptualizations have also transformedour understandings of ways of knowingand seeing the world. So feminist geographyhas not only extended human geography’sresearch agendas, but redefined what humangeographers do and how they do it. Lookingto the future, feminist geographers will con-tinue to produce new understandings and toengage politically in the progressive use ofresearch. But we do need to be more open to‘negative’ findings and to evidence that runscounter to our point of view. Like SusanHanson, I hope ‘to see us devise methods andmethodologies that maximize the chance thatwe will see things we were not expecting tosee, that leave us open to surprise, that do notforeclose the unexpected’ (1997: 125). Bythinking critically about epistemologies,methodologies, and methods, feminist geo-graphers have already created richer, morecomplex human geographies; and feministmeditations on the research process havetransformed the way human geography ispracticed, produced and taught. By askingincisive questions and by seeking to developthe very best approaches to knowledge pro-duction in the future, the explanatory powerof feminist geography will become evenstronger and more compelling.

NOTE1 I choose to use ‘we’ and ‘us’ throughout this

chapter, but not because I speak for all feministgeographers (or you the reader!). I am also

294ÿÿPRACTICES


ReferencesACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2003) ‘Practices in Feminist

Research’, collection, 2(1): 57–111.Berg, L. and Mansvelt, J. (2000) ‘Writing in, speaking out: communicating qualitative

research findings’, in I. Hay (ed.), Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blumen, O. and Zamir, I. (2001) ‘Two social environments in a working day: occupationand spatial segregation in metropolitan Tel Aviv’, Environment and Planning A,33: 1765–84.

Canadian Geographer (1993) ‘Feminism as method’, collection, 37: 48–61.Domosh, M. (1997) ‘ “With stout boots and a stout heart”: historical methodology and fem-

inist geography’, in J.P. Jones III, H. Nast and S.M. Roberts (eds), Thresholds inFeminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham, MD: Rowmanand Littlefield.

England, K. (1994) ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality and feminist research’, TheProfessional Geographer, 46: 80–9.

England, K. (2002) ‘Interviewing elites: cautionary tales about researching women man-agers in Canada’s banking industry’, in P. Moss (ed.), Placing Autobiography inGeography. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Falconer Al-Hindi, K. and Kawabata, H. (2002) ‘Toward a more fully reflexive feminist geo-graphy’, in P. Moss (ed.), Placing Autobiography in Geography. Syracuse NY: SyracuseUniversity Press.

Fox-Keller, E. (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press.

Gender, Place and Culture (2002) ‘Feminist geography and GIS’, collection, 9(3):261–303.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1994) ‘ “Stuffed if I know”: reflections on post-modern feministsocial research’, Gender, Place and Culture, 1: 205–24.

Hanson, S. (1997) ‘As the world turns: new horizons in feminist geographic methodolo-gies’, in J.P. Jones III, H. Nast and S.M. Roberts (eds), Thresholds in FeministGeography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham, MD: Rowman andLittlefield.

Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995) Gender, Work and Space. London: Routledge.Haraway, D.J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:The Reinvention of Nature. New York:

Routledge, Chapman and Hall.Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press.


mindful of concerns raised by, for instance,women from the global south/Third Worldwho argue they are excluded from the ‘we’ ofmany feminisms (for example see Mohantyet al., 1991). I avoid the third person because it

distances me from what I am writing, and I amcertainly not (and do not wish to be) discon-nected from feminist knowledge creation (Bergand Mansvelt, 2000).


Jones, J.P., Nast, H.J. and Roberts, S.M. (eds) (1997) Thresholds in Feminist Geography:Difference, Methodology, Representation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Katz, C. (1994) ‘Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography’, ProfessionalGeographer, 46: 67–72.

Kobayashi, A. (1994) ‘Coloring the field: gender, “race”, and the politics of fieldwork’,Professional Geographer, 46: 73–80.

Kwan, M.-P. (2002a) ‘Feminist visualization: re-envisioning GIS as a method in feministgeographic research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92:645–61.

Kwan, M.-P. (2002b) ‘Is GIS for women? Reflections on the critical discourse in the1990s’, Gender, Place and Culture, 9: 271–9.

Lawson, V.A. (1995) ‘The politics of difference: examining the quantitative/qualitativedualism in post-structural feminist research’, Professional Geographer, 47: 449–57.

McDowell, L. (1992) ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in humangeography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17: 399–416.

McDowell, L. (1998) ‘Elites in the City of London: some methodological considerations’,Environment and Planning A, 30: 2133–44.

McLafferty, S. (2002) ‘Mapping women’s worlds: knowledge, power and the bounds ofGIS’, Gender, Place and Culture, 9: 263–9.

McLafferty, S. and Timander, L. (1998) ‘Breast cancer in West Islip, NY: a spatial clus-tering analysis with covariates’, Social Science and Medicine, 46: 1623–35.

Mohanty, C., Russo, A. and Torres, L. (eds) (1991) Third World Feminism and the Politicsof Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Moss, P. (ed.) (2001) Placing Autobiography in Geography. Syracuse, NY: SyracuseUniversity Press.

Moss, P. (ed.) (2002) Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford:Blackwell.

Nagar, R. (2000) ‘I’d rather be rude than ruled: gender, place and communal politics inDar es Salaam’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5: 571–85.

Oakley, A. (1981) ‘Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms?’, in H. Roberts (ed.),Doing Feminist Research. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 30–61.

Peake, L. and Kobayashi, A. (2002) ‘Policies and practices for an antiracist geography atthe millennium’, Professional Geography, 54: 50–61.

Professional Geographer (1994) ‘Women in the Field: Critical Feminist Methodologiesand Theoretical Perspectives’, collection, 46: 426–66.

Professional Geographer (1995) ‘Should Women Count? The Role of QuantitativeMethodology in Feminist Geographic Research’, collection, 47: 427–58.

Reinharz, S. (1979) On Becoming a Social Scientist. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Rose, D. (2001) Revisiting Feminist Research Methodologies. Ottawa: Status of Women

Canada, Research Division.Rose, G. (1997) ‘Situating knowledge, positionality, reflexivities and other tactics’, Progress

in Human Geography, 21: 305–20.Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies. London: Sage.Rose, G. (2003) ‘Family photographs and domestic spacings: a case study’, Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers, 28: 5–18.

296ÿÿPRACTICES


Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1993) Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology(1st edn 1983). London: Routledge.

Valentine, G. (1993) ‘(Hetero)sexing space: lesbians’ perceptions and experiences ofeveryday spaces’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11: 395–413.



POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES, CRITICALMETHODS AND EXPERIMENTATION

John W. Wylie

Introduction

Poststructuralist methods are above all criticalmethods.That is, they enable a perspective fromwhich we can make critical assessments of, forexample, existing social institutions, culturalbeliefs and political arrangements.

But straightaway we need to be careful inmaking such a claim. First, poststructuralistthought, writing and practice are character-ized by a profound suspicion of bald state-ments and simple explanations for things.Poststructuralism is profoundly suspicious ofanything that tries to pass itself off as a simplestatement of fact, of anything that claims to betrue by virtue of being ‘obvious’, ‘natural’, orbased upon ‘common sense’. As a philosophyand a set of methods of doing research, post-structuralism (see Chapter 10) exposes allsuch claims as contingent, provisional, subjectto scrutiny and debate.

Second, we need to be careful because,while poststructuralism may be reasonablycalled a ‘critical philosophy’, it is very differ-ent from the types of critical or radicalgeographies, sociologies, histories and so onthat are ultimately rooted within Marxistphilosophies as elaborated in Chapter 5.Poststructuralism in fact offers a more radicaland critical approach than these, because it isnot based upon one particular diagnosis ofhow the world is organized (such as Marxism),and because it does not offer a systematicalternative (as Marxism is held to do). Thewriter Michel Foucault captured this aspect

of a poststructural approach well when hestated that, ‘nothing is fundamental. That iswhat is interesting in the analysis of society’(in Rabinow, 1984: 247). Thus, because it isbased, as this quote suggests, upon principlesof plurality and complexity, poststructuralismin a sense demands that we be endlessly crit-ical. And as one consequence of the radicalway in which it urges us to incessantly ques-tion our most rooted assumptions about whowe are and how the world is, poststructural-ism necessarily pushes us towards inventiveand experimental ways of researching andwriting.

One particular thing that poststructuralistwriters have tended to be critical of is theway in which academic or scholarly know-ledge tends to be produced, organized andcommunicated within both specific institu-tions such as universities, and education sys-tems more generally. What tends to beproduced, and what students tend to expectbecause they have been socialized into suchsystems, is structured knowledge: ideas boileddown to their ‘essence’, bullet points, lists of‘key ideas’, clear statements of what the issuesare, fairly definite conclusions. The notionthat the entire purpose of academic studyis to make an opaque reality clearer, acomplex world more graspable, is verydeeply entrenched within western culture.Poststructuralism, however, is very suspiciousof this notion, and especially of the systems itentails. For example, textbooks designed forconsumption by an undergraduate audience

27


tend to be organized by a system in whicha body of knowledge (e.g. human geo-graphy) is divided and classified into discreteapproaches, topics and methods and thenpackaged into manageable chunks (chapters)in which key points are identified and sum-marized. From a poststructural perspective,this type of reductive, systematic procedure isprecisely the sort of thing that stunts ourability to think critically and radically.This, ofcourse, means that my task in this chapter isin a sense an ironic, contradictory and dubi-ous one. However, as with the other chaptersof this volume, the aim here is not to providea ‘how-to’ guide, or a recipe that if followedcorrectly will magically produce a ‘poststruc-tural’ piece of research or writing. The aiminstead is to spotlight two of the main theo-retical avenues down which poststructuralismtravels – deconstruction and discourse analysis –and, in doing so, to identify some of thesubstantial topics that poststructuralist geo-graphers have unearthed and written about.

Deconstruction, or, What Happens

Deconstruction.This term, forever associatedwith the work of the French-Algerian philo-sopher Jacques Derrida, was originally con-fined to use in technical, specialist and scholarlycircles. More recently it has to an extententered common usage.Today, for instance, itcan sometimes be found in book, film ormusic reviews in broadsheet newspapers. Insuch contexts,‘deconstruction’ often seems tosimply mean ‘analyse’ or ‘scrutinize’, withoutany specific or technical connotations; forexample, ‘if we deconstruct X’s album, wecan see their influences are …’.Alternatively,the term ‘deconstruction’ is sometimes usedto designate the style or characteristic feel ofa book, film, or album.The term is particu-larly applied if a book, film, album, etc. is per-ceived to be genre blurring, hybrid in form,or, in the most general sense, ambiguous,

complex or difficult to understand. Forexample, ‘this film deconstructs our conven-tional notions of the cowboy’, or, ‘the book’splot is a deliberate deconstruction of standardnarrative devices’.

These quasi-popular usages only skim thesurface of the potential meanings and rami-fications of deconstruction. But they do serveto highlight that deconstruction may usefullybe thought of (and deployed within researchprojects) in two complementary ways. First,in the sense conveyed by ‘analyse’ or ‘scruti-nize’, deconstruction is a particular methodwhich may be used in studying any topic.More specifically, deconstruction is a way ofreading and writing about things; a way ofreading and writing which is based upon anoriginal understanding of how language, andthe meanings and messages conveyed by lan-guage, works. Second, thought of as a charac-teristic of things in themselves (of objects,artworks, transport systems, whatever), decon-struction is not merely a research method; it isan actual process which actually occurs in theworld, and may thus be witnessed and docu-mented. Deconstruction, in other words, iswhat happens (Royle, 2003). One interpreta-tion of the works of Jacques Derrida (1976;1978) is that deconstruction is already goingon ‘out there’. It is a process which is (thoughthis word is rather inappropriate) ‘inherent’ inlanguage, in the way humans communicatewith each other, think about themselves andothers – in the general ways cultural andmaterial worlds operate.

Some care is needed in making theseclaims, though. Deconstruction does not andcannot aver to be the methodological key tounlocking the one and single truth of howthings ‘really are’. This is because its aim is,precisely, to oppose and undermine claims totruth, certainty and authority.To explain thiswe may, following Derrida, adopt the lan-guage of ghosts. While most methods restupon an ontology – a set of beliefs and assump-tions about what is real, what can be taken as

POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES AND METHODSÿÿ299


self-evidently true – deconstruction might bedescribed as a ‘hauntology’ (Derrida, 1994;Royle, 2003). Deconstruction is an uncanny,ghostly process. Like a ghost, it is incessant, for-ever in a process of appearing, but, ‘never pre-sent as such’ (Derrida, 1994; xviii). It is alwaysboth there and not there. In this way, in a sense,the raison d’être of deconstruction is, parasiti-cally, to haunt, inhabit and contest claims totruth. Deconstruction destabilizes notions oftruth, clarity and certainty through a spectrallogic: it differentiates, disturbs, unsettles.

Given the importance of relations betweentheories and methods, the remainder of thissection focuses upon deconstruction as amethod of reading, analysing and writing.Having outlined the rudiments of the decon-structionist approach – a quixotic venturegiven the space available – I will briefly discusssome of the main areas in which human geo-graphers have applied deconstructive analyses.

Deconstruction sets out from the princi-ple that language is a system of differences.Take, for example – as does Eagleton (1983),whom I follow here – the English word ‘cat’.A first, small step onto the deconstructivetrack is to recognize that ‘cat’ is ‘cat’ because itis not ‘mat’,‘car’,‘cut’ and so on. Equally,‘mat’is ‘mat’ because it is not ‘man’, ‘car’ is ‘car’because it is not ‘bar’, ‘cut’ is ‘cut’ because it isnot ‘but’, and so on, and so on – endlessly.Rather than words possessing meaningbecause they correspond to actual things ormental images (e.g. a small, furry, four-leggedanimal), words acquire meaning via beingcaught up within an infinite series of differ-ential relations.This, crucially, is not merely apeculiarity of language of interest only to aca-demic specialists. It is a process at work withinactuality. Its most glittering consequence isthat the meaning of something is constitutedby what that thing is not.Meaning is not insidea word – or an object, a thing, a process –inherent to it, uniquely owned by it. Themeaning of something is constituted insteadby what it is not. To put this another way,

the presence of a thing, its existence, identity,validity, etc., is constituted by what is absentfrom it, or what is excluded from it.

Consider the couplet male/female.‘Common sense’ might seem to say that theterms ‘male’ and ‘female’ refer to real andunchanging qualities. There are, we tend toassume, uniquely ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’characteristics, attributes and tendencies inpeople, animals and things. However, theapplication of a deconstructive reading revealsthat male/female might equally be writtennot-female/female. In other words, the mean-ing of the term ‘male’ is defined and producedthrough the meaning of the term ‘female’.The definition of a series of ‘feminine’ quali-ties constitutes by opposition those that areheld to be ‘masculine’. To put this the otherway round, the definition, in a particular placeor time, of what it is to be a ‘man’, is achievedvia the exclusion from this definition of allthose things that are held to constitute what itis to be a ‘woman’. But, in the deconstructiveprocess that is always already occurringwithin any such attempts at definition, thetrace of the ‘feminine’ is incessantly returningto haunt the definition of the ‘masculine’ fromwithin. Therefore the terms ‘male’ and‘female’ are never stable in their meaning.They never acquire presence, meaning orvalidity in themselves. The terms ‘masculine’and ‘feminine’ can only ever describe a terri-tory of meaning that is shifting, incessantlyundercutting itself.

Our culture is littered with binaries likemale/female – mind/body, me/you, us/them,natural/artificial, west/east and so on. Theirimpact upon the way we think, how we relateto each other, and how society and politics ingeneral operate, is incalculable. What decon-structive analysis reveals is not that such bin-aries are unreal, but that they are never pureor coherent: the two sides of the coin are notproduced in isolation from each other but arerather always inextricably intertwined.Derrida calls such binaries violent hierarchies,

300ÿÿPRACTICES


because as a rule one of the two terms isunderstood to be superior to the other, to bethe original, or the norm.An example is het-erosexuality/homosexuality. In this case, inmany societies past and present,‘heterosexual’is thought of as primary and normal; thispositions ‘homosexuality’ as a secondary anddeviant condition. Again, however, once werecognize deconstruction, we can see that, farfrom being a deviation or aberration from anorm, what it is to be homosexual is in fact atthe very heart of the meaning of what it is tobe heterosexual.

Hopefully the critical potential of decon-struction can be sensed in what I have writ-ten thus far. At issue is the fact that the sortsof binary distinctions under discussion arelinked to violence both real and symbolic;they may be witnessed at work within social,political and economic inequalities and injus-tices at all scales; they are hardwired intobeliefs and assumptions at both the popularand the intellectual levels. Many currentexamples come to mind: the so-called ‘clashof civilizations’ between the west and Islam,‘genuine’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seekers,‘organic’versus genetically modified foodstuffs, global-ization and anti-globalization.These are fairlypolarized and unsubtle examples. But decon-struction is a critical method because it canbe applied to all attempts to presence, centre,purify, divide, classify and exclude. It exposesthe fragility, arrogance and indeed the impos-sibility of such attempts. And, although thereis no explicit political agenda here, decon-struction leads us towards a recognition of thedifferential impacts and outcomes occasionedby our dreams of presence and absence, iden-tity and difference.

Finally, it is worth stressing again that theterm ‘deconstruction’ refers to both a way ofanalysing, a ‘method’, and an actual process,what is actually happening in academic texts,in paintings, music, conversations, governmentpolicies, scientific reports, etc. Deconstructionis most definitely not about inferring in such

things meanings that are ‘not really there’, orabout reading a situation wilfully against thegrain. This misconception arises becausedeconstruction often sidesteps or ignores whatthe ‘obvious’ meaning of things seems to be,what ‘common sense’ would seem to tell usa situation is saying to us. In fact, deconstruc-tion is about reading texts, events, situations,processes and so on with very close attention,in an effort to be as faithful as possible tothem. Its aim is maximum fidelity.At the sametime it would be futile to pretend that decon-structive writing – with Derrida’s own as aparagon – is anything other than complex andchallenging, and does often seem to morphand twist texts in startling, even implausibleways.This seeming paradox, of simultaneouslyrepresenting something faithfully and alteringit beyond recognition, is captured well byRoyle (2003: 21) when he states that decon-struction both ‘describes and transforms’. Ashe goes on to say, ‘in a sense [Derrida] doeslittle more than describe what happens whenreading, say, a passage of Shakespeare or a dia-logue of Plato’ (2003: 26). But the point isthat, given that deconstruction is what hap-pens, such a description must necessarily bealso and always already a transformation.Deconstruction, to be faithful to the world,must bear witness to the hauntedly decon-structive nature – the slipping, spectral, supple-mental, instable actuality – of the world itself.

