The Dictionary of Human Geography (114 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
6.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
lifeworld
Synonymous with the taken for granted worLD, the everyday lifeworld of habitual actions and attitudes is the founda tional setting of Schutzian phenomenoLogy and the closely related symbolic iNTerac tionism of G.H. Mead. Introduced to geog raphers in the humanistic geography of Anne Buttimer (1976) and others, lifeworld comprised the relational and meaningful places of direct experience where intentional actions unfolded and identity was assembled. Lifeworld is socio centric and corporeal in its range and clarity. However, it is not static but, as Buttimer stressed, dynamic, concerned with movement and rhythm that integrates parts into an experienced whole, with routines that sediment a way of life in a geographic setting (Mels, 2004). Such a fusion of intersubjective meaning and physical location is inherent to the geographies of home, community and nation. The lifeworld is a basic building block in attempts to construct a meta social theory by Berger and Luckmann, Giddens and others. In his influential formulation, JÂÂ81rgen Habermas counters the practical inter subjective interests of the lifeworld, retrieved through hermeneutic study, with the instru mentality of political and economic systems accounted for through positivist methods (see critical theory). dl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Dyck (1995); Jackson and Smith (1984, ch. 2); Mels (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
limits to growth
The proposition, central to much modern environmentaLism, that the finiteness of biophysical resources places absolute limits on demographic and economic growth. Although the idea is important in clas sical political economy, the phrase entered widespread modern circulation only in 1972, when it appeared as the title of a report by a group known as the Club of Rome (Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Brehens, 1972). Based on early exercises in computer model ling, the report argued that humanity was on the brink of exceeding the Earth?s carrying capacity and precipitating widespread social and ecological crisis. Although the report looked at resources in addition to those dir ectly related to agricultural production, its argument was essentially a Malthusian one (see maLthusian modeL). It was an important milestone in the development of neo Malthusian trends in modern environmentalism, such as a concern with the ?population bomb?, as well as an impetus towards calls for a ?steady state economy? and the development of the field of environmentaL economics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Belief in absolute limits to economic growth based on material scarcity, and the politics that follow from such a position, constituted a direct challenge to the Promethean views of human activity arguably shared by neo clas sical economics and classical Marxism, both of which denied the necessity of such absolute material limits to human productivity. In geography, David Harvey (1974a) and others strongly criticized resurgent neo Malthusian models for overlooking issues of distribution, justice, scale, changes in technology and prod uctivity, and other factors that would compli cate or undermine their predictions. A significant amount of geographical work over the subsequent several decades has essentially reproduced and elaborated this debate in vari ous arenas. Perhaps the most notable example is the rapid growth of scholarship centred on the concept of eNvironmentAL security. This literature is constituted largely by debates be tween dominant neo Malthusian views, which continue to articulate theories of how demo graphically fuelled conflicts over increasingly scarce natural resources will produce escalat ing violence and geopolitical instability (see resource wars), and more critical voices, which continue to insist on attention to the social causes, contexts, and complexities of such scenarios (see Dalby, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Other work in geography, though, has revis ited the question of natural limits with increas ing theoretical nuance, moving beyond the simple rejection of it in much of the Marxist tradition. Theorists of natural resource indus tries in particular have begun to take nature?s materiality seriously by attempting to under stand not only the constraints, but also the affordances and surprises, that biophysical sys tems present to human activities in specific circumstances, developing concepts such as appropriationism, substitutionism, eco regu lation, hybridity, and the formal versus the real subsumption of nature to capital (see Boyd, Prudham and Schurman, 2001). Nat ural ?limits? are thus increasingly understood and investigated as differentially malleable conditions of possibility for particular forms of human activity, rather than as absolute and universal barriers. Such a perspective has proved compatible with recognition of the ne cessarily political and social character of any claims about natural limits, as emphasized in the literature on social constructionism. jm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Benton (1989); Boyd, Prudham and Schurman (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
linear programming
A type of optimization modeL used to find the optimal solution to a wide variety of economic, business and geo graphical problems, such as the minimum total transport cost of shipping goods through a geo graphical network. Optimization models have an objective function (the quantity to be minimized or maximized) and a setof constraints that define the possibilities and requirements (limits on sup ply, demand requirements, route character istics). In linear programming both the objective function and the constraints are linear functions and this makes solution fast and easy, even for very large problems. The tEansporta tion probLem is a special form that has many geographical applications. lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Greenberg (1978); Killen (1979, 1983). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
linkages
The contacts and flows of informa tion and/or materials between two or more individuals. The term is widely used in both industriaL geography and the geography of services to indicate inter firm interdepend ence and its effects on location choice (see aggLomeration). A firm?s linkages can be divided into: (1) backward, which provide goods and services for its production activities; (2) forward, links with customers purchasing its products; and (3) sideways, interactions with other firms involved in the same pro cesses. Membership of such networks in increasingly seen as crucial to success and survival for a firm, especially a small firm. (See also integration). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