Examples of the adoption and applicationof such an analysis are legion within humangeography, as they are across the social sciencesand humanities. Over time, the principlesof Derrida’s philosophy have become almostmainstream, and the language of deconstruc-tion is now commonly, even casually deployedwithin human geographical research. It is aswell to note here that deconstruction is usu-ally associated with a series of phrases andthemes that have quickly become passé; the‘cultural turn’, postmodernism, the politics ofidentity, the ‘celebration of difference’ and soon. However, while most of these have come



and gone, deconstruction has persisted, as thedepth and rigour of Derrida’s analyses havebecome more obvious to Anglophone aca-demics. Indeed it may even (and appropriately)be the case that deconstruction has yet tohappen within human geography, and that thecomplexities and possibilities of deconstruc-tion are only now beginning to be explored(e.g. see Rose, 2004).

Alongside the slogans mentioned above,deconstruction entered human geography inthe late 1980s and early 1990s.To begin with,its implications for geographical writing andpractice were the focus of interest, with espe-cial attention being paid to issues of epistemo-logy and language in geography (Doel, 1992;Olsson, 1991; Barnes, 1994). More widely,deconstructive analyses have been enrolledalongside feminist and radical analyses of theconstructedness of gendered and sexualizedidentities (for early examples see Domosh,1991;McDowell, 1991).This is a wide-rangingand ongoing project; its review is beyond thepurview of this chapter (see Chapter 10), but itis worth noting that much recent research ongender, identity and performance, for example(see Bell and Valentine, 1995; Gregson andRose, 2000), has been inspired by the work ofJudith Butler (1990; 1993) which is itselfin large part indebted to Derrida’s work.However, as a broadly poststructural or, moreaccurately, constructivist agenda – one focusedupon the critical analyses of geographicalknowledges and identities – quite quicklyspread through the 1990s, then so the strategiesof deconstruction have become widely usedacross different branches of geography.

It is important to note that this hasinvolved not only the application of a ‘new’method to traditional topics, but also, in mostinstances, the development of new areas ofstudy. It is further important to be aware thatin many cases the insights of a deconstructiveanalysis implicitly rather than explicitly informstudy and interpretation; such has been theextent to which deconstruction has suffused

critical analysis.Within political geography, forexample, deconstruction has in part inspiredand impelled the development of a new criticalgeopolitics.This has taken as its substantial focusthe construction of geopolitical imaginationsat a variety of levels, from the evolution ofgovernmental foreign policies and stratagems(e.g.O’Tuathail, 2000;Dalby,1991) to the rep-resentation of global political and militaryissues within news reportage (O’Tuathail,1996) and print media (Sharp, 1993; Dodds,1996). Deconstructive strategies are perhapsparticularly apt with regard to critical analysisof the fields of geopolitical reasoning and pro-paganda, given that these often tend to paint adistinctly divisive and polarized picture ofglobal interests and relations.

In the widespread turn towards discussionof the construction and deployment of geo-graphical knowledges in different times andspaces, historical geography has been revolu-tionized by the advent of poststructuralapproaches in general. The critical man-oeuvres and avenues opened up in part by adeconstructive approach to issues of know-ledge production have led to a sustainedinterrogation of geography’s chequered past,as an intellectual tradition deeply imbricated,via practices of mapping, surveying, exploringand so on, within colonial and imperial his-tories.For example, in what is a now classic dis-cussion on ‘deconstructing the map’, Harley(1989) demonstrates how a Derridean analy-sis of cartography works to unravel claims toobjectivity, transparency and innocence inmap-making by making visible the rhetoricaland metaphorical elements which in actualityconstitute any map’s meaning. Pratt (1992),Barnett (1998) and Ryan (1996), amongstothers, further supply deconstructive readingsof the accounts of nineteenth-centuryEuropean explorers in South America, Africaand Australia, demonstrating that the ‘silen-cing’ of indigenous voices in such texts was anessential element in the process of establish-ing the authority and centrality of European

302ÿÿPRACTICES


geographical knowledges, embodied in thefigure of the explorer. Equally, Blunt (1994)and Clayton (2000) deploy a mixture ofarchival scholarship and deconstructive analy-sis to, respectively, the nineteenth-centuryAfrican travels of Mary Kingsley and theeighteenth-century Pacific navigations ofCook and Vancouver, in each case demon-strating the ambivalences, ambiguities andcontradictions at the heart of imperial travelswhich sought, in contrast, purity, identity andcertainty. In the wake of a generation of post-colonial theorists inspired by Derrideanthought (Spivak, 1988; Bhabha, 1994), and inan area of overlap between such historicalgeographies of empire and exploration andcontemporary geographies of the developingworld,‘postcolonial geographies’ (e.g. Sidaway,2000; Crush, 1995; Blunt and McEwan, 2002)have emerged as a set of critical analyses ofthe languages, texts and silences of colonialrelations past and present.

As these brief highlights hopefully reveal,deconstructive strategies have become part ofthe lingua franca of human geography, andI could go on at length to discuss the use ofdeconstruction within social geographies, cul-tural geographies and so on. But in conclu-sion I want to reiterate that the implications ofdeconstruction for the practice of a subjectsuch as geography are radical. Deconstructionis not just a ‘useful’ method we can deploy; ithauntingly demands questioning of normal-ized assumptions and procedures, and perhapsabove all entails a rethink of how academicssuch as geographers write.The work of MarcusDoel (1992; 1994; 1999) is exemplary in itsinsistence upon exploring the potential ofdeconstruction in this regard – but few othershave, so far, taken up this challenge.

Discourse Analysis

Like deconstruction, the term ‘discourse’requires careful definition.This section focuses

upon discourse analysis as a poststructuralmethod most commonly associated with thework of the French historian and philo-sopher Michel Foucault.As with Derrida, hisnear-contemporary and one-time student,Foucault’s writings, on issues as varied as epi-stemology, madness, punishment, power andthe histories of science and sexuality, havebeen enormously influential across the socialsciences and humanities. They have inspirednot only new approaches but new fields ofstudy. Indeed, Derrida’s and Foucault’s worksare commonly yoked together, at least rhetor-ically, in the plethora of books and paperswhich set out to ‘deconstruct discourses’ ofrace, gender, sexuality, the state, nature, land-scape, and so on ad infinitum.

Foucault’s understanding of the term ‘dis-course’, central to his various inquiries, is muchmore complex and multifaceted than the dic-tionary definition: ‘noun. 1. Conversation. 2.(foll. by on) speak or write about at length’(Collins Pocket English, 1996). For Foucault, adiscourse, while retaining connotations ofdialogue and speech, refers more broadly tothe totality of utterances, actions and eventswhich constitute a given field or topic. Toclarify this further, we can consider two def-initions of discourse by geographers.

Gregory states that discourse ‘refers to allthe ways in which we communicate with oneanother, to that vast network of signs, symbolsand practices through which we make ourworld(s) meaningful’ (1994: 11). This defini-tion alerts us to two things. First, a discourseis not just a set of written texts. A discourseencompasses texts, speeches, dialogues, waysof thinking and actions; bodily practices,habits, gestures, etc. Second, a discourse isnot a series of things that are said and doneregarding a pre-existing thing – gender, say.A discourse of gender is not ‘about’ gender:instead it creates gender, makes it really, actu-ally exist as a consequential and meaningfulset of beliefs, attitudes and everyday practicesand performances. Furthermore, as Barnes



and Duncan note, ‘discourses are bothenabling and constraining … they set thebounds on what questions are considered rel-evant or even intelligible’ (1992: 8). In otherwords, a discourse defines both what can andwhat cannot be said or done, what appears tobe true, legitimate or meaningful and what isdismissed as false, deviant or nonsensical.Takegender again: as a discourse, this both enablessome ‘male’ and ‘female’ ways of thinking andbehaving and constrains or proscribes others.In this way, the political and ethical import ofdiscourse begins to clarify: discourses establishsome behaviours and identities as normal andnatural and establish others as unusual, mar-ginal or unnatural.

Discourses must thus be considered interms of power. To grasp anything aboutFoucault’s thought and method it is necessaryto engage with his innovative understand-ing of how power operates. Common sensewould suggest that power operates in a top-down manner. In other words, some people,organizations or states ‘have’ power: they pos-sess it, and use it to influence and dominateothers, who are, comparatively, powerless. Inthis view, power is (1) concentrated in thehands of a minority, (2) exercised over liferather than being part of life, and (3) negativerather than creative in its effects – power isexercised to constrain, limit, forbid, detain,etc. Foucault, however, disagrees with thisview, arguing that ‘we must cease once andfor all to describe the effects of power in neg-ative terms … In fact, power produces; it pro-duces reality’ (1977: 155). Power, in otherwords, is what creates new identities, newsocial, economic and political systems, notwhat prevents change or ‘progress’. Moreoverthis creative power operates in a diverse anddispersed manner; it does not emanate from asingle source. As Foucault notes, ‘power iseverywhere, not because it embraces every-thing, but because it comes from everywhere’(1981: 93). The sites where power is pro-duced, and where its effects are felt, worked

through and transformed, are multiple andheterogeneous.

Two crucial points regarding the use ofdiscourse analysis as a critical method devolvefrom this discussion of power/discourse.Thefirst is that Foucault is most definitely notseeking to argue away the palpable existenceof inequalities, injustices and repressions inthe societies we live in. He is rather attempt-ing to develop, via his understanding of howpower operates, a more distinctive and subtleway of analysing how inequalities acquiresuch concrete existence. Again the genderexample is instructive. Foucault is arguing thatcertain ways of being male and female in oursociety are viewed as normal and appropriatenot because some mysterious central ‘power’ isforcing us to conform to them, but becausewe ourselves exercise power over ourselves,in the sense that we continually self-regulateand monitor ourselves and others. Gendernorms are sustained via a multitude of small,local, specific practices. Discourse is everydaypractice – not an invisible web of ‘powerful’ideas imposing themselves from above.

The second crucial point – a radical con-sequence of the first – is that we are ourselvesthe effects of discourse.Various discourses (of,say, manliness, Irishness, fatherhood) are notexternal layers of meaning enclosing an inner,unique self. Rather, for Foucault, the very ideathat every person is unique, that we are indi-viduals with inner thoughts, feeling and atti-tudes, is in fact a relatively recent invention.He argues that modern societies are character-ized by processes in which humans are indi-vidualized, both as objects to be studied byacademic disciplines such as human geography,and as selves (subjects) to be experiencedand nurtured. The various knowledges andcategories through which we know ourselvesand others are, in other words, culturally andhistorically specific. Foucault’s most notableachievement, perhaps, is to have shown thatcategories often assumed to be universal,naturalor objectively definable – categories such as

304ÿÿPRACTICES


sane/mad, healthy/ill, normal/deviant – are infact the products of particular discursive prac-tices; are in fact, as the saying goes, ‘sociallyconstructed’.This does not mean that they aresomehow false or unreal.They have become realand meaningful within particular cultural andhistorical contexts.

Hopefully this discussion points clearlytowards the critical potential of Foucault’sconcepts of discourse and power. Hopefullyalso, the partial similarities between aFoucauldian and a Derridean, deconstructiveanalysis are evident. Discourse analysis isa critical method which seeks to describehow certain identities and narratives are pro-duced, privileged, sometimes naturalized, andasserted over identities and narratives whichare comparatively marginalized, excluded orsilenced. Discourse analysis seeks to describein detail, with close attention to particularevents, episodes and practices, how certainbehaviours, attitudes and beliefs come to besedimented and reproduced through contin-ual repetition.As with the language of decon-struction, Foucault’s approach and methodhave permeated much geographical researchover the past 15 years, and again I want tobriefly highlight some of the main directionsthat have been pursued.

Foucault’s own interests in practices ofobserving, punishing and confining have toan extent inspired new research agendas inhuman geography. For example, inspired byclassic texts such as Madness and Civilization(Foucault, 1967) and Discipline and Punish(Foucault, 1977), new geographies of asy-lums, prisons and other institutions of careand confinement have arisen (e.g. Driver,1985; 1993; Philo, 1995; Philo and Parr,1995). Equally, Foucault’s famous analyses ofthe visual gaze which isolates, objectifies andclassifies that which it gazes upon has provedespecially fertile within human geography. Ithas inspired, for instance, work on surveil-lance and CCTV within urban areas (Davis,1990).And in relation to cultural geographies

of art, nature and the visual, Foucault’s conceptof the gaze has further influenced writingson landscape, voyeurism and the objectifica-tion of women as ‘nature’ (e.g. Rose, 1993;Plumwood, 1993; Nash, 1996; Pollock, 1988).

The impact of the ‘discursive turn’ hasalso been notably evident within medicalgeographies, where it has occasioned an atleast partial shift from an almost exclusivefocus upon the enumeration and mapping ofdisease and illness within populations to anagenda which explores the manifold ways inwhich issues of health and illness discursivelyconstruct bodies and identities (e.g. Kearns,1993; Dorn and Laws, 1994; Butler and Parr,1999). More specifically here we can point towork on the geographies of disability (e.g.Chouinard, 1997), which, without neglectingissues of access, mobility and so on, exploresnuances of definition and self-definitionthrough which ‘disabilities’ are classified andperformed. This further feeds into geo-graphies of mental illness, exploring the insti-tutional, therapeutic and policy spaces throughwhich ‘mentally ill’ subjects are produced andenacted (e.g. Parr, 1999).

As with Derrida, Foucault’s discursivemethodology, with its clear emphasis onknowledge, power and the relations betweentheories and practices, and in particular itshistorical and archival bent, has been espe-cially influential for cultural and historicalgeographies.An outstanding example here hasbeen Said’s (1978) Orientalism, which (thoughSaid was not a geographer) heralded andinformed a range of studies of ‘geographicalimaginations’, in particular those associatedwith colonialism and imperialism, and withthe representation of non-European ‘others’by European ‘selves’ (Said’s particular focuswas upon the historical place of the Near andMiddle East in the western imagination).Numerous geographers have further pursuedSaid’s adoption of Foucault as a critical his-torian of western thought and practice, inparticular scrutinizing the discursive practices



of exploration (Driver, 2001), travel (Duncanand Gregory, 1999) and geography itself as anintellectual tradition (Gregory, 1994).

I could go on to chronicle at length therole of discourse analysis in forming andinforming a variety of studies by culturalgeographers, for example the study of theconsumption of ‘exotic’ foodstuffs (May,1996), or the representation of masculinitywithin contemporary ‘lad’s mags’ (Jacksonet al., 1999). In concluding this section, how-ever, I would suggest that while the languageof ‘discourse’, like that of deconstruction, hasbecome commonplace, the concept has per-haps been too often taken to mean somethingakin to ‘structure’. It is worth reiterating thata discourse is not a structure of ‘powerful’ orinfluential ideas, towering over and dominat-ing individuals; nor is it akin to a chessboardof predetermined identities and positionswhich individuals are forced to chooseamongst.A discourse consists precisely in, andis malleable through, the manifold of every-day, repeated, sometimes ‘habitual’ practicesand performances – textual, imagined and lit-erally enacted – that weave together thefabric of life.A good example of this approachwithin geography, one especially indebtedto Foucault’s conception, is David Matless’Landscape and Englishness (1998), which detailshow in mid-twentieth-century England elitenotions of citizenship, regional planning poli-cies and emerging ecological perspectivescombined with the evolution of suburbanlifestyles and the increasing popularity ofcountryside leisure pursuits to produce com-plex discursive articulations of the relation-ships between self, society and landscape.

Conclusion: Experimentation

I have concluded both main sections of thischapter by offering some perhaps quite mildcriticisms of the manner in which the post-structural approaches of Derrida and Foucault

have been taken up and applied withinhuman geographies. In both cases I have thefeeling that geographers (along with perhapsmost Anglophone social scientists) have in asense too quickly incorporated poststructuralinsights. In consequence, poststructuralismhas been rather grafted onto previous, moreconventional, ‘structuralist’ and empiricistunderstandings of topics such as power,language, identity and meaning. Strictlyspeaking it entails a rejection of these anda movement towards something quite dis-tinctively new. The radical questioningand destabilizing implied by poststructuralapproaches has had relatively little impact, forexample,upon how academic papers and booksare written; for the most part these continueto view themselves as incremental additions toalready existing, established bodies of know-ledge, and as commentaries upon an external,objective world (see Law and Benchop, 1997).

Business as usual. In this brief chapterI have chosen to focus upon deconstructionand discourse analysis, and thus Derrida andFoucault, because these are the writers whohave clearly had the biggest impact uponhuman geography in the past 15 odd years.This has meant excluding some significantothers in the poststructural pantheon, forexample Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotardand Jean Baudrillard. It has also meantexcluding a third writer whose work is oftenbracketed with that of Foucault and Derrida,and who may well in time prove as decisivelyinfluential: Gilles Deleuze.

I want to conclude this chapter with somecomments on Deleuze and emergent trendswithin human geography.At the start I notedthat the radical and unsettling implicationsof poststructural philosophies necessarilyentailed questions regarding academic thoughtand practice, and at the least implied a needfor experimental and creative approaches toacademic writing, and modes of representa-tion generally.This is a lodestone of Deleuz-ian thought. Deleuze’s philosophy emphasizes

306ÿÿPRACTICES


creativity, vitality and transformation, not justas values to be cherished, but as immanent,ontological features of life in general.While heis characteristically poststructural in his rejec-tion of ‘grand’ theories and appeals to a singleexplanatory key to unlocking the secrets of life(e.g. appeals to God, ‘social structures’, freemarkets, the self, or the psyche), his response,unlike that of Derrida or Foucault, is notto undertake painstaking, forensic criticismaimed at revealing the true plurality and com-plexity of things. Deleuze rather seems toadvocate resolutely experimental modes ofwriting and performance.He is especially crit-ical of the way in which much academic writ-ing sees its function as representing the world.For Deleuze (1994; 1990), representation isessentially a negative procedure, in so far as(1) attempting to accurately describe thingsinevitably distorts and simplifies them, and(2) the critical distance which ‘accurate’ repre-sentation demands has the effect of turningthat representation into a judgement. Insteadof seeking to describe or judge, Deleuze aversthat critical or philosophical writing shouldaim to add to the world, to make it more thanit is, rather than less.

This expressive and creative principleof addition is echoed within some recentgeographical writing. Thrift calls upon geo-graphers to ‘weave a poetic of the commonpractices and skills which produce people,selves and worlds’ (2001: 216) while Dewsburyet al. argue that academic writing should aimto ‘contribute to the stretch of expressions inthe world’ (2002: 439).Both of these citationsare from advocates of what has rather clum-sily been called ‘non-representational the-ory’. One tenet of this nascent movement isthat the reception of poststructural theorywithin geography has been flawed. First,there has been a persistent tendency to viewit as an ‘add-on’ to structuralist and Marxisttheories of power, society and identity; thisis evident, for example, in the continuingframing of ‘discourse’ in terms of narratives of

domination/resistance (e.g. see Pile and Keith,1998). Second, there has been an ‘idealist’ ten-dency to use strategies such as discourse analy-sis and deconstruction within a movementthat converts particular material flesh-and-blood actualities into an abstract realm of gen-eral symbols, texts, representations and so on,in which the ‘meanings’ of those actualities areheld to inhere.

I concur with these criticisms. In thischapter my aim has been to outline the keyprinciples and procedures of both Derrida’sand Foucault’s methodology, and to brieflydescribe their substantial use within humangeographical research. In both cases, stress hasbeen laid upon the fact that deconstructionand discourse analysis are critical methods –used in making critical assessments of socialinstitutions, identities, cultural beliefs, politi-cal arrangements and so on. However, I havebeen concerned to stress that both are post-structural methods, in so far as they are con-cerned to go beyond ‘top-down’ structuralistconceptions of how power is exercised, ofhow identities are constructed. And I havealso tried to stress that both deconstructionand discourse are processes already alive inthe actuality of lived practice and perform-ance. While a key part of critical geographyhas been to raise consciousness regarding theoperation of cultural, political and economicideologies, an unintended consequence hasbeen a partial misreading of the scope andpurchase of deconstruction and discourseanalysis. These, I would suggest, are not justmethods we can use to ‘read’ the world, norare they means through which we can dividethe world first into processes and events, andsecond into their ‘inner’ or ‘wider’ meaning.Instead, deconstruction is what happens anddiscourse is everyday practice. Using thesemethods is not so much about extracting thekey themes and meanings of the text, imageor situation being studied as about ‘describ-ing and transforming’ it via experimental andexpressive engagements.



ReferencesBarnes, T. (1994) ‘Probable writing: Derrida, deconstruction and the quantitative revolution

in human geography’, Environment and Planning A, 26: 1021–40.Barnes, T.J. and Duncan, J.S. (1992) ‘Introduction: writing worlds’, in T.J. Barnes and

J.S. Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds. London: Routledge.Barnett, C. (1998) ‘Impure and worldly geography: the Africanist discourse of the Royal

Geographical Society, 1831–73’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,23: 239–51.

Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (1995) ‘The sexed self: strategies of performance, sites of resis-tance’, in S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of CulturalTransformation. London: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Blunt, A. (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism. New York: Guilford.Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds) (2002) Postcolonial Geographies. Edinburgh: Cassell.Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:

Routledge.Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge.Butler, R. and Parr, H. (1999) Mind and Body Spaces. London: Routledge.Chouinard, V. (1997) ‘Making space for disabling differences: challenging ableist

geographies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,15: 379–87.Clayton, D. (2000) Islands of Truth. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Crush, J. (1995) ‘Introduction: imagining development’, in J. Crush (ed.), Power of

Development. London: Routledge.Dalby, S. (1991) ‘Critical geopolitics: discourse, difference, and dissent’, Environment

and Planning D: Society and Space, 9: 261–83.Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz. London: Verso.Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense. London: Athlone.Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone.Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx. London: Routledge.Dewsbury, J.D., Wylie, J., Harrison, P. and Rose, M. (2002) ‘Enacting geographies’,

Geoforum, 32: 437–41.Dodds, K. (1996) ‘The 1982 Falklands War and a critical geopolitical eye: Steve Bell and

the If… cartoons’, Political Geography, 15: 571–92.Doel, M. (1992) ‘In stalling deconstruction: striking out the postmodern’, Environment

and Planning D: Society and Space, 10: 163–80.Doel, M. (1994) ‘Deconstruction on the move: from libidinal economy to liminal material-

ism’, Environment and Planning A, 26: 1041–59.Doel, M. (1999) Poststructuralist Geographies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Domosh, M. (1991) ‘Towards a feminist historiography of geography’, Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, 16: 95–104.Dorn, M. and Laws, G. (1994) ‘Social theory, body politics and medical geography’,

Professional Geographer, 46: 106–10.Driver, F. (1985) ‘Power, space and the body: a critical assessment of Foucault’s

Discipline and Punish’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 3: 425–47.

308ÿÿPRACTICES


Driver, F. (1993) Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Driver, F. (2001) Geography Militant. Oxford: Blackwell.Duncan, J. and Gregory, D. (eds) (1999) Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing.

London: Routledge.Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Foucault, M. (1967) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

London: Routledge.Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.Foucault, M. (1981) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. London: Allen Lane.Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell.Gregson, N. and Rose, G. (2000) ‘Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities

and subjectivities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18: 433–52.Harley, J.B. (1989) ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica, 26: 1–20.Jackson, P., Stevenson, N. and Brooks, K. (1999) ‘Making sense of men’s lifestyle

magazines’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17: 353–68.Kearns, R.A. (1993) ‘Place and health: towards a reformed medical geography’,

Professional Geographer, 45: 139–47.Law, J. and Benchop, R. (1997) ‘Resisting narrative Euclideanism: representation, distri-

bution and ontological politics’, in K. Hetherington and R. Munro (eds), Ideas ofDifference: Social Spaces and the Labour of Division. Oxford: Blackwell.

Matless, D. (1998) Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion.May, J. (1996) ‘A little taste of something more exotic’, Geography, 81: 57–64.McDowell, L. (1991) ‘The baby and the bathwater: diversity, deconstruction and feminist

theory in geography’, Geoforum, 23: 123–33.Nash, C. (1996) ‘Reclaiming vision: looking at landscape and the body’, Gender, Place

and Culture, 3: 149–69.Olsson, G. (1991) Lines of Power/Limits of Language. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.O’Tuathail, G. (1996) ‘An anti-geopolitical eye: Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia’, Gender, Place

and Culture, 3: 171–85.O’Tuathail, G. (2000) ‘Dis/placing the geo-politics which one cannot want’, Political

Geography, 19: 385–96.Parr, H. (1999) ‘Bodies and psychiatric medicine: interpreting different geographies of mental

health’, in R. Butler and H. Parr (eds), Mind and Body Spaces. London: Routledge.Philo, C. (1995) ‘The chaotic spaces of medieval madness’, in M. Teich, R. Porter and

B. Gustafson (eds), Nature and Society in Historical Context. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Philo, C. and Parr, H. (1995) ‘Mapping “mad” identities’, in S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds),Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge.

Pile, S. and Keith, M. (eds) (1998), Geographies of Resistance. London: Routledge.Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.Pollock, G. (1988) Visions of Difference: Feminism, Feminity and the Histories of Art.

London: Routledge.Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984) A Foucault Reader. London: Penguin.



Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity.Rose, G. (2004) ‘Re-embracing metaphysics’, Environment and Planning A, 36: 461–68.Royle, N. (2003) Derrida. London: Routledge.Ryan, S. (1996) The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Said, E. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin.Sharp, J.P. (1993) ‘Publishing American identity: popular geopolitics, myth and the

Reader’s Digest’, Political Geography, 12: 491–503.Sidaway, J. (2000) ‘Postcolonial geographies: an exploratory essay’, Progress in Human

Geography, 24: 591–612.Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds),

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan.Thrift, N. (2001) ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18: 213–55.

310ÿÿPRACTICES


RESEARCH IS THEFT: ENVIRONMENTALINQUIRY IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD

Paul Robbins

One afternoon while I was doing research onforest cover outside a wildlife preserve in ruralIndia, an old woman yelled at me over thethorn fence at the back of her house:‘You arewriting down things about the forest sosomeone can come take it!’

Recording, interpreting, and analyzing theworld is a way to appropriate it and control it.The terms and narratives used to describesocial and environmental conditions serve todefine the range of debate and to enclose itspossibilities. If carried out by people withinstitutional authority and power (e.g. foreignresearchers), such accounts can become thestuff of policy that dramatically impinges onlocal livelihoods and survival. Research onfood has often made people hungrier.Research on forests has destroyed biodiversity.Research on poverty has made people poorer.In this way, even well intentioned research,especially when carried out by non-residentpeoples, is a deeply structured part of a systemof ongoing exploitation. So too, a researcherwith explicitly normative and often lofty goals –more equitable distribution of resources, lessexploitative labor relations, and defense ofendangered species – is working not only torecord how the forest is, but to imagine howthe forest might be, an undeniable exerciseof power. Finally, by making a living offthe stories of other people and the recordsof environmental conditions in otherplaces, research is unambiguously extractive.Researchers are paid for textual transcrip-tions of other people’s histories and records

of the condition of their plants, knowledge,technology, life, and land. In all these ways,research is theft.

The recent enclosure of the forest into amore restrictive wildlife preserve to which theold woman refers, however, is a move that hasmade access to the forest more difficult forsubsistence producers who reside nearby, butone introduced and financed by a foreign statedonor agency, which ushered in a new periodof restriction and control.To record that factand enumerate its deleterious impacts on thepeople of that neighborhood is a challenge tothat control, and arguably represents an effortnot to take the forest, but rather to take it back.Similarly, the research I was conducting thatday was in cooperation with grassroots organi-zations,which explicitly do seek control of theforest, but with hopes of an argument basedon scientifically recorded phenomena. So too,the research was directed at questions towhich many local people want answers (Howmuch forest cover is there? What are theeffects of grazing?) but for which no fundingis available from the state, from private firms,or from the very donor agencies that estab-lished the wildlife preserve in the first place. Ifresearch is theft, it is a theft in which many wishto participate, including local and marginalcommunities.

In this chapter, I seek to address thisinevitable postcolonial contradiction (see alsoChapter 12), and describe an ongoing researchproject that is in some ways colonial and insome ways an insurgent effort at anti-colonial

28


science. In the process I hope to demonstratethe limits and potential of field-based investi-gation into issues of environmental changeand sustainability, while relating a generalsense of how this kind of research is done.Butto do so requires answering a prior question:why do research at all?

Research as Expropriation

The argument that environmental research –objective, non-political, and truth seeking –is expropriative and often has normativelyundesirable results, is one rooted in theglobal colonial experience. The great era ofEuropean expansion and domination of dis-tant places was characterized not only byexpressions of military force but also by thepromulgation of expertise. Colonial states’activities, as Cohn observes, ‘fostered officialbeliefs in how things are and how they oughtto be’, which depended upon systems ofdocumentation

that formed the basis of their capacityto govern. The reports and investigationsof commissions, the compilation, stor-age, and publication of statistical data onfinance, health, demography, crime, edu-cation, transportation, agriculture, andindustry – these created data requiring asmuch exegetical and hermeneutical skillto interpret as an arcane Sanskrit text.(1996: 3)

In practical terms, this meant collecting a lotof data, arranged and defined in the categoriesof the colonizer. But it also entailed the estab-lishment of an elite caste of people (e.g. statis-ticians, geographers, botanists, demographers)specially trained to interpret these data andmake wise decisions on behalf of the colonizedpeople. The social power, remuneration, andpolitical authority of these people all depended

on the consistent determination of whatproblems colonial regions faced, and on thecreation of solutions. Such solutions com-monly resulted in proscriptive and prescrip-tive policies with wide-ranging perniciousimplications. In this way, theories of environ-ment were invariably linked to theories ofpolitical domination.As environmental histo-rian David Gilmartin puts it in the case ofBritish colonial science:

the definition of the environment as a nat-ural field to be dominated for productiveuse, and the definition of the British as adistinctive colonial ruling class over alienpeoples, went hand in hand. (1995: 211)

Conservation efforts in West African forestry,in an example relevant to later discussion here,are representative of this problem. Frenchcolonial authorities and scientists entering thesavannas of Guinea in the 1800s saw a com-plex landscape of rotational fallows (land leftto temporary regrowth), mixed with locallypreserved forest, and open grazing land. Asresearchers James Fairhead and Melissa Leach(1994) record, the ecological complexity ofthe system and the difficult maintenancerequired from the local village residents,however, was absolutely lost on the colonialobservers. They instead saw an area of greatand increasing aridity,which they further sug-gested was a result of reckless local land usepatterns leading to deforestation.Examinationof aerial photographs and careful scrutiny oflocal records, however, suggest that in fact thereverse has been occurring: forests have beenexpanding in Guinea throughout and afterthe colonial period, precisely as a result oflocal land use practices.

These French scientists were not simplyempirically wrong, seeing deforestationwhere in fact afforestation was occurring.More than this, they were led into their wayof seeing, at least in part, as a result of their

312ÿÿPRACTICES


colonial relationship to local people.Knowingin advance that local accounts and practiceswere problematic, inevitably led to readingforest history backwards (Fairhead and Leach,1995).And so too, their conclusions, that localpeople were destroying their ecosystem, hadimplications for power and control overresources for generations to come.The assump-tion that state conservation intervention isrequired to curb local behaviors invariably ledto loss of control over traditional resources, aloss overseen not only by men with guns,but by those with notebooks, sketchpads,dog-eared botanical texts – the other tools ofenvironmental expertise.

Thus, efforts at conservation appear, atleast in retrospect, as exercises in control.What seemed perhaps at the time as enlight-ened efforts to preserve local ecologies andeconomies, were clearly efforts in expropria-tion; in the process, local people lost the rightsto their land, the rights to their property, andthe rights to govern their own affairs. Thatthese colonial social and environmental sci-ence practitioners were well trained, wellintentioned, and often very sympathetic tothe situation of the colonized (though oftenthey were not) matters little to such out-comes, and in some ways, is prerequisite tothe confidence and zeal with which colonialscience was conducted.

Nor was it unique to France (or Germany,Great Britain or the United States for thatmatter). This generalized expression of statehegemony in a form of research abstraction isarguably an inevitable product of state know-ledge authority – what James Scott (1998)calls ‘authoritarian high modernism’, the sim-plification of ecology, economy, and societyrequired to govern, and its inevitably perni-cious effects.

Such research traditions are thus theft intwo senses. First, they are instrumental to actu-ally appropriating other people’s stuff: forests,pastures, waterways, minerals, and knowledge.

But more than this, they rob from other peoplethe right to speak.

Colonialism Now: EnvironmentalScience

The legacies of these research traditions aretwofold. First, they have left the world withsets of historical notions that are empiricallywrong, yet which hold tremendous influenceover the global imagination.The idea that WestAfrican forests are receding under a tide ofignorant local populations, for example, is oneas prevalent now as a century ago, despite localaccounts and increasing historical evidence tothe contrary (Fairhead and Leach, 1998).

But more than this, in the contemporarycontext, a tradition of colonial knowledge pro-duction has left a legacy of ongoing research inthe underdeveloped world that is, put baldly, anindustry. Hundreds of millions of dollars ofnational and international funds are pouredinto funding surveys, analyses, and examina-tions of a great range of environmental ‘prob-lems.’ University professors, United StatesAgency for International Development work-ers, and arguably even reporters, trek acrossthe world’s poorest places, interviewing localpeople and recording their opinions, theirresources, and their ideas, later bartering themfor salary and prestige. All the while, suchresearch is leveraged on providing ‘authentic’accounts of local experience.

This last crisis, one of representation wherelocal ideas are reframed in terms that makesense in the conceptual world of the expertobserver, is perhaps the most pernicious, sinceit suggests the limits of emancipatory socialand environmental science. As Gayatri Spivak(1990) explains, the impulse to ‘save the poor’generally involves efforts to speak on their behalf,inevitably therefore in the language of thecolonial expert, a self-defeating and internallycontradictory effort. Rather, Spivak argues,

ENVIRONMENTAL INQUIRY IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLDÿÿ313


scholars need not to learn more, but rather tounlearn:

There is an impulse among literary criticsand other kinds of intellectuals to save themasses … how about attempting to learnto speak in such a way that the masses willnot regard as bullshit? When I think of themasses, I think of a woman belonging to84% of women’s work in India, which isunorganized peasant labor. Now if I couldspeak in such a way that such a personwould actually listen to me and not dis-miss me as yet another of those manycolonial missionaries, that would embodythe project of unlearning. (1990: 56)

The extension of this line of criticism to theproblem of dominant modes of colonialthinking in contemporary theory and researchhas come to be known as postocolonial the-ory.The term is quite contentious since it canbe taken to mean:

1 the theorization of a historical period‘after’ formal colonialism and the geo-graphic spaces experiencing and negoti-ating decolonization, with their persistentexperience of unequal power relations

2 a methodology to interrogate the coloniallogics and practices of Euro-Americancultural/scientific hegemony, both histori-cally and contemporarily (Said,1978;1994;Mongia, 1997).

Despite their incredible heterogeneity, post-colonial theorists commonly share an interestin decolonizing the relations between north/south and exposing the contribution to globalinequity and power relations of research, writ-ing, and thinking on the ‘Third World’ (forlack of a better term) by First World scholars.In the process this work rewrites history andecology from the point of view of the col-onized subject and so inverts the privilegeenjoyed at the expense of the world’s mostmarginal people.

In this sense, contemporary environmentalscience conducted not only by foreignresearchers but also by indigenous nationalsfunded by state organizations and private firmscan be explored in terms of how it functionsto reproduce colonial relationships while oftenironically claiming to speak on behalf of mar-ginal people.These practices appropriate localresources while simultaneously appropriatinglocal voices: research is theft.

Ways Forward

All of this is to present a pretty formidable wallfor researchers interested in environmentalchange and the power relations that flow frommanagement and control of resources. Takingthis critique seriously seems to suggest that thenormal way of doing business is certainly not asprogressive as one might think. So what are thedirections forward for researchers seeking to dorobust analysis of social and environmentalprocesses, while admitting the political embed-dedness of any claims about society and nature?

Ignore the critique?

One obvious option is to ignore the critique.Such postcolonial accounts, after all, onlyserve to muddy what is already a complex setof research tasks. And the fact that colonialaccounts were perhaps incorrect, owing tothe poor research technologies and ideologiesheld by researchers, is no guarantee that suchfailings are inevitable or inherent to contem-porary research. Indeed political research maybe the very problem in the colonial legacy;the key must be to create a less, rather thanmore, political ecology. Stay the course ofpositivist science, one might argue, perhapsgetting ‘feedback’ from local people throughparticipatory planning efforts.

While this is certainly the preferencefor most of the world’s researchers, it is hardto proceed seriously with any normative

314ÿÿPRACTICES


projects (explicitly seeking more equitableand emancipatory ways of doing research,not just more accurate ones) if one takes thehistory of science seriously. To attempt toremove the ‘politics’ from science is preciselythe failing of colonial science, which evacu-ated the normative moral responsibility froma practice laden with normative political cat-egories and implications.As Said observes:

the general liberal consensus that ‘true’knowledge is fundamentally non-political(and conversely, that overtly politicalknowledge is not ‘true’ knowledge)obscures the highly if obscurely organi-zed political circumstances obtainingwhen knowledge is produced. No one ishelped in understanding this today whenthe adjective political is used as a label todiscredit any work for daring to violatethe protocol of pretended suprapoliticalobjectivity. (1978: 10)

As far as participation goes, while ‘experts’have studiously recorded local opinions ofproblems, locals themselves have been largelywritten out of actual scientific practice. Evenwhere local voices are allowed into the envir-onmental planning process, as is increasinglythe case, the actual practice of ‘science’,whichprecedes any community-based discussion,remains the untouched domain of experts.

Stay home?

Another possible response to the postcolonialcritique, at least for privileged and First Worldresearchers, is to stay home. Given the fraughtnature of international research and the grosslyunequal power relations between the researchand the ‘studied’, the ethics of anti-colonialpractice mandate that those daily geographiesof colonialism not be reproduced.

Work at home, moreover, allows a greatmany important projects.The colonial natureof science can be explored historically, elites

and their relations to the global south can beinterrogated, and the political economy ofpractice ‘at home’, especially as it relates toprocesses ‘far away’, allows endless researchprojects in the researcher’s own back yard.A deep historical reading of the colonial originsof the contemporary world, its imbalancedconceptual apparatuses, and its current impli-cations, is a daunting and important enoughproject to justify staying home.

This seems a necessary but incompleteeffort. First, there is nothing necessarily anti-colonial about physically doing work ‘athome’, even archival research, since all writ-ing and interpretation are, by the definitionsof the postcolonial critique, political acts. Sotoo, the landscapes of home, whether urbanCleveland or rural West Virginia, are arguablythemselves postcolonial landscapes, filled withunequal power relations, and embeddedclassed, raced, and gendered historical poli-tics, all of which impinges on the conceptualworlds of the researcher and researched.

More than this, however, is the inevitablefact that though the critical researcher maychoose to stay at home, the rest of the worldmost definitely will not. Increased global tradeand foreign direct investment mean thatmultinational firms will not stay home.Globalefforts at conservation mean that powerfulenvironmental groups will not stay home.TheUnited States armed forces will not stayhome.The IMF will not stay home, nor willthe World Bank, nor indeed the global laborforce, whose migrations represent an endlessset of complex movements with environmen-tal portent. Indeed, if a (mis)reading of post-colonialism results in critical environmentalresearchers staying home, they will be num-bered amongst a very few indeed.

Engage the critique: methodologicalimplications

Obviously, therefore, a serious reading ofpostcolonialism suggests doing a different



kind of environmental research, while at thesame time engaging the colonial implica-tions inherent in doing research. In such anapproach, research revolves around exposingand interrogating the practice of scientificresearch and planning in the reproductionof colonial power relationships. This meansengaging in ground-level, empirical study ofhow organizations operate, especially scien-tific and official ones. So too, this approach toresearch should examine how local peopleengage with agencies and knowledges underconditions of unequal power, exposingalliances, positions, and practices. This effortshould work not only to understand the localpolitics of knowledge, but also to explainwhat kinds of social, cultural, and ecologicalwork such alliances do, employing whateverways of knowing we have at our disposal,and evaluating them in normative and eman-cipatory terms. In other words, a possiblepostcolonial research path is to explore andexplain how landscapes and the knowledgeof landscapes are produced through colonialpractice.

Such an effort requires serious attentionto methodology, since science attending to itsown colonial implications must consider howresearch is performed, not simply the ques-tions and answers that motivate inquiry.Research must retain methods that measure,describe, and explain, while linking them (ornesting them within) methodologies thatseek to interpret, contextualize, and expose.The key is therefore to unite inquiry into sci-entific, environmental research questionswith inquiry into the power of science. Orput another way, critical research may pro-ceed by bringing together important andmeaningful truth claims and questions (e.g.is soil being eroded, are groundwater levelschanging, or is carbon being sequestered?)with explorations of the production of truth(e.g.who is doing soil science, how is ground-water categorized and defined, or who paysfor global warming?).

The following case study from rural Indiarepresents my own efforts to follow this path.By inquiring into the politics of forestry sci-ence, while simultaneously seeking to meas-ure alternative accounts of forest cover, thework seeks to critically assess the productionof knowledge even while working to empir-ically explain forest cover change.Whether ornot these goals are achieved is best left to thereader to decide.

How Much Forest Is There?A Postcolonial Inquiry

Global forest cover is on the decline. Onemuch-cited estimate suggests that between1700 and 1980, forests and woodlands declinedby some 19 per cent, a loss of over 5 billionhectares of forest cover in less than 300 years.Of course, the trajectories of forest coverchange are regionally divergent, with LatinAmerica, tropical Africa, and South Asiarecorded as suffering some of the greatestdeclines (Richards, 1990).

Certainly, there is much to say about thesedivergent trajectories of decline, especially interms of the role of colonial science and mod-ernization in their development and perpetua-tion. Many convincing critical explorationshave been made into the driving forces of suchchange, relating current trends to colonial his-tories.The treatment of the forest periphery inLatin America as an extractive colony of theurban core, for example, shows that deforesta-tion is commonly a result of explicit statepolicy for the appropriation of land fromindigenous communities and other marginalgroups (Hecht and Cockburn, 1989). Theclearance of Asian forests in many countries, ata different scale, reflects the colonial depen-dency relationships with industrial neighbors,who accrue added value in the cutting andmilling of products consumed in the First World(Kummer, 1992). Put simply, deforestation canbe seen as an expression of power relationships.

316ÿÿPRACTICES


Forest cover change in Godwar

Yet, as Fairhead and Leach have shown (seeearlier), any measurement of forest coverchange is itself inherently political. The firstgoal of a critical environmental science, there-fore, is to place these statistics under criticalscrutiny and explore the political stakes inenumerating forest cover in the first place.What is a forest? Who has the authority tosay? And how are answers to these questionsprefigured by the conceptual conditions withinwhich they are asked? Under competing def-initions, moreover, those enforced by officialsversus those held by local producers, wouldrates of change be measured differently? Inother words, by taking seriously the colonialcharacter of environmental knowledge, whatmight an exploration of forest cover changelook like?

To explore these conditions, my ownresearch has focused on the savanna andgrasslands regions of southern centralRajasthan in India. The Godwar region ofthe state, located along the spine of the highlyeroded Aravalli hills, divide the arid north-west of the state from the humid southeast(Lodrick, 1994). This is an area of relativelygood rainfall, receiving around 500 mmannually. The forests dominate the hills andcontain a range of tree species, includingAnogeissus pendula, Butea monosperma, andZiziphus nummularia (Jain, 1992; Robbins,2001a) (Figure 28.1). Between 1996 and2000, I spent many months travelling inthe region, examining satellite imagery, andhaving long discussions with foresters,farmers, and herders throughout the area,trying to answer the simple questions: isforest expanding or contracting, why, and atwhose expense?

The expansion or contraction of forest inthe region is a matter of some disagreement,and is of considerable political importance. In1986, 562 square kilometres of the hills wereenclosed to form the Kumbhalgarh Sanctuary,

a wildlife park managed for panther, hyena,and sloth bear species (Chief Wildlife Warden,1996). This enclosure, like many enforcedthroughout the region, is predicated on theexplicit assumption that forests are decliningthroughout India and require immediatepreservation. Indeed, the government’s explicitgoal, supported by that of the World Bank, isto put one-third of the subcontinent’s landunder forest cover: ‘for achieving the target ofthe prescribed 33⅓ per cent area of the coun-try to be under forests, we need about 35 mil-lion hectares to be planted and made intoforests outside the traditional forests’ (Maithani,1988: v).

It is in this context, a government man-date nested within a global environmentalcrusade for forestry, that government statisticsof regional land cover are created. Thesestatistics tell an apparently optimistic story(Figure 28.2). Forest cover in Rajasthan, apoor and arid state on the margins of Indianindustrialization, whose population growthrate is higher than the national average, hasexperienced more than a doubling of forestcover since 1965.

Contemporary Edenic imaginaries

Explorations of forestry texts and conversa-tions with foresters in the field, however,open a window on a more complex processthan a simple, value-neutral, land cover trans-formation. Specifically, this expansion offorests is commonly justified in terms of halt-ing the encroachment of a vast desert. Stateofficials insist that the crisis in forest cover ispotentially catastrophic, a large-scale trans-formation of apocalyptic proportions.Generally,planting and protection efforts are extolled,therefore, as an effort to restore a lost gardenthat has been replaced by a desert. Each treeplanted represents a step towards ‘turningthe desert region into a green belt full ofvegetation and highly fertile land’ (Bhalla,1992: 284).



The quixotic conceptual system that sucha discourse of land management implies isby no means unique to Indian forestry, butrather represents the ‘Edenic imaginary’common to all modern tree-planting efforts.As Shaul Cohen (1999) has explained, forestsand trees are powerful normative metaphorsthat drive a struggle to return to a pristinenature. Such a narrative supports the powerof forestry agencies, private firms, and non-governmental organizations, all of whoseefforts become suffused in a soft green glowby association with their planting of trees.With little or no specific ecological justifica-tion, our collective urge to restore a lost past

props up the political and economic agendasof a range of powerful players.

So too, this approach to trees is underlainby two related assertions.As Cohen observes:

First, tree planters, regardless of theirideology, hold that the more treesplanted the better, suggesting that thegarden is improved with each tree.Second, trees and tree planting (and treeplanters, by extension) are unmitigatedgoods. (1999: 429)

Together this leads to a quantitative moral cru-sade, to plant as many trees as possible and to

318ÿÿPRACTICES

Figure 28.1 The forested Kumbhalgarh Reserve in Rajasthan, India


assert successful land stewardship based on thenumber of trees on the ground. Such is clearlythe case in Rajasthan.Targets are set quanti-tatively for tree plantation and survival, andprofessional promotions in the state ForestDepartment are fixed to quantitative assess-ment of success. So too, all tree plantations aredescribed as unmitigated local goods, eventhough many of the species selected for theregion are introduced from other countriesand ecozones. Because of what has been ‘lost’,any efforts, no matter how ecologically ques-tionable, represent ‘gains’.

This metaphor of loss and recovery isobviously quite old, rooted in a specificallyJudeo-Christian Edenic worldview, whichmay or may not be more general or univer-sal. Whether forests, grasslands, or asphaltfor that matter, characterize Marwari notionsof Eden is of little relevance, however. Themobilization of the metaphor implies thatlocal practice has erased a lost world, whichonly expert intervention can recover; anexercise in landscape control by a professionalcadre, obscured in the assertion (neverproven) of the normative good that willcome from trees. Forestry texts and dis-courses, revealed in field-based exploration,

show the Edenic imaginary of Rajasthaniforestry to be in and of itself colonial.

Consistent colonial hegemony

A history of Marwari forests, moreover, sug-gests that the contemporary panic over defor-estation is considerably less old than the Bible,and has its roots instead in a key historicalmoment of British hegemony. Surveying thecolonial-era administrative reports for theKumbhalgarh forest belt from the late 1800sreveals a clear linkage between forestry andcolonial governance; as colonial authorityexpanded throughout the subcontinentduring the period, facing resistance in manyquarters, the imperative to maintain controlover semi-independent regions and rulers,while avoiding the financial and military bur-den of widespread occupation, required thecreation of experts.

Specifically, the princely states ofRajputana, which made up the geographicallandscape of the region that would laterbecome Rajasthan,were governed in the nine-teenth century by semi-autonomous Rajas.These rulers, governing the states of Jaisalmer,Marwar, and Sirohi, were by no means ‘free’agents. Rather, these states were linked toBritish authority through the offices of pro-fessionals, whose expertise was required in theconduct of modern governance.

Thus, in 1887 the first forestry survey ofMarwar was published, under the authorityof a Mr Lowrie, the Assistant Conservator ofForests of Ajmer, where the British enjoyeddirect rule, who was ‘loaned’ to the kingdomfor the task. Following Lowrie’s tour of theregion (and its tens of thousands of squaremiles) in a single brief month in 1884, thesurvey concluded that ‘the soil of Marwar isgenerally poor, abounding with rock andsand, and ill-adapted for Forest growth’(Marwar, 1887: 26). As the Gazetteer fromthe region noted previously in 1871, ‘theappointment of an Assistant Conservator of


0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Year

Hec

tare

s ('0

00)

Figure 28.2 Forest cover in Rajasthan


Forests [is] more for the purpose of creatingthan of conserving forests’ (Ajmeer, 1875: 9).

In administrative reports spanning thenearly two decades from 1887 to 1894, thetone and extent of forest control shifted dra-matically. Enough valuable timber was foundto justify conservation activity. Boundary pil-lars were built, forest laws were drawn up, anda number of traditional subsistence practiceswere criminalized, including ‘grass cutting’,‘grazing without permission’, and lightingfires (Marwar, 1893: 19). As income began toflow into the state from forest revenue, forestrywas simultaneously professionalized, with thefirst batch of English-speaking foresters sentfor specialist training. Finally, the regionalgeography of the near-forest areas was dividedup in favour of varying ‘rights holders’ withdiffering access and control over forestresources.All of this was accomplished througha set of complex negotiations where theprincely owners of the forest were ‘compen-sated’ by the enclosure of the land by colonialauthorities (Marwar, 1894).This was accom-panied by an increasing number of expertsand reports to codify the resources of theregion.All of this is typical of colonial forestrymore generally, but the Rajputana case is aremarkably clear example of the extension ofcolonial power through the establishment ofexpertise.

Yet simultaneous with this establishmentof control was an explicit effort to ‘denatural-ize’ the degradation of the region’s forest,pointing to the hand of humanity, specificallynon-colonials and historic Indian peoples, inthe degradation of the forest. ‘The recklessdestruction by man’ became a justification foraction (Marwar, 1887). In particular, theMarattas – an earlier local imperial rival ofthe British – were blamed for destruction ofwhat was once lush vegetation, along withlocal communities (Marwar, 1886).

Recalling the Edenic narrative promul-gated in the contemporary period, a historicalreading of the emergence of forestry in theregion is equally marked with a regenerative

crisis story. So too does the story coincidewith the emergence of colonial technocraticcontrol and the criminalization of the dailylives of the poor.

Living in someone else’s forest

The upshot of this forest activity, includingdemarcation, institutionalization, and planta-tion, is the burgeoning expansion of treecover in the Kumbhalgarh area. The energyand momentum described consistently fromthe colonial period to the present have resultedin dramatic landscape change, therefore (assuggested previously in Figure 28.2). So, howmuch forest is there?

To answer this question, my discussionswith foresters and work in colonial archiveswere supplemented with analysis of satelliteimagery and extensive interviews with localpeople living in and around these conserva-tion areas.These two modes of inquiry pro-duced a curiously contradictory picture offorest cover change, which sheds light on thepostcolonial condition of regional forests.

Satellite imagery was unambiguous; asshown in Table 28.1, forest canopy cover inthe 900 km2 region facing the Kumbhalgarhreserve has increased dramatically between1986 and 1999, of the order of 50 per cent injust a few years. A walking ground survey ofthese emergent forests, however, reveals com-plications. The trees in this emergent forestrepresent a relatively narrow range of speciesin plantation, including trees from theAmericas (Prosopis juliflora) and the Near East(Acacia tortilis). Because they grow quickly andform a thick canopy, they often crowd outother important local species.

The problems encountered each day bypeople living in the material shadow ofsomeone else’s forest imaginary are manifold.The new thorn scrub discourages the growthof grassy ground cover for grazing.The leavesof the new trees are poor fodder. The newtrees charcoal reasonably well but make poormaterials for local construction. While the

320ÿÿPRACTICES


new forest cover is not exactly a nuisance, it byno means represents the return of ‘forests’ inany meaningful way for most locals (Robbins,2001a). Not so for foresters or for state-levelstatistical reporting (Figure 28.2), whichdefines as forests all lands under the control ofthe Forest Department, who continue to insistthat this land cover is successful forestry.

To test this notion, follow-up researchmapped the varying estimates of forest coverby local farmers, herders, and foresters. Thetechnique, utilizing photograph identificationand satellite imagery, reveals that forestersconsider a far larger expanse of land cover tobe ‘forest’ than do their counterparts outsidethe bureaucracy (Robbins, 2001b). On thecontrary, the areas considered by herders inthe region to be forest, composed of savannascrub and forage tree species, are in decline.

This is further confirmed in a survey oflocal land use and mapping records, called jam-abandi, which are kept in each village andwhich record in local categorical terms thecoverage of varying land uses. These records,which consist of large cloth cadastral maps anda geocoded record of land use for every vil-lage, are archived over long periods.Because ofneglect, these records are in a regrettable con-dition of advanced physical decay (Figure 28.3).A sample of such records from villages in theregion confirms the characterization of forestdecline suggested by local farmers and herders.While ‘forest’ cover is indeed expanding in theregion,on an average of 39 hectares per villagebetween 1965 and 1992, there has been a

concomitant decline in what the recordsdescribe as oran land. Surveyed villages inwestern Rajasthan lost on average 219 hectares(over 2 km2) of oran each (Robbins, 1998).Oran lands, considered sacred by both theregion’s Hindus and Muslims, are typicallycovered in trees, especially important indi-genous species (Gold, 1989).Thus, an expan-sion in forest in the region is accompanied by(and necessarily linked to) deforestation.

In sum, the local fact of deforestation iserased through a colonial practice of reforesta-tion, which silences alternative notions of thelandscape by forwarding not only a materialpractice of exogenous tree planting, but alsoa triumphant discourse of Edenic recovery,grounded in a colonial historical tradition ofcontrol.The more trees appear on the ground,moreover, the more physical vindicationthere is for the conceptual apparatus of expertauthority. Trees are a colonial fait accompli,and the research and planning efforts ofreforestation arguably represent a theft oflocal resources.

The Colonial Ambiguity of Research

Yet such pernicious processes have here beenexposed and explained through yet moreresearch.This empirical investigation, conductedto expose the practices and transformationsborn of technical imaginaries, thus itselfrepresents a form of appropriation. It doesnot derive from local people themselves and it


Table 28.1 Net land cover change in Godwar, 1986 and 1999 (km2)

Cover 1986 1999 Change Change as % of 1986

Water/shadow 3.85 0.57 −3.27 −85.11Urban/rocky 74.48 81.80 7.32 9.83Grassy/fallow 336.50 185.29 −151.21 −44.94Thorn scrub 161.69 161.20 −0.49 −0.31Tree canopy 183.82 274.47 90.65 49.31Agriculture/cultivated 18.12 75.39 57.27 315.95

Note: Figures exclude unclassified areas and represent roughly 775 km2 of the study region.

Source: Robbins, 2001a


does not (cannot?) give voice to the colonizedsubject, nor would it necessarily be under-standable in any immediate way to that subject.

Put more directly, was the old lady whoyelled at me across her back fence ‘right’ or‘wrong’? What gives this author the author-ity to say? Could I possibly speak for her inany case, since any such representation onlyreinscribes exactly the pernicious relation-ships the research seeks to undermine.

So too, the technical tools employed tobuild the case against colonial forestry, includ-ing satellite imagery and other equipment,actually served to reinforce the power oftechnical knowledge systems, which havehistorically silenced the voices of localpractitioners and their ways of knowing.The

apparent unambiguous ‘truth’ suggested inTable 28.1, as a specific example, is a privilegeafforded to the researcher who uses the tech-nical tools of colonial science, even where theresults are used to challenge hegemonicauthority. So too, it reinforces the very methodsof ‘abstraction’ that James Scott so correctlycriticizes (see earlier).Anti-colonial science iscolonial too, at least to some degree.

This essential ambiguity is troublingand suggests the difficult methodologicalimplications for environmental research in apostcolonial world. It does point a possible wayforward, however, by critically examining therole of power in the production of environ-mental knowledge while going about the busi-ness of rigorously producing new knowledges.

The reconciliation of these projects willrequire more than has been suggested here,however. A necessary step for any such pro-ject is the establishment of politically viablealliances – those that might impact perni-cious policy and practice – with other partic-ipants in the struggle over nature, whetherthese are farmers, herders, or foresters.By sharing results, by allowing research ques-tions to be modified and diverted in consul-tation, and by arguing over the applicationof research to policy advocacy, the act ofresearch becomes more complex, thoughreally no more or less political. Admittingthat the interests of these players, includingthe geographer, the forest range officer, andthe raika pastoralist, do not and cannot entirelycoincide, such alliances are necessarily fluid,temporary, and strategic. Even so, productiveresearch to help reinvent the world will requirerobust and extensive research conducted in justsuch complex political networks – mutualexploitation, mutually agreed upon. Anythingless is theft.

NOTEThis research described in this paper was madepossible with support of the American Institute of

322ÿÿPRACTICES

Figure 28.3 Bundled jamabandi records for Marwarivillages contain land use records in disaggregatedand highly localized categorical vocabulary. Thougha crucial archival resource, and an importantalternative to technical records like satellite imagery,such records are commonly in a state of decay


Indian Studies,The Ohio State University, and theNational Science Foundation. Special thanks go toHanwant Singh Rathore at the Lok Hit PashuPalak Sansthan, Ilse Kohler-Rollefson at theLeague for Pastoral Peoples, and S.M. Mohnot at

the School for Desert Sciences.Thanks also to theforesters and residents of Sadri and Mandigarh andto Anoop Banarjee and Sakka Ram Divasi. Theauthor is deeply indebted to Joel Wainwright forcomments on earlier drafts of the paper.


ReferencesAjmeer, State of (1875) Gazetteer of Ajmeer–Merwara in Rajputana. Calcutta: Office of

the Superintendent of Government Printing.Bhalla, L.R. (1992) ‘Development of desert and waste land’, in H.S. Sharma and

M.L. Sharma (eds), Geographical Facets of Rajasthan. Ajmeer: Kuldeep, pp. 283–7.Chief Wildlife Warden, F.D. (1996) Management Plan: Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary

1997–1998 to 2000–2001. Udaipur: Rajasthan Forest Service.Cohen, S. (1999) ‘Promoting Eden: tree planting as the environmental panacea’, Ecumene,

6: 424–46.Cohn, B. (1996) Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1994) ‘Contested forests’, African Affairs, 93: 481–512.Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1995) ‘False forest history, complicit social analysis: rethink-

ing some West African environmental narratives’, World Development, 23: 1023–35.Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1998) Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local

Realities: Studies in West Africa. New York: Routledge.Gilmartin, D. (1995) ‘Models of the hydraulic environment: colonial irrigation, state power

and community in the Indus Basin’, in D. Arnold and R. Guha (eds), Nature CultureImperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia. Bombay: OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 210–36.

Gold, A. (1989) ‘Of gods, trees, and boundaries: divine conservation in Rajasthan’, AsianFolklore Studies, 48: 211–29.

Hecht, S. and Cockburn, A. (1989) The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers andDefenders of the Amazon. London: Verso.

Jain, R.R. (1992) ‘Botanical and phytogenic resources of Rajasthan’, in H.S. Sharmaand M.L. Sharma (eds), Geographical Facets of Rajasthan. Chandranagar: Kuldeep,pp. 68–75.

Kummer, D.M. (1992) Deforestation in the Postwar Philippines. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press.

Lodrick, D.O. (1994) ‘Rajasthan as a region: myth or reality’, in K. Schomer, J.L. Erdman, D.O.Lodrick and L.I. Rudolph (eds), The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity.New Delhi: Manohar and the American Institute of Indian Studies, vol. I, pp. 1–44.

Maithani, G.P. (1988) ‘Preface’, Wasteland Development for Fuelwood and FodderProduction (A Compilation). Dehra Dun: Government of India, pp. v–vii.

Marwar, State of (1886) Report of the Administration of the Marwar State for the Year1885–86. Jodhpur: Marwar State Press.





Mongia, P. (1997) ‘Introduction’, in P. Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory.London: Arnold.

Richards, J.F. (1990) ‘Land transformation’, in B.L.T. Turner, W.C. Clark, R.W. Kates et al.(eds), The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, pp. 163–78.

Robbins, P. (1998) ‘Paper forests: imagining and deploying exogenous ecologies in AridIndia’, Geoforum, 29: 69–86.

Robbins, P. (2001a) ‘Tracking invasive land covers in India: or, why our landscapes havenever been modern’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91: 637–59.

Robbins, P. (2001b) ‘Fixed categories in a portable landscape: the causes and con-sequences of land cover classification’, Environment and Planning A, 33: 161–79.

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Random House.Said, E. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human

Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Spivak, G.C. (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (ed.) in

Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge.

324ÿÿPRACTICES


CONTESTED GEOGRAPHIES: CULTURE WARS,PERSONAL CLASHES AND JOINING DEBATE

Gill Valentine and Stuart Aitken

29

‘Geography is a social institution – it is madeby human beings in social contexts – andas such its nature will always be contested’(Taylor and Overton, 1991: 1089). In thisbook so far the authors of each chapter haveoutlined very diverse ways of thinking aboutwhat constitutes geographical knowledge, themethods that should be used to collect data,and the politics and purpose of these endeav-ours. Sometimes implicitly and at other timesexplicitly, the chapters have touched on theconflicts between them in terms of geograph-ical thought and practice and the implicationsof these for the direction and nature of thediscipline.As Neil Smith argues:

The history of geography does not simplyhappen with the passing of time, but isan active creation, the result of struggle.There is a struggle over which ideas bestexplain the past, a struggle over conceptsappropriate for current research, andinsofar as scientific research is obliged tohave some redeeming social importance,a struggle over the way in which the his-torical geographies of contemporarylandscapes are to be fashioned. (1988: 160)

This chapter provides some examples ofthe contested nature of geography. HenryKissinger is credited with saying that debatesamongst academics are the most vitriolicbecause there is so little at stake.This statementis as conflicted as the former US Secretary ofState himself, who is lauded by some for hiswork towards peace and who is indicted byothers as a war criminal. Yes, geographical

debates can be vitriolic but the nature of thestakes is important because they are far fromsmall.

This chapter picks out three examples –skirmishes about philosophy and relevance;skirmishes about institutions, people and thediscipline; and skirmishes about philosophyand methodology – to demonstrate some ofthe ways that geography is being debated.What is at stake here are the ways that geo-graphers see the world and practise research.

Skirmishes about Philosophyand Relevance

Our first example of a geographical skirmishtook place within the pages of the journalProgress in Human Geography. In 2001 thegeographer Ron Martin launched an attackon the failure of geography in the UK tomake an effective contribution to the publicpolicy agenda, at a time when it was beingactively reworked and rethought. In doing so,he contrasted the discipline with others, suchas sociology, whose leading figure AnthonyGiddens is frequently invited by the PrimeMinister to advise on policy-making.

Martin blamed the failure of geographyto have an impact on the corrosive effectsof postmodernism and the ‘cultural turn’ inAnglophone human geography. In mappingthe process leading up to this, Martin recalledthe publication of David Harvey’s book SocialJustice and the City in 1973. He argued that


this critical Marxist take on capitalism,although largely theoretical, inspired a sense ofsocial commitment and political engagement(see also Chapter 25) within the discipline. Inthe late 1970s as the postwar Keynesian eco-nomics and the welfare model of state inter-vention unravelled, geographers had theopportunity to be part of the political debateabout new ways forward; or to challenge thefree-market neoliberal policies of Thatcherismin the UK and Reaganism in the USA.

Instead of taking a ‘policy turn’ – with thenotable exception of some individual geo-graphers who have persisted with trying tomake a contribution to policy – Martin(2001: 192) claims the discipline lost its rele-vance, fragmenting into a series of what heterms ‘post-radical and post-Marxian move-ments’, such as critical human geography, fem-inism, postmodernism and so on. In particular,he suggested that the contemporary emphasison difference and particularism (see Chapters10 and 12) had led to a fragmentation of geo-graphy’s political project and a movementaway from concerns with broader conceptssuch as social justice. Martin characterized‘post-radical and post-Marxian movements’as being preoccupied with theoretical andlinguistic issues and losing their critical edge.He also lamented what he described as humangeography’s move away from doing rigorousempirical work; and its preoccupation withwriting obtuse theory rather than using thekind of jargon-free language necessary to com-municate with government. Rather, Martinsuggested that human geographers hadbecome dismissive of policy work, dubbing itatheoretical and descriptive and questioning theindependence or integrity of its practitioners.

Calling for a ‘policy turn’ in the discip-line, Martin argued that:

we need to temper our enthusiasm forseeking out the latest philosophical, theo-retical or methodological fad, and developa greater interest in practical social

research, and as part of this reorientation,accord proper academic standing to policystudies … we need to take detailed empir-ical work far more seriously: the drifttowards ‘thin empirics’ needs to bereversed, and much greater attentiondirected to methodology and the quality ofevidence. And … human geographers needto decide how they, and the studies theyundertake, are to be used: there is ofcourse no such thing as neutral researchand we need to be more explicit about,and more committed to, the political posi-tions that inform and shape our work –whatever those political positions are.(2001: 202)

Indeed, he went on to argue that geographershave a moral obligation to apply theirresearch for the benefit of wider society (forexample by exposing and explaining inequal-ities) rather than just their own careers.

Martin’s article sparked a heated debatein the journal Progress in Human Geography.While he had blamed geography’s failure tomake an impact on government policy interms of philosophical issues within the dis-cipline, Doreen Massey (2001) located its dif-ficulty in gaining any political influence, atleast in part, on the unwillingness of govern-ment to listen to the radical implications ofwhat geographers have to say. Massey warnedagainst the dangers of abandoning theory ina bid to engage policy-makers, of separatingtheory from applied work, identifying insteadthe need for geographers to get their the-oretical ideas across to wider audiences in amore accessible way. Indeed, she suggestedthat geographers needed to work throughtheir own specific theoretical contribution todebates rather than being so quick to importideas from other disciplines, calling for amore constructive dialogue between humanand physical geography. And, she identifiedthe need for geography to shake off its imageas an intellectually dull subject associatedwith ‘capes and bays’ (2001: 13).

326ÿÿPRACTICES


While Massey had responded to Martin incivil terms, Dorling and Shaw (2002) adopteda more aggressive tack, challenging bothMartin’s and Massey’s arguments in brusquelanguage. In particular, they took Martin andMassey to task for being preoccupied withgeography, arguing that perhaps the reasonwhy regional inequality is still on the policyagenda after 25 years is that geographers havespent too much time debating it with othergeographers in academic journals, rather thangetting involved with what is going on outsidethe discipline. They pointed out that mostgeographers ‘are concerned with thinkingabout (and understanding and explaining) spa-tial relationships, not with changing them, andthat is precisely why they are geographers’(2002: 632).

Dorling and Shaw then went on to arguethat if geographers want to have an impacton policy, rather than waiting for a policyturn within the discipline, they must rethinkhow they get their message across outsidethe discipline. Here, they criticized geo-graphers for their abstract conceptualizationsof regional inequalities and the north–southdivide, arguing that concrete argumentsbased on examples and statistical evidence aremore convincing. Stressing the importance ofquantitative methods (see Chapter 22) for‘showing how much things matter’, Dorlingand Shaw (2002: 633) accused critical geo-graphers of losing sight of the effects of‘quantifying power’.

Like Martin, they too laid into the elitistjargon of poststructuralist theories, and calledfor geographers to articulate their messagemore effectively. Referring to a reader onpoverty, inequality and health (Davey Smithet al., 2001), they noted that of the 30 seminalessays included, not one was written by a geo-grapher. Controversially, they suggested that ifgeographers want to have any impact on pol-icy they would be better off in another discip-line, claiming that geography may not be wellsuited to political influence, characterizing it as

‘an academic refugee camp – a place whereacademics can work on whatever they wish towork on and not be disturbed by the need toconform to the traditions of other disciplines’(2002: 638). Dorling and Shaw concluded bysuggesting that if geographers wanted to betaken seriously outside the academy theyneeded to respect those that did take part inpolicy debates instead of dismissing them forbeing inadequately theoretical or not propergeographers.

Martin and Massey were given right ofresponse to Dorling and Shaw’s attack by thejournal Progress in Human Geography. Martin(2002) took the opportunity to agree withDorling and Shaw’s (2002) criticism of Massey(2001) – that the cause of geography’s lack ofrelevance is not politicians’ failure to not listenbut rather whether geographers will respondto calls for policy-oriented work or have any-thing informative/distinctive to say.He furtherpicked up an underlying theme in Dorlingand Shaw’s paper, to argue that geography has aweak or inferior standing in wider educationaland public domains, taking the opportunity tohave another dig at poststructuralist theoriesand geography’s dabblings in cultural and mediastudies, etc.

Massey entered back into the affray todefend herself against what she regarded asDorling and Shaw’s ‘persistent misunder-standing (wilful?) [and] a scatter of insults(gratuitous)’ (2002: 645). Pointing to her owninvolvement in policy arenas beyond theacademy, Massey claimed that it was notnecessary to sacrifice theory to be politicallycommitted. Rather, she argued that the trickis to use appropriate language for appropriateaudiences, characterizing her own role not asthinking of ideas and then trying to foistthem onto politicians but as an ‘endless mov-ing between’ in which she works with policy-makers and community groups in a range offorums, ‘reflecting on these engagements,thinking, arguing, and writing’ (2002: 645).In doing so, Massey took Dorling and Shaw

CULTURE WARS, PERSONAL CLASHES AND JOINING DEBATEÿÿ327


to task for their conceptualization of policy,arguing it is not just a case of winning largegovernment research contracts and providingtechnically correct answers to prespecifiedgovernment questions. Rather, she suggestedthat policy work can also involve workingwith campaign groups or trying to influencewider public opinion and that academics havean intellectual responsibility to have a deeper,more difficult political engagement and debateabout different understandings of the world.

Beyond this skirmish in Progress in HumanGeography, the debate about geography’s rel-evance and its relationship to different philo-sophical traditions has rumbled on. For NoelCastree (2002), if geographers want to makea difference beyond the academy they mustfirst pay more attention to the institutions inwhich they are situated – to what Wills(1996) has dubbed the academic sweatshopor what Smith (2000) has described as thecorporatization and commodification of uni-versities. In focusing on the political eco-nomy of higher education, Castree (2002)argued for the need for more activism withinuniversities to challenge and change whatcounts as valuable academic activity. Whilefor Mitchell, ‘to make a difference beyondthe academy it is necessary to do good andimportant, and committed work, within theacademy’ (2004: 23). He cited the example ofKarl Marx whose scholarship was driven by acommitment to a revolutionary project – tolearn and explain how capital worked andhow it might be changed – arguing that itwas this commitment that has made Marx’swork relevant to those outside academy forover a century and a half.

Skirmishes about Institutions, Peopleand the Discipline of Geography

In contrast to the contemporary and UK-focused nature of our first example of thecontested nature of geography, the second

examines the history of the closure ofgeography in one of North America’s mostprestigious universities.

Following modest postwar expansion thegeography program at Harvard Universitywas abruptly closed in 1948, triggering askirmish over the nature and future of thediscipline of geography. This closure wassymbolically important because of the emin-ent position of Harvard within the NorthAmerican education system but was madeeven more significant by the President ofHarvard’s suggestion that geography was notan appropriate university subject.

Tracing the history of what happened,Neil Smith (1987) argued that the demise ofHarvard geography was bound up with par-ticular personalities. The story began opti-mistically: a wartime report on geography atHarvard (which at this time was a Departmentof Geology and Geography within theDivision of Geological Sciences) highlighteda lack of trained geographers required forwartime operations, and therefore recom-mended expansion. Harvard took on severalpromising young geographers. In 1947 one ofthese, Ackerman, was recommended for pro-motion by the senior faculty to the Provostand Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science,Paul Buck, who was the administrator directlyin charge of geography. However, MarlandBillings, a professor of geology and the Chairof the Division of Geological Sciences withinwhich geography was located, was unhappyabout this because Ackerman had originallybeen half in geology and half in geography. IfAckerman was promoted to associate profes-sor in geography, geology would effectivelylose half a post. Billings was concerned thatgeography’s expansion threatened geology andchose the case of Ackerman’s promotion tolaunch an attack on geography.

According to Smith’s account, Billingslobbied Paul Buck to administrativelyseparate geography and geology because thesubjects were very different. His move was

328ÿÿPRACTICES


actually supported by the Head of Geography,Derwent Whittlesey, who welcomed the ideaof autonomy for the emerging GeographyDepartment.

This achieved, Billings wrote to Buckarguing that Ackerman’s promotion had previ-ously been supported by geology on the(mis)understanding that it would gain half apost if Ackerman’s application was successfuland he became a full-time geographer.Billingsmade the case that a half-post in geology wasmore valuable to the university than a newappointment in geography and questioned theimportance of human geography. Paperworkflew back and forth.Whittlesey, and a numberof prominent academics who acted as externalindependent referees, defended Ackerman’spromotion and an Ad Hoc Committee onGeography, including outsiders, also recom-mended Ackerman’s promotion.

But Buck had become convinced thatgeography should be closed. He refused toreappoint a teaching instructor who taught anumber of core courses in the department,and the sophomore class was informed thatthere were insufficient courses for them toobtain a major in geography.With the excep-tion of Whittlesey, the members of theGeography Department were to be fired.Despite a temporary stay of execution andthe mobilization of support for the depart-ment on campus, geography closed.

In telling this story Neil Smith (1987)argued that there were three public factors inthe decision to close geography: (1) the adversefinancial circumstances of the university;(2) the efficacy of geography at Harvard; and(3) whether geography could be a universitydiscipline. Behind the scenes, however, person-alities also played a crucial part. A key figurewas Isaiah Bowman, an eminent geographerand President of Johns Hopkins University,whom Smith identified as contributing to theelimination of geography at Harvard. Smithargued that although Bowman supportedgeography as a discipline, he did not support

Harvard geography because he took a negativeview, for personal reasons, of some of the staff.He found Whittlesey’s homosexuality ananathema. In particular, he was critical of theway that Whittlesey had appointed Kemp –with whom he was having a gay relationship –as an instructor of geography, suggesting thatKemp was a mediocre scholar who probablywould not have survived in Harvard with-out Whittlesey’s patronage. He also had littletime for Alexander Hamilton Rice, who ranthe university’s Institute for GeographicalExploration. According to Smith, Bowmansaw Rice as a charlatan who had effectivelypurchased a professorship thanks to the moneyof his wife, a rich society figure.

However, the crucial factor in Bowman’sreluctance to support the Harvard GeographyDepartment was in Smith’s (1987) analysis thefact that his personal antipathies were alsobound up with an intellectual antipathy forWhittlesey. Bowman had trained within theDavisian paradigm, and regarded physicalgeography as the foundation stone of the dis-cipline; as such he positioned geographywithin the sciences. He was critical of humangeography, viewing it as descriptive, easy, andlacking in scientific character. His perceptionof the social sciences was further tainted bytheir association with leftwing radicals. ThusWhittlesey, who came from the ChicagoSchool, and who believed that there could bea set of intellectual principles that could pro-vide a foundation for human geography as adiscipline, embodied Bowman’s prejudicesabout the discipline. Smith argued thatBowman therefore let his judgement aboutthe future of Harvard geography becomeclouded by his personal feelings, refusing tostand up in support of the department despitebeing encouraged to do so by other prominentfigures in the discipline. He also suggests thatBowman was not kindly disposed to geo-graphy at Harvard because he felt intimidatedby its wealth and elitism, coming as he didfrom a more modest background.



Smith (1987) therefore concludes that inthe context of geography’s institutionalweakness at Harvard – emerging out of geo-logy, it was numerically weak and had not yetidentified a clear intellectual terrain or set ofboundaries from other subjects for itself – itwas vulnerable to the attack launched byBillings.Whittlesey was politically weak, anddid not have the allies in the administrationor among key faculty members to resist it.

Smith’s explanation for the demise ofgeography at Harvard prompted a spate ofresponses from other geographers offeringalternative readings of what had taken place.Martin (1988), for example, challengedSmith’s account. He was more critical of therole played by Whittlesey, accusing him ofhaving not developed a meaningful geo-graphy programme at Harvard (which wasbound up with his alleged appointment ofKemp on the grounds of their relationshiprather than his ability) and having failed tomake his mark on the wider university.Concomitantly, Martin was more forgivingof Bowman. He suggested that he had failedto intervene because he respected the presi-dential prerogative, so once the Presidenthad made his decision to close geographyBowman would do nothing to undermine it,and did not want to engage in unseemly pub-lic squabbles about the discipline (although hesuggested that he did make efforts in privateto defend geography as a science). For Martin,Bowman’s actions were shaped by his lack ofrespect for Whittlesey and Rice, regardingthem both as liabilities, portraying Bowman asa good friend of geography.

Cohen (1988) took a different tack –identifying geography’s vulnerability in termsof the department’s failure to be aggressive atthe first sign of crisis. He observed that theimage of any department stems largely fromthe reputation in its faculty, and thus geo-graphy at Harvard was vulnerable because itwas composed of poor teachers (such as Kemp)who lacked charisma. He also pointed out

that the Geography Department did not workeffectively as a team or come together. As asmall community geography did not have thecritical mass to work as a force within theuniversity or to create a meaningful supportnetwork in the field, and the weaknesses ofindividuals were easily magnified.

Burghardt (1988) also waded into thedebate, standing up for both Whittlesey andBowman. He attacked Smith (1987), stating:‘I don’t doubt that Whittlesey and Bowmandid a poor job of defending the discipline.However this was at a time when humangeography was just emerging from a physicalcocoon. I feel that it is somewhat distastefulfor contemporary geographers, with the rich-ness of thirty years of intense discussion behindthem, to blame the progenitors of the field fortheir lack of insight’ (1988: 144).

Other commentators also defended dif-ferent proponents in the story and criticizedSmith (1987) for washing geography’s dirtylinen in public. In response to the commen-taries on his paper, Smith (1988) struck backat those who argued that geographers shouldnot be openly critical of each other in pub-lic. He challenged what he termed ‘ploddinghistories’ of the discipline that refused toacknowledge the intellectual and personalstruggles that shaped it, stating that ‘any out-ward appearance of unity and tranquillityfools only geographers’ (1988: 160).

Skirmishes about Philosophy andMethodology

Our third example of an ongoing skirmishwithin geography focuses on the philosophi-cal and methodological struggle for discip-linary supremacy between GIS practitionersand their critics in human geography.

GIS (see Chapter 23) is a collection oftools for quantitative data analysis thatemerged out of the positivist tradition (seeChapter 2). In the early 1990s it was subject

330ÿÿPRACTICES


to hostile criticism on the basis of what wasperceived to be its inherent positivism (Lake,1993). Peter Taylor described the growth ofGIS as a ‘technocratic turn’, characterized bya ‘retreat from ideas to facts’, ‘trivial pursuitgeography’ and ‘a return of the very worst sortof positivism, a naïve empiricism’ (1990: 212).

In particular, critics attacked GISresearchers for unproblematically using scien-tific methods to study social phenomena, argu-ing that GIS ‘did not accommodate lessrational, more intuitive analyses of geographi-cal issues and that its methodology, by defini-tion, excluded a range of inquiry’ (Schuurman,2000: 577). GIS researchers were further lam-basted for implying that all data are given(Taylor and Overton, 1991) rather than recog-nizing that data are always created and thatthere are social relations to its production (i.e.most data come from the state, and there is acontrast between the information at the dis-posal of rich and poor countries).

Critics of GIS also called its users toaccount for their claims of intellectual neutral-ity in the interpretation of data, and their lackof ethical concern for some of its applications.Neil Smith (1992: 257), for example, pointedout that the Iraq War of 1990–1 was the ‘firstfull scale GIS war’ in which advanced GIS andrelated technologies were used by pilots, tankcommanders and geosmart bombs, alteringthe way modern warfare is fought. Moreover,he observed that a significant percentage ofAmerican geography graduates who studyGIS end up in military-related jobs – notingthat the US Defense Mapping Agency is thesingle largest employer of geography gradu-ates. Denis Wood (1989) suggested that com-puter systems promote death not only throughtheir military usages but also through theirrole in car manufacturing, observing that carskill more people in the USA than most othercauses of death combined.

Others critics railed at the under-representation of marginalized groups in thetechnology; challenged the commercial

motivations behind the development of GIS;questioned its ethics, suggesting that theopportunities the technology provides for sur-veillance might threaten individuals’ privacyand freedoms; and called for geographers toshow responsibility for the ways that GIS isdeveloped and applied (Pickles, 1993;Sheppard, 1993).

Advocates of GIS retaliated at variousstages of the debate, arguing that it is a power-ful tool that increases geographers’ analyticalabilities and that the discipline needs GIS(Goodchild, 1991). Dobson (1993) accusedcultural geographers of being ignorant of GISapplications and contrasted its hostile receptioninside the discipline with the positive ways itwas being received outside the discipline.Openshaw (1991: 621) suggested that withingeography there was ‘genuine ignorance andwilfully misinformed prejudice’ towards GIS.For Openshaw, GIS represents the essence ofgeography – the basis to hold the disciplinetogether. He argued that GIS offers: ‘an emer-ging all embracing implicit framework capableof integrating and linking all levels of past, pre-sent and possible future geographies’ (1991:628). He writes:‘A geographer of the impend-ing new order may well be able to analyse rivernetworks on Mars on Monday, study cancer inBristol on Tuesday, map the underclass ofLondon on Wednesday, analyse the ground-water flow in the Amazon basin on Thursdayand end the week by modelling retail shoppersin Los Angeles on Friday’ (1991: 624).

Like many academic skirmishes withinthe discipline, this one was characterized byboth the critics and the advocates of GIS alikemaking excessive claims for their own posi-tions while portraying the arguments of theother in derogatory terms (Schuurman,2000). In the process of hyping the impor-tance of GIS, Openshaw (1991) in particularwas openly hostile towards its critics. Heaccused them of ‘infecting’ the younger gen-eration; lambasted their ‘fear and anxiety’;charged them with ‘envy’; labelled them ‘poor



fools’; and most offensively of all describedthem in disablist terms as ‘technical cripples’(1991: 621–4).

For Openshaw, the critics of GIS weremotivated not just by concerns about epi-stemology but by a desire to protect and retaintheir disciplinary position. He suggested thatwith the growth of GIS ‘the utility of soft andso-called intensive and squelchy-soft qualita-tive research paradigms could fade intoinsignificance’ (1991: 622). Smith (1992: 258)struck back, ridiculing the ‘outlandish discip-linary ambitions’ of GIS users and their obses-sion with a technical agenda at the exclusionof intellectual pursuits and other perspectives.

These intense and often hostile skirmishesthat characterized the debate about the role ofGIS in geography in the first half of the 1990sgave way to a calmer discussion about thesocial effects of the technology and its impacton the discipline (Schuurman, 2000). By nowthere was a growing demand for GIS aca-demics (and a corresponding falloff in positionsfor cultural geographers); and the technologywas making inroads into other disciplinesas well as the commercial and public sectors.As such, Schuurman argues that GIS hadbecome a legitimate and permanent featureof geography, and so its critics began to recog-nize that the technology was non-negotiableand to focus instead on opportunities torework GIS in postpositivist ways.This markeda period of negotiation between users of GISand social theorists, although Schuurmanobserves that this process was undercut bycommunication problems as a result of ignor-ance of each other’s fields. Rather than mak-ing their criticisms of GIS relevant to its users,its critics, unfamiliar with the language oftechnology, used the language of social theoryto talk about the epistemological and ethicalshortcomings of GIS. In turn,GIS researchers,unused to the language of social theory,employed the vocabulary of technology, writ-ten in the language of computational algebraand laws of physics, to extol its virtues.Schuurman argued that if social theorists

wanted to influence the use of GIS they mustlearn to communicate in its own language.

Some GIS researchers, concerned by theattack on GIS in terms of positivism, beganto draw attention to the fact that neitherthe technology nor its users were inherentlypositivist. Rather GIS could be compatiblewith a wide range of philosophic positions(Schuurman and Pratt, 2002). Indeed,Schuurman and Pratt (2002) argued that cri-tiques from within the GIS research com-munity might be more effective at shapingits use than those offered by social theoristsoperating outside its community who haveno stake in its future.

Mei-Po Kwan (2002), for example, afeminist GIS user, observed that the crudeoppositional polemic of the GIS debate –positivist/quantitative methods versus critical/qualitative methods; GIS/spatial analysis ver-sus social/critical theory – had marginalizedthe contribution of feminist GIS researchersand the potential to develop feminist GISpractices.

She claimed that GIS can disrupt thequantitative/qualitative methods division ingeography because qualitative data like videoor voice clips and photographs, hand drawnmaps, or sketches can be incorporated intothe technology; and GIS/spatial analysis canalso be informed and contextualized by datagenerated by qualitative methods such asinterviews. Moreover, she showed that GIScan be employed in alternative ways thatsubvert dominant GIS practices and are com-patible with feminist epistemologies and pol-itics. For example, Mei-Po Kwan (1999a;1999b; 2000; 2002) has used GIS to trace andvisualize women’s life paths and the impact ofspace–time constraints on their mobility andemployment; and to examine the spatiallyconstrained life spaces of African Americans.GIS software and data do not predeterminethe ways that technologies are used; rather,GIS can create many different products. Asanother feminist geographer Sarah Elwood(2000) has shown, the outcome of GIS

332ÿÿPRACTICES


depends less on the technology itself than onthe critical agency of its users. In her study,GIS technologies, by legitimizing a neigh-bourhood association, shifted the powerdynamics between a community group andthe state.

Reflecting on how GIS can be used infeminist research, Schuurman and Pratt(2002) commented that feminist geographerscan bring reflexivity to GIS in relation to thecreation, use and interpretation of the visualdata and so challenge the detached, disem-bodied mode of knowing that characterizesconventional GIS practices. They suggestedthat feminist geographers need to thinkabout what knowledges are excluded fromGIS representations; to consider the rele-vance of the knowledge produced by thetechnology to those participating in theresearch; to identify which groups areempowered or disempowered by GIS; and tobe sensitive to the impact of it on the lives ofvulnerable groups.They concluded by arguingthat feminist geographers need to destabilizemasculinist computer cultures and GIS pra-ctices, and find ways of using GIS technologiesto advance social justice.

Up Close and Personal

As all the previous skirmishes (about philo-sophy and relevance; people and institutions;and philosophy and methodology) haveshown, the terms of geographical debateare rarely confined to scholarly remarks.Professional differences can become personalantagonisms; while personal antipathy can beprojected on to professional positions. Ratherthan academic argument moving smoothlyfrom an exchange of views to a negotiatedconsensus, in the whole process there is oftena tendency for individuals to resort to varyingdegrees of provocation, irony, and even insult.

In the mid 1990s The Canadian Geographerpublished a keynote conference speech givenby Peter Gould. In it he rounded on radical

feminist geography, claiming that it had ‘beenelevated rapidly to the sacred, where faith andbelief rule, but reason is not relevant’ (Gould,1994: 10). He attacked radical feminists’ con-cern with sexist language, accusing them ofbeing ignorant of the historical origins ofwords and linguistic structures. Implicitly,Gould argued that feminist geography wasconstructing men like himself as ‘other’ (Peake,1994). And in defence of his position hereferred to himself as a lover of Geographia –invoking images from his book The Geographerat Work (1985),which depicts the discipline asa naked woman. In his published speechGould also took postcolonialism to task,reappraising colonialists for spreading the advan-tages of civilization such as ‘scrupulous honestyin all matters of accounting … and a senseof service’ (1994: 14), while accusing blackAfrican leaders of being corrupt despots. Atthe same time, Gould (1994: 10) attempted todeflect potential criticisms of his position, byreferring to some of his best friends as black.

Feminist geographers Linda Peake (1994)and Janet Momsen (1994) hit back. Peake(1994) questioned Gould’s (1994) representa-tion of women, and the political effects of thesymbols he invoked. Likewise, Peake pointedout that Gould’s reappraisal of colonialismcould be read very differently, drawing atten-tion to the dishonesty of colonial regimes suchas the UK government in British Guyana –which, she pointed out, rigged elections for29 years and left the country with one of thelowest levels of GNP per capita in the world.Peake lambasted Gould for implicitly consti-tuting himself as an objective detached viewerin what she termed a ‘dangerously nostalgicvein of masculinist rationality’ (1994: 203). Sheconcluded by arguing that:

Professor Gould suggests that it is timewe all grew up … The problem is thatthe Young Turks, the (exclusively male)intellectual vanguard of academic geo-graphy to whom he makes referenceseveral times, have a habit of growing up



into Old Turkeys. Maybe it is time notonly to grow up, but for some OldTurkeys to come down off their roosts.That would be just fine by me. (1994: 206)

While this skirmish in The CanadianGeographer might be seen as a rather person-alized contest framed through academic dis-course, on other occasions conflict can gobeyond this rough and tumble of academicdebate. Michael Dear (2001) argues that con-flicts between geographers can descend intohate. He takes the dictionary definition ofhate as having ‘feelings of hostility or anti-pathy towards’ (2001: 2).Using this definition,he recounts how he has been the subject ofhate in geography, in terms of being brandedwith labels used pejoratively such as liberal,Marxist and postmodernist, as well as moreblatant insults such as ‘freak’, ‘zealot’, ’un-American trash’ and ‘subversive scum’.Referring to responses to his essay on post-modernism and urbanism (Dear and Flusty,1998), he recalls how his promotion of post-modernism was referred to by one commen-tator as a form of ‘academic AIDS’ (2001: 4).Other commentators have frequently usedanimalistic and excretory references todescribe his work as well as making threatsabout ‘unpleasant actions’ that ‘will be taken’against him (2001:5).

Dear argues that these experiences ofwhat he dubs ‘rabid referees’ and ‘combatantsin the culture wars’ – as well as the public casesof hate incidents and intimidation directedat Michael Storper and Gill Valentine –have made him aware of the role of the per-sonal in disciplinary politics. Dear suggests

that personal hatred is often a product ofprofessional antagonisms, such as jealousiesover differences in reputation, or the distribu-tion of resources, responsibilities, power, andeven popularity with students within depart-ments and the discipline. He questions thesilence in geography surrounding such issues,and the role of professional networks in gen-erating hate.Rather,Dear argues for the needfor geographers to teach students the value ofcivility in academic discourse and to developa culture of respectful criticism. He suggeststhat academics should spend less time lookingfor each other’s faults and more time lookingfor strengths, and that they should embracediversity (in terms of intellectual commit-ments and projects as well as personal identi-ties) rather than attack it. Dear concludes hispaper with the claim that geographers have amoral responsibility to treat colleagues withcivil collegiality.

In a response Wolfgang Natter (2001)makes three practical suggestions for how thismight be achieved. First, he suggests that ifgeographers overhear conversations wherecolleagues are being unfairly criticized theyshould demonstrate zero tolerance for charac-ter assassination by challenging unacceptablepersonal characterizations. Second, as refereesand editors geographers should encouragescholarly writing and promote an ethics of dis-cussion.Third, the discipline needs to develop,and extend, codes of professional conduct.

In such ways, geographers might keep abit of civility in their everyday skirmishesover the content, boundaries and directionsof the discipline without losing any of thepassion or excitement of the debate.

334ÿÿPRACTICES

ReferencesBurghardt, A.F. (1988) ‘On “academic war over the field of geography”: the elimination of geo-

graphy at Harvard, 1947–51’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78: 144.Castree, N. (2002) ‘Border geography’, Area, 34: 103–12.Cohen, S. (1988) ‘Reflections on the elimination of geography at Harvard, 1947–51’,

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78: 148–51.


Davey Smith, G., Dorling, D. and Shaw, M. (2001) Poverty, Inequality and Health1800–2000: A Reader. Bristol: Policy.

Dear, M. (2001) ‘The politics of geography: hate mail, rabid referees, and culture wars’,Political Geography, 20:1–12.

Dear, M. and Flusty, S. (1998) ‘Postmodernism urbanism’, Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 88: 50–72.

Dobson, M. (1993) ‘Automated geography’, Professional Geographer, 35: 135–43.Dorling, D. and Shaw, M. (2002) ‘Geographies of the agenda: public policy, the discipline

and its (re)turns’, Progress in Human Geography, 26: 629–46.Elwood, S. (2000) ‘Information for change: the social and political implications of

geographic information technologies’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis.

Goodchild, M. (1991) ‘Just the facts’, Political Geography Quarterly, 10: 335–7.Gould, P. (1985) The Geographer at Work. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul.Gould, P. (1994) ‘Sharing a tradition: geographies from the enlightenment’, The Canadian

Geographer, 38: 194–202.Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold.Kwan, M.P. (1999a) ‘Gender, the home–work link, and space–time patterns of non-

employment activities’, Economic Geography, 75: 370–94.Kwan, M.P. (1999b) ‘Gender and individual access to urban opportunities: a study using

space–time measures’, Professional Geographer, 51: 210–27.Kwan, M.P. (2000) ‘Interactive geovisualisation of activity-travel patterns using three

dimensional geographical information systems: a methodological exploration with alarge data set’, Transportation Research C, 8: 185–203.

Kwan, M.P. (2002) ‘Is GIS for women? Reflections on the critical discourse in the 1990s’,Gender, Place and Culture, 9: 271–9.

Lake, R.W. (1993) ‘Planning and applied geography: positivism, ethics and geographicinformation systems’, Progress in Human Geography, 17: 404–13.

Martin, G.J. (1988) ‘On Whittlesey, Bowman and Harvard’, Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 78: 152–8.

Martin, R. (2001) ‘Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda’,Progress in Human Geography, 25: 189–210.

Martin, R. (2002) ‘A geography for policy, or a policy for geography? A response toDorling and Shaw’, Progress in Human Geography, 26: 642–4.

Massey, D. (2001) ‘Geography on the agenda’, Progress in Human Geography, 25: 5–17.Massey, D. (2002) ‘Geography, policy and politics: a response to Dorling and Shaw’,

Progress in Human Geography, 26: 645–6.Momsen, J. (1994) ‘Response to Peter Gould’, The Canadian Geographer, 38: 202–4.Natter, W. (2001) ‘From hate to antagonism: toward an ethics of emotion, discussion and

the political’, Political Geography, 20: 25–34.Openshaw, S. (1991) ‘A view on the GIS crisis in geography: or, using GIS to put

Humpty-Dumpty back together again’, Environment and Planning A, 23: 621–8.Peake, L. (1994) ‘ “Proper words in proper places …” or, of young Turks and old turkeys’,

The Canadian Geographer, 38: 204–6.Pickles, J. (1993) ‘Discourse on methods and the history of the discipline: reflections on

Jerome Dobson’s 1993 “Automated geography”’ Professional Geographer, 45: 451–5.



Schuurman, N. (2000) ‘Trouble in the heartland: GIS and its critics in the 1990s’,Progress in Human Geography, 24: 569–90.

Schuurman, N. and Pratt, G. (2002) ‘Care of the subject: feminism and critiques of GIS’,Gender, Place and Culture, 9: 291–9.

Sheppard, E. (1993) ‘Automated geography: what kind of geography for what kind ofsociety?’, Professional Geographer, 45: 457–60.

Smith, N. (1987) ‘Academic war over the field of geography: the elimination of geographyat Harvard, 1947–51’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77: 155–72.

Smith, N. (1988) ‘For a history of geography: a response to comments’, Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers, 78: 159–63.

Smith, N. (1992) ‘History and philosophy of geography: real wars and theory wars’,Progress in Human Geography, 16: 257–71.

Smith, N. (2000) ‘Who rules this sausage factory?’, Antipode, 32: 330–9.Taylor, P.J. (1990) ‘GKS’, Political Geography Quarterly, 9: 211–12.Taylor, P.J. and Overton, M. (1991) ‘Further thoughts on geography and GIS’,

Environment and Planning A, 23: 1087–94.Wills, J. (1996) ‘Labouring for love?’, Antipode, 28: 292–303.Wood, D. (1989) ‘Commentary’, Cartographica, 26: 117–19.

336ÿÿPRACTICES


EXERCISES

1 Define the following terms and briefly state their significance for humangeography: dialectic, patriarchy, epistemology, ontology, phenomenology, gender.

2 Structuration theories are inherently attractive as an ontology, but using them asa basis for research is highly problematic. Discuss.

3 By focusing solely on the thoughts and actions of ‘ordinary folk’, humanisticgeography is romantic, superficial and empirical. Critically evaluate thisassessment of humanistic geography.

4 Human geography has moved from the absolutes of positivism to the relativitiesof postmodernism. Discuss this statement and identify what has been gained andlost on the way.

5 Outline the main consequences for human geography of the quantitativerevolution.

6 What was radical about the development of Marxist approaches to humangeography in the 1960s and 1970s?

7 ‘We need to contemplate the human world less in terms of “grand theories”and more in terms of humble, eclectic and empirically grounded materials’(P. Cloke, C. Philo and D. Sadler, eds, 2003, Approaching Human Geography,London: Chapman). To what extent do you agree with this approach to thestudy of human geography?

8 Critically evaluate the role of agency in actor-network theory.9 Outline postcolonial critiques of representation. What are the implications of this

for doing human geography research?10 Choose a well-known human geographer, and research the development of their

career and writing. How does their work reflect particular philosophical ormethodological approaches to geography?

11 The topic of your research project is immigration. For each of the philosophiesoutlined in Part 1 of this book, identify how a geographer adopting this approachmight go about researching this topic. What are the similarities and differencesbetween them?

31-Aitken-3325(Exercises).qxd 11/24/2005 2:50 PM Page 337

GLOSSARY

Actor-network theory A theoretical approach that holds to the indivisibility of human andnon-human agents, exploring the ways that different materials are enrolled in networks. Originallydeveloped in debates about the production of scientific knowledge, actor-network theory (oftenabbreviated to ANT) opens up the ‘black boxes’ of action to explore the way that heterogeneousmaterials are continually assembled to allow actions to occur.

Agency Literally, the ability to act. Commonly used to refer to the ability of people to makechoices or decisions which shape their own lives.This notion of self-determination has formed animportant part of the humanistic critique of structuralist approaches to geography.

Behaviouralism An outlook or system of thought that believes that human activity can best beexplained by studying the human decision-making processes that shape that activity. Originallydeveloped in psychology, largely as a reaction to the mechanistic excesses of experimental psy-chology, behaviouralism – and more particularly cognitive behaviouralism – came to prominencein the human geography of the 1960s and 1970s. Primarily based on methods of quantification,behavioural geography has been criticized for its adherence to positivist principles, as well as itsunwillingness to explore the role of the unconscious mind, although it still underpins manyresearch projects, particularly those based on survey research.

Capital accumulation The use or investment of capital to produce more capital.This is the aim of,or driving force in, a capitalist society. It results in patterns of uneven development.

Capitalism The political-economic system in which the organization of society is structured inrelation to a mode of production that prioritizes the generation of profit for those who own themeans of production. Such a structuring sees a clear division in status, wealth and living conditionsbetween those few who own or control the means of production (bourgeois) and those who workfor them (proletariat).

Citizenship The relationship between individuals and a political body (i.e. the nation-state).Usually conceptualized in terms of the rights/privileges that individuals can expect in return forfulfilling certain obligations to the state.

Class A system of social stratification based on people’s economic position (specifically the socialrelations of property and work). Understandings and definitions of class are highly contested.

Commodification The processes through which people, ideas or things are converted into commodi-ties that can be bought and sold.As such it is a manifestation of capitalism. Such is the extensiveness

32-Aitken-3325(Glossary).qxd 11/24/2005 2:50 PM Page 338

of commodification that it is alleged by some writers to be contributing to the creation of a globalculture.

Critical geography Though diverse in its epistemology, ontology and methodology, and hencelacking a distinctive theoretical identity, critical geography nonetheless brings together thoseworking with different approaches (e.g. Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, poststructural) through ashared commitment to expose the sociospatial processes that (re)produce inequalities betweenpeople and places. In other words, critical geographers are united in general terms by their ideo-logical stance and their desire to study and engender a more just world.This interest in studyingand changing the social, cultural, economic or political relations that create unequal, uneven,unjust and exploitative geographies is manifest in engagements with questions of moral philo-sophy and social and environmental justice as well as in attempts to bridge the divide betweenresearch and praxis.

Cultural turn A trend in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries which has seen thesocial sciences and humanities increasingly focus on culture (and specifically the construction,negotiation and contestation of meanings). Linked to postmodernist philosophies.

Deconstruction A method of analysis that seeks to critique and destabilize apparently stable sys-tems of meaning in discourses by illustrating their contradictions, paradoxes, and contingent nature.

Dialectics A form of explanation and representation that emphasizes the resolution of binaryoppositions. Rather than understanding the relationship between two elements as a one-way causeand effect, dialectical thinking understands them to be part of, and inherent in, each other.A dialec-tic approach has been an important part of structuralist accounts that seek to understand the inter-play between individuals and society.

Difference Poststructuralist theory has emphasized the need to recognize the complexity ofhuman social differences associated with culturally constructed notions of gender, race, sexuality,age, disability, etc.This means providing an analysis that is sensitive to the differences between indi-viduals and avoids overgeneralizations.

Discourse Sets of connected ideas, meanings and practices through which we talk about or rep-resent the world.

Dualism Where two factors (e.g. home/work; body/mind; nature/culture; private/public) areassumed to be distinct and mutually exclusive and to have incompatible characteristics.

Empiricism A philosophy of science that emphasizes empirical observation over theory. In otherwords it assumes ‘facts speak for themselves’.

Essentialism The belief that social differences (such as gender, race, etc.) are determined by bio-logy and that bodies therefore have fixed properties or ‘essences’.

Feminism A set of perspectives that seek to explore the way that gender relations are played outin favour of men rather than women. In human geography, such perspectives have suggested thatspace is crucial in the maintenance of patriarchy – the structure by which women are exploited inthe private and public sphere.

GLOSSARYÿÿ339


Humanistic A theoretical approach to geography which is characterized by an emphasis on humanagency, consciousness and meanings and values. It developed in the 1970s partially as a critique ofthe spatial science of positivism.

Ideology A set of meanings, ideas or values which (re)produce relations of domination andsubordination.

Marxism A set of theories developed from the writing of Karl Marx, a nineteenth-centuryGerman philosopher. Marxist approaches to geography use these insights to examine geographiesof capitalism, challenging the processes that produce patterns of uneven development.

Mode of production A Marxist-derived term that denotes the way that relations of production areorganized in specific periods. Currently, it is accepted that the world is organized so as to reproduceand maintain a capitalist mode of production, though it is emphasized that feudal, socialist and com-munist modes of production have been (and in some cases still remain) dominant in some nations.

Non-representational theory A theory that seeks to move the emphasis of analysis from representa-tion and interpretation to practice and mobility. Emphasis is placed on studying processes of becom-ing, recognizing that the world is always in the making, and that such becoming is not alwaysdiscursively formed (framed within, or arising out of, discourse). Here, society consists of a set ofheterogeneous actants who produce space and time through embodied action that often lacks rea-son and purpose.To understand how the world is becoming involves observant participation – a self-directed analysis of how people interact and produce space through their movement and practice.

Objectivity The assumption that knowledge is produced by individuals who can detach them-selves from their own experiences, positions and values and therefore approach the object beingresearched in a neutral or disinterested way.

Other/othering The ‘other’ refers to the person that is different or opposite to the self. Othering isthe process through which the other is often defined in relation to the self in negative ways: forexample, woman is often constructed as other to man; black as the other of white; and so on.

Paradigm The assumptions and ideas that define a particular way of thinking about and under-taking research that become the dominant way of theorizing a discipline over a period of time untilchallenged and replaced by a new paradigm.

Political economy Theoretical approaches that stress the importance of the political organizationof economic reproduction in structuring social, economic and political life. Associated in humangeography with the influence of Marxist thinking, political economy perspectives in fact encom-pass a variety of approaches that explore the workings of market economies.

Positionality Refers to the way that our own experiences, beliefs and social location affect the waywe understand the world and go about researching it.

Positivism A theoretical approach to human geography, characterized by the adoption of a scien-tific approach in which theories/models derived from observations are empirically verifiedthrough scientific methods to produce spatial laws. Positivism came to the fore in the 1950s and1960s in what was known as the quantitative revolution.

340ÿÿGLOSSARY


Postcolonialism A set of approaches that seek to expose the ongoing legacy of the colonial erafor those nations that were subject to occupation by white, European colonizers. Emphasizing boththe material and the symbolic effects of colonialism, postcolonial perspectives are particularly con-cerned with the ways that notions of inferiority and otherness are mapped onto the global southby the north, though postcolonial perspectives have also been utilized to explore the race and ethnicrelations played out on different scales.

Postmodernism A theoretical approach to human geography which rejects the claims of grand the-ories or metanarratives. Instead it recognizes that all knowledge is partial, fluid and contingent andemphasizes a sensitivity to difference and an openness to a range of voices. Deconstruction is a post-modern method. Postmodernism is also a style, associated with a particular form of architecture andaesthetics.

Poststructuralism A broad set of theoretical positions that problematize the role of language in theconstruction of knowledge. Contrary to structural approaches, which see the world as constructedthrough fixed forms of language, such approaches emphasize the slipperiness of language and theinstability of text. A wide-ranging set of assertions follow from this key argument, including theassertion that subjects are made through language; the idea that life is essentially unstable, and onlygiven stability through language; the irrelevance of distinctions between realities and simulacra;ultimately, that there is nothing ‘beyond the text’. In human geography, poststructural thought hasprovoked attempts to deconstruct a wide variety of texts (including maps) and has encouraged geo-graphers to reject totalizing and foundationalist discourses (especially those associated with structuralMarxism).

Qualitative method In human geography, this denotes those methods that accept words and text aslegitimate forms of data, including discourse analysis, ethnography, interviewing, and numerousmethods of visual analysis. Mainly tracing their roots to the arts and humanities, such methods haveoften been depicted as ‘soft’ methods, and hence described as feminist in orientation. Latterly, how-ever, such simplistic assertions have been dismissed, and qualitative methods proliferate across thediscipline in areas including economic and political geography.

Quantitative method In human geography, this denotes those methods that prioritize numerical data,including survey techniques, use of secondary statistics, numerous forms of experimentation, andmany forms of content analysis. Mainly derived from the natural sciences, such methods are oftendepicted as ‘hard’ methods, deriving their analytical rigour and validity by association with masculinemodes of science and exploration. However, numerous critiques have exposed the subjectivity ofquantitative methods, and suggested their techniques cannot be understood as objective ways of look-ing at and understanding the world.This has led to a reappraisal of the quantitative method in areasof the discipline such as social and cultural geography where it has long been anathema.

Realism A theoretical perspective that seeks to transcend many of the problems associated withpositivism and structuralism by seeking to isolate the causal properties of things that cause otherthings to happen in given situations. Based on a methodological distinction between extensive andintensive research, this approach was widely embraced in human geography in the 1980s as a wayof distinguishing between spurious associations and meaningful relations.

Reflexivity Refers to a process of reflection about who we are, what we know, and how we cometo know it.

GLOSSARYÿÿ341


Situated knowledge In a challenge to objectivity, a situated knowledge is one where theorizationand empirical research are framed within the context in which they were formulated. Here, it isposited, knowledge is not simply ‘out there’ waiting to be collected but is rather made by actorswho are situated within particular contexts. Research is not a neutral or an objective activity butis shaped by a host of influences ranging from personal beliefs to the culture of academia, to theconditions of funding, to individual relationships between researcher and researched, and so on.This situatedness of knowledge production needs to be reflexively documented to allow otherresearchers to understand the positionality of the researcher and the findings of a study.

Social justice Refers to the distribution of income and other forms of material benefits withinsociety.

Spatial science An approach to understanding human geography that holds to the idea that therecan be a search for general laws that will explain the distribution of human activity across the world’ssurface.Associated with the precepts of positivism, and mainly reliant on quantitative method, spa-tial science signalled geography’s transition from an atheoretical discipline to one concerned withexplanation rather than mere description. Emerging in the 1950s, and bolstered by the quantitativerevolution of the 1960s, spatial science continues to be dominant in many areas of the discipline,though in others its philosophical underpinnings and theoretical conceits have long discredited it.

Structuralism A theoretical approach to human geography which is characterized by a belief thatin order to understand the surface patterns of human behaviour it is necessary to understand thestructures underlying them which produce or shape human actions.

Subject/subjective Subject refers to the individual human agent (includes both physical embodi-ment and thought/emotional dimensions). Subjective research is that which acknowledges the per-sonal judgements, experiences, tastes, values and so on of the researcher.

342ÿÿGLOSSARY


INDEX

Aborigines, 227absolutism, 241, 276academic careers, 169–70accountability, 289–90activism, 276, 277, 278; Marxist geographical,

273, 279–82, 283; research and, 234; theoryand, 281–2; in universities, 281, 328; use ofpeople-centred methodologies, 270

actor-network theory (ANT), 18, 34, 136–9, 222,338*; critique of, 144; and networks ingeography, 139–44; passnotes, 166

Adam, A., 137Adorno, T., 70agency 137, 141, 154, 338*; decentred, 137; human,

31, 88; and structure, 34, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94–5Allahabad, University of, 213Amedeo, D., 23Amin, A., 142analytical statements, 21ANT, see actor-network theoryanti-capitalism, 276, 277anti-essentialism, 122, 124–5, 133, 221;

ANT and 136Association of American Geographers, 43, 51,

228–9, 230Auckland, University of, 192, 194–6authenticity, 268, 269authority, 266; identity and, 154autobiography, 169

Barnes, T.J., 303–4Baudrillard, J., 117Bauman, Z., 108, 115–16behavioural research, 16, 75–8, 338*; cognitive,

79–80, 81, 84; interactional-constructivist, 80,81–2, 84; methodology and, 83; passnotes,164; philosophy and, 78–83, 84;transactionalism and, 81, 84

Berg, L., 196

Berry, B., 10Berry, T., 193Bhabha, H.K., 115, 152Billings, M., 328–9biopower, 124Blomley, N., 280Blumen, O., 281–2Blunt, A., 303Bowman, I., 329, 330Boyce, B., 173Bradley, W.J., 240British Columbia, University of, 181–2Browning, F., 220Buck, P., 328, 329Bunge, W., 281–2Burghardt, A.F., 330Butler, J., 302Buttimer, A., 30

Cabral, A., 147Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), 253Canetti, E., 117capital accumulation, 63–8, 338*capitalism 14, 68–9, 71, 72, 277, 338*;

consciousness and, 69; culture and, 69–70;Marx and, 58, 60–1, 62, 63; patriarchy and,48; postmodernism and, 112

Caputo, J.D., 123, 129Casey, E.S., 130Castells, M., 188, 207Castree, N., 281, 328causation, 101–4central place theory, 172, 174–5Césaire, A., 147cities, 66, 70, 206–7citizenship, 338*Clarke, K.C., 255class, 186, 338*; -for-itself/-in-itself, 275; Marx

and, 68, 274–6

A page number followed by an asterisk (*) refers to a mention in the glossary.

33-Aitken-3325(Index).qxd 11/24/2005 2:50 PM Page 343

Clayton, D., 303Cloud, J., 255cognitive behavioural research, 79–81, 84cognitive maps, 79, 83Cohen, S., 318, 330Cohn, B., 312collaborations, 205–6, 230colonialism, 151–2, 312, 333; and cultural power,

147, 149, 150; expertise of, 313, 320; inpostcolonial thought, 149, 152, 153, 313–14

Colorado, University of, 215commodification, 62–3, 70, 338–9*compartmentalization, 45Computer Institute for Scientific Research

(Michigan State University), 174computers, use of, 251–3, 253–4Comte, A., 20conceptualization, 101, 102, 103consciousness, 69conservation, as control, 312–13, 319–20consumption, 62–3, 70contact zones, 152Cosgrove, D., 31, 33, 36, 69cotton mills, 171Couclelis, H., 80, 239Critchley, S., 126critical geography, 277, 280, 307, 327, 339*critical methodology, 299–307critical reflection, 265, 270cultural geography, 94, 140, 195–6; discursive

methodology, 305–6cultural relativism, 156, 157cultural turn, 30, 70–1, 209, 339*culture, 100; in capitalism, 69–70; and

commodification, 70; communicationbetween, 152; difference between, 153,156; and domination, 147, 150, 151;European, 149

Daniels, S., 33De Geer, S., 172De Leeuw, J., 246Dear, M.J., 10, 92–3, 109, 193, 334deconstruction, 129, 234, 299–300, 307, 339*;

in analysis, 300–1; in geography, 302–3; asmethod of reading and writing, 301

DeFilippis, J., 279, 281, 282deforestation, 316, 321Deleuze, G., 234, 306–7democracy, 37, 128, 129Derrida, J., 128–9, 130, 133, 299–300, 301–2

Dewsbury, J.D., 307dialectics, 15–16, 58–60, 339*diaries, 90, 266difference, 71, 115, 203, 339*; ANT and, 143, 144;

cultural, 153, 156; gender as, 42, 46–7;sexual, 50

Digital Earth, 257–8digital libraries, 256–7disability, 203–4, 305discourse, 49–50, 100, 150, 303–4, 306, 339*;

colonial, 151–2, 153–4, 304; power and, 304discourse analysis, 50, 305–6, 307division of labour, 275Dobson, M., 331Doel, M.A., 113–14, 131, 303Dorling, D., 327Downs, R., 79, 80dualism, 59, 137, 300–1, 339*Duncan, J.S., 303–4

Easthope, A., 115Eco, U., 108economic geography, 140, 171–2Elwood, S., 332–3empathy, 264, 265–6, 267, 269, 288empiricism, 20, 23, 25, 80–1, 84Enlightenment, 125–6environmental perception, 76–9environmental research, 311; as expropriation,

312–13, 321–2; and postcolonialism,314–21, 322

epistemology, 5, 287; masculinist, 44–5essentialism (see also anti-essentialism),

290, 339*ethics, 36–7, 143, 290; of poststructuralism,

122, 129ethnography, 180–1, 215, 227Eurocentrism, 149existentialism, 263expeditions, 281–2experiential knowing, 265–6experimentation, 81, 84exploitation, Marx and, 61–2; research as,

311, 313

Fairhead, J., 312falsification, 22Fanon, F., 148–9Fellows, W., 220feminism, 15, 214, 216, 339*; realism

and, 104–5

344ÿÿINDEX


feminist geography (see also womengeographers), 15, 42–3, 51–3, 286–7;autobiography, 205, 206, 207–9, 228,230; critique of positivism, 26–7; genderas difference, 46–7; male-dominateddiscourse, 43–6; methodologies, 234,287–90, 290–4; passnotes, 163; andpatriarchy, 47–9; social constructivists,49–51; use of GIS, 332–3

Fenneman, N., 9field trips, 178–9Fincher, R., 89, 201Flusty, S., 116Ford, L., 10Ford Foundation, 175forestry, 317–21Foucault, M., 123–6, 130, 298, 303, 304–5Fox-Keller, E., 288

Gatrell, A.C., 239gay men, search for identity, 219–20, 221Geiger, S., 216gender 42; as difference, 42, 46–7; as social

construction, 42, 49–51; as social relation,42, 47–9

genealogy, 123–6generalization, 101geographic information systems, see GIS

(geographic information systems) geolibrary, 256–7Gibson-Graham, J.K., 72, 277Giddens, A., 86, 87–8, 92, 94Gidwani, V., 71Gilmartin, D., 312GIS (geographic information systems), 25,

176, 233, 330–1; critiques of, 27,254–6, 331; debate about, 331–3; impactof Internet, 256–8; military applications,255, 331; public participation (PPGIS),256; science and, 259–60; and uncertainty,258–9, 260

global laws, search for, 240globalization, 74–5Golledge, R., 23, 80, 173, 239Goodchild, M., 10Gore, A., 257Gould, P., 180, 246, 333Graf, W., 241–2Graham, E., 4Gregory, D., 89, 94, 221, 222, 303Grosz, E., 130

Haggett, P., 24Halfacree, K., 92Hanson, P., 77Hanson, S., 51, 77, 291Haraway, D., 130, 274, 276, 288Harley, J.B., 254, 302Harvard University, closure of geography

department, 328–30Harvey, D., 26, 57, 59, 67, 69, 113, 115, 180,

277–8; The Condition of Postmodernity, 52,109, 111–12, 189; Explanation in Geography,24–5, 187

Hayes, M., 194Hayter, T., 278hazard research, 79, 80health geography, 89, 90, 92–4, 194, 195;

discourse analysis, 305Heidegger, M., 126–7, 264Hepple, L., 247Herod, A., 275, 279heteronormativity, 48Hill, M.R., 25historical geography, 32; deconstruction in,

302–3; discursive methodology, 305–6historicism, critique of, 149holism, 264Horkheimer, M., 70housing, 201–2Hudson, R., 274humanism, 7, 263, 264; passnotes, 162humanistic geography, 14, 33–9, 263, 340*;

critique of positivism, 26; legacy of, 270;methodology, 263–8; origins, 30–3

Humphries, J., 208Husserl, E., 127Huyssen, A., 112hypotheses, 21; testing, 238, 239

idealism, 100, 221, 263identity, 150, 221; authority and, 154; place and,

153, 157, 182, 185, 229; search for, 218, 220ideology, 287, 340*; nationalist, 148idiographic-nomothetic schools, 100–1Illinois, University of, 228imagination, 31India, 175, 211–13; forestry in, 317–21intentional agent, 14, 34, 35interactional-constructivism, 80, 81–2, 84International Geography Union, 230Internet, impact on GIS, 256–8interpersonal knowing, 266–8

INDEXÿÿ345


interviews, 90, 227, 245; in-depth, 264, 266, 292Iowa, University of, 172–3, 174–7

James, C.L.R., 147Jameson, F., 112Janelle, D., 10Johns Hopkins University, 187, 189–90Johnston, R.J., 2, 11, 20

Kant, I., 76, 125, 126Kingsley, Mary, 43Klein, N., 279knowledge, 79, 151, 156, 266, 274; colonial,

150–1, 153; geographical, 9–11;interactional-constructivist, 80; poststructural,298–9; power and, 150, 313, 314, 316, 322;as process, 266, 268, 269, 270; productionof, 69; realism and, 98–9; shared, 266–8;situated 2, 274, 276, 288, 342*; spatial,77–8, 81; subjectivity of, 104, 105, 268

Kobayshi, A., 290Koertge, N., 244Krell, D.F., 130Kwan, M.-P., 332

Lancashire, industrial change, 171, 172landscape geography, 79, 80Lapsley, R., 111Latour, B., 34, 137, 139, 144Law, J., 136, 137laws: global, 240; spatial models and, 23–4Lawson, V., 293Leach, M., 312Lee, H.N., 77Lefebvre, H., 36, 188Lentricchia, F., 281Ley, D., 30, 31, 312locales, 88, 90, 94location, politics of, 290location-allocation models, 175–6location theory, 44, 175–6locational analysis, 207Lowenthal, D., 79Loyd, B., 228Lukács, G., 275Lyotard, J.-F., 109–10, 111, 112, 113, 114

Malpas, J., 130maps, 25, 251, 259; deconstructing, 254, 302;

power relations, 254Martin, G.J., 330Martin, R., 325–6, 327

Marx, K., 57–8, 112; and accumulation of capital,63–8; and class, 68, 274–6; materialism, 58,59–60; political economy, 60–3; and socialconstruction, 71

Marxism, 15–16, 36, 57–72, 200, 340*; critique ofpositivism, 26; death of, 57; andmetanarratives of, 111, 115; passnotes, 163;postmodernism and, 112, 115

Marxist geography, 36, 69–72, 187–8, 189, 201;activist, 279–82; defence of, 274–82;post-Marxian critique, 273–9

Massey, D., 51, 52, 142, 208, 326, 327–8materialism, 58–9; dialectical/historical, 59–60Matles, D., 306McCarty, H.H., 172McDowell, L., 51McHarg, I.H., 251McLafferty, S., 291, 293McMaster University, 92, 174, 192, 193–4, 201meaning, 5, 31, 33, 102–4, 208, 209;

in deconstructive readings, 300measurement, 21, 239; of error, 241;

GIS and, 259Merrifield, A., 274, 276, 277, 282, 283metanarratives, 17, 110, 111metatheory, 274, 276methodology: in behavioural research 75,

82, 83; critical, 299–307; people-centred,263–8, 270

Metropolis Project, 181–2Michigan, University of, Computer Institute for

Social Science Research, 174micro-economic theory, 199–200migration research, 32, 89, 90, 92Minnesota, University of, MacArthur

programme, 214Mitchell, D., 69–70, 277, 279mixed methods, 291modernity, 108–9, 110, 115; Holocaust and,

110–11; tradition and, 148; and truth, 114modes of production, 60, 72, 112, 340*Monk, J., 51Moody, K., 276Moore, I., 80moral theory, 36–7mothering, 89–90Mounfield, P., 172movement, 218, 221, 223; of gay men, 219, 220

Nagar, R., 291, 292–3National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse, 257National Spatial Data Infrastructure (USA), 257

346ÿÿINDEX


nationalism, 148Natter, W., 334naturalism, 20, 84nature, Marx and, 58, 63, 71neoliberalism, 276, 280network effects, 137, 139; in geography, 139–42networks, 34, 144; career, 196; spatial analysis

of, 140Neurath, O., 126Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, 148Nietzsche, F., 123, 126nihilism, 125, 128non-representational theory, 221, 222, 340*Norwood, V., 229

object-to-object relationships, 78objectivism, 276, 288objectivity, 21, 45, 79, 104–5, 340*; GIS and, 256,

259, 260observation, 264, 266Olsson, G., 186ontology, 5; feminist relational, 288; spatial,

218, 221–3Openshaw, S., 244, 247–8, 331–2oral techniques, 291otherness, 105, 129, 143, 340*Oxford, University of, 178–9, 189

Paget, P., 178Pain, R., 280paradigms, 2, 246, 340*participant observation, 264, 266, 291, 292participatory action research, 280patriarchy, 14, 42, 47–8Peake, L., 333Peet, R., 6, 282Penn State University, 179–81people-centred methodologies, 263–8, 270People’s Geography Project, 277Peperzak, A., 128perception, 76–7, 81, 242Perec, G., 108phenomenology, 127–8, 263, 269philosophy, 6, 7, 125, continental, 126–7;

and research, 4–5Phipps, A.G., 89physical geography, 102; differences from human

geography, 241–3Pickles, J., 222, 255place 35, 86, 195–6, 208, 221–2; ANT and, 142,

143; context of, 46–7; creation of, 38; healthand, 92–4; and identity, 182, 185, 229

place evocation, 265–6placelessness, 221, 222–3Pocock, D., 263, 264, 265–6, 268–9, 270‘policy turn’, 326–7political economy, 340*; Marxist, 60–3political geography, 140, 302Poona, University of, 213Popke, J.E., 131Popper, K., 22positionality, 289, 290, 340*positivism, 2, 7, 13–14, 20–2, 103, 233, 340*;

autobiography, 172, 199, 221; behaviouristresearch and, 80–1; and causation, 101;challenges to, 25–7; feminist critique of,287–8; in geography, 22–8; GIS and, 332;passnotes, 162; and quantification, 23–4,237, 239–41

postcolonialism, 19, 147–9, 214, 221, 303, 341*;anti-colonial writing, 147–9 anti-universaliam,35; critique of, 333; and cross-culturalunderstanding, 156–8; and environmentalscience, 314–21, 322; Orientalism, 149–53;passnotes, 167; and representation, 153–6,313; and research, 234, 311, 314

postmodernism, 17–18, 94, 115, 195, 341*; andcultural production, 112; geography and,113–17; influence of, 325; andmetanarratives, 110, 111; modernity and,108–9, 110, 114, 115; passnotes, 165

postmodernity, 107–8, 109, 114; Lyotard and,109–10; spaces of, 112, 115, 116–17

poststructuralism, 2, 18, 126–30, 298, 306–7,341*; ANT and, 136; anti-essentialism of,122, 124–5, 133; anti-foundationalism of,126, 127, 128, 133; critique of humanism,34–5; critiques of, 132–3, 326, 327; anddeconstruction, 299–303; and discourseanalysis, 303–6; genealogy and, 123–6; andgeography, 130–2; passnotes, 166

power, 35–6, 38, 200–1; agency and, 88, 95;colonial, 147, 149, 150, 151; inequalities in,198, 199, 200; knowledge and, 150, 313,314, 316, 322; in postcolonial theory, 151,155–6; relations of, 142–3; research and,288–9, 311, 315, 316

practice, 6–8, 222, 223Pratt, G., 291, 332, 333Pratt, M.L., 152

qualitative methods, 81, 194, 286, 291, 341*; andquantitative methods, 290–4; in spatialanalysis, 240

INDEXÿÿ347


quantitative methods, 14, 81, 102, 233, 237–41,246, 247–8, 290–1, 341*; differencesbetween human and physical geography,241–3; geographers’ views onnon-quantitative approaches, 243–6;marginalization of, 244, 246–7; andqualitative methods, 290–4; use of GIS,253, 332

quantitative revolution, 23–4, 141questionnaires, 291

radical feminism, 48, 333radical geography, 200, 201–2rationalism, 22, 84rationality, 242–3realism, 17, 98–9, 341*; and causation, 101–4;

critical, 103; feminism and, 104–5;passnotes, 165; social constructivismand, 99–100

reality, 76–7, 78, 80; alternative, 82–3; nature of,77; perceptions of, 242; process view of,77–8; subjective, 79

reason, 17, 125, 126, 128reflexivity (see also self-reflexivity), 289, 290, 341*regional studies, 31, 179regionalization, 88, 90, 94regularities, 101, 102, 103relativism, 276relevance of geography, 325–8Relph, E., 30, 32, 269Rengert, A., 228representation, 209, 306–7; colonial, 152;

cultural, 150, 153; postcolonialism and,153–6, 313

research, 6, 287, 316; as exploitation, 311, 313;as expropriation, 313–13; feminism and,287–8; goal of, 238; philosophy and, 4–5;power and, 311, 315, 316; relationshipin, 288

respect, 264, 265, 266, 288Robinson, G.M., 247Rose, G., 289, 292Rowles, G., 266–8, 269Royal Geographic Society, 43

Saaty, T.L., 259Sack, R., 26, 35, 37Said, E., 156, 315; Orientalism, 19, 149–53, 305Samuels, M., 30, 181San Diego State University, 176Sauer, C., 9

Sayer, A., 275Schaefer, F., 22Schaefer, K.C., 240Schuurman, N., 332, 333science, 14, 110; GIS and, 259–60; positivism

and, 20–1, 23, 25, 27; reportingstandards, 260

scientism, 22, 32Scott, A., 175self-to-object relations, 78self-reflexivity, 27, 263, 266Shaw, D., 36–7Sheppard, E., 143Sholl, M.J., 78Simon, H.A., 79situated knowledge, 2, 274, 276, 288, 342*Smith, D., 36–7Smith, N., 188, 254–5, 274, 278, 325; GIS, 331,

332; and Harvard University, 328, 329–30social construction, 5, 99, 156; and gender,

49–51; Marx and, 71; realism and, 99–100social justice, 180, 187, 342*social network analysis, 141–2social science, 246; ANT and, 136, 141–2;

investigation in, 240–1social theory, 94, 274socialism, 274, 276–7socialist feminism, 48societies, 43Society for Human Exploration, 281Soja, E.W., 109, 113Southwest Institute for Research on Women

(SIROW), 229, 230space-time, 67, 109, 117; Marxism and, 65–6spatial analysis, 176–7, 238, 257; GIS and, 253;

qualitative methods, 240spatial decision support systems, 176spatial science, 22–4, 26, 44, 342*; positivism

and, 25, 27spatiality, 78, 79, 81–2, 142; ANT and, 142,

143; methodology, 83; relationalapproaches, 142–3

Spivak, G., 154, 156, 313–14Stanley, L., 286, 291statistical analysis, 23, 291, 293Stea, D., 79, 80structuration theory, 16–17, 34, 86–9, 342*;

gender and migrant spaces, 90–2; healthand place, 92–4; mothering, 89–90;passnotes, 164

structure, agency and, 34, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94–5

348ÿÿINDEX


subjectivity, 35, 38, 264, 269, 270, 342*; colonial,150; discursive construction of, 154–5

Sui, D.Z., 257Sullivan, P.A., 244synthetic statements, 21–2

Tanzania, University of, 214Taylor, P.J., 254Taylor, S.M., 92–3, 193textual analysis, 291, 292textuality, 155–6, 158theory, 1, 6, 180, 326; activism and, 281–2Thrift, N., 88, 221, 222, 307Tickell, A., 280time geography, 17, 89time-space maps, 88, 90Tobler, W., 59Todorov, T., 37, 38tradition, 148transactionalism, 81–2, 84truth, 110, 123, 128, 266, 269, 270Tuan, Y.-F., 30, 32

uncertainty, 258–9, 260understanding, 103, 264, 276universalism, 45universals, 278, 290universities, 202; activism in, 281, 328Unwin, T., 20urban change, 199, 200, 201urban theory, 206–7, 208, 209

Urry, J., 136utopianism, dialectical and spatiotemporal, 277–8

value, Marx and, 61, 62, 64verification, 21, 239, 269Verrall, C., 193Vienna Circle, 20, 21–2virtual environment, 258

Wales, University of, 171–2Walker, R., 275Webber, W., 201Westlake, M., 111Whatmore, S., 131–2, 141, 142, 143Whittlesey, D., 329, 330Widdowfield, R., 270wildlife, topologies of, 138–9, 143Williams, R., 36Wills, J., 275Wise, S., 286, 291Wittgenstein, L., 127Wolpert, J., 174, 180women, 47, 207–8women geographers, 15, 43, 51, 209;

marginalization of, 202–3; status of, 43, 44Wood, D., 254writing, 2, 266, 268, 289–90; activism and,

282–3; deconstructive, 301

Zelinsky, W., 180Zhang, J.X., 258–9

INDEXÿÿ349


Approaches to Human Geography · Approaches to Human Geography Edited by Stuart Aitken and Gill...

Documents

Transcript of Approaches to Human Geography · Approaches to Human Geography Edited by Stuart Aitken and Gill...