literature
Although the meanings of this term have varied widely, two have been of special interest to geographers: (a) imaginative writing, especially that deemed to be of espe cially high quality or status by a critical estab lishment; and (b) published scholarly work on a particular topic. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Literature in the sense of imaginative writ ing has attracted the analytical attention of cultural geographers over the past 30 years in particular. Novels, stories, poems and travel narratives have been studied for their repre sentations of places, landscapes and nature, of regions and nations, and of geographical pro cesses such as urbanization, migration and colonization. An interest in literature was evi dent in some of Alexander von Humboldt?s writings, and received scattered attention at moments through the early and mid twentieth century. Darby?s essay on the regional geog raphy of Hardy?s Wessex (1948) was an early outlier, but it extracted the descriptions of Landscape from the novels and used them to reconstruct the regional geographies of Dorset in the first half of the nineteenth century: as Darby had it, placing ?the pictures that Hardy drew? in ?the sequence that stretches from John Coker?s survey in the seventeenth cen tury up to modern accounts of the land util ization of Dorset? (p. 343). Darby displayed no interest in exploring the significance of these places for the characters and events in the novels, still less in approaching these ?geographies? with the sensibility of a literary scholar (cf. Barrell, 1982). Hardy?s texts were read as more or less inert sources, and Darby had no interest in (or awareness of) how, as Brosseau (1995, p. 89) later put it more gen erally, a novel ?has a particular way of writing its own geography.? (NEW PARAGRAPH) It was not until thirty years after Darby?s essay that literature received any sustained and systematic attention in human geography, as part of the growing attention to environmental perception, imagery, attitudes and values, and to consciousness as an aspect of culture. This was the product of the critique of spatiaL sci ence and the flowering of a humanistic geog raphy that renewed the discipline?s traditional connections with the humanities in different, more analytical, registers, and which had a particular impact on cuLturaL geography (Salter and Lloyd, 1977; Pocock, 1981). These explorations intensified through the closing decades of the twentieth century and into the opening decades of the twenty first. This was achieved, in part, through a much closer and usually theoretically informed en gagement with the work of literary scholars and cultural critics from Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin through Edward Said and Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson many of whom had an interest in spatiaLity and the cultures of coLoniaLism, capitaLism and modernity that was at once close to and consequential for human geography more generally. Their crit ical writings had a considerable impact on explorations of modernism and postmodern ism in the cities of the global North, of im aginative geographies produced under the signs of oriEntalism, tropicamy and similar projects, and on theorizations of power and cuLture. These endeavours were reinforced through a second source of interest in literary matters: human geography?s engagement with styles of contemporary phiLosophy that Rorty once described as forms of cultural criticism: these included his own version of pragma tism but also post structuraLism (the lit erary sensibilites of Foucault and Derrida are especially salient, though Eagleton has railed against Spivak?s). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The turn to literature has raised an interest ing question in a field dominated by the dis courses of social science: Exactly what kind of evidence is literature? For some human geog raphers, it is both indicative of the capacity of human beings to make meaning and an expression of a specific meaning filled culture (e.g. Bunkse, 2004); for others, and not mutually exclusive of other meanings, it is at once a reflection of political economic real ities and a way of thinking them through (e.g. Henderson, 1999); for others, it is part and parcel of the production of regional identity and memory (e.g. DeLyser, 2005). In human geography, the meaning of ?imaginative writ ing? extends to some degree to narratives of travel and exploration (see traveL writing). While not pure figments of imagination, these writings are often structured around certain tropes and narrative conventions that give textuaLity as such a constitutive role in their making: travel narratives do not simply mirror or correspond to the world (e.g. Blunt, 1994). It is probably safe to say that most contempor ary geographical study of literature is not so much interested in literature per se than in literature as a species of representation, dis course and text, interest in which has grown with the cuLturaL turn in the social sciences (Barnes and Duncan, 1991). It is not entirely a one way street, and the traffic has been marked by both interesting departures and juddering collisions: literary scholars would have no difficulty in recognizing the force and originality of Kearns? (2006b) reading of the spatial dialectics of James Joyce, for example, and the three spatial motifs he iden tifies (circulation, labyrinth and palimpsest) thread out on to the wider terrain of British colonialism and Irish nationalism; but most human geographers would be bemused at the traces of spatial science to be discerned in Moretti?s (1998, 2005) spatialized apprehen sions of the European novel and literary history. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Literature as a social and geographical phe nomenon, involving the geographical spread of avowedly ?literary? forms (e.g. the novel), the emergence of publication and printing centres, literary celebrity and certain ideo logical effects, has been studied extensively. Few such studies have been undertaken by geographers, but the classic account of ?the coming of the book? in Europe devoted a cen tral chapter to ?the geography of the book? (Febvre and Martin, 1984 [1958], pp. 167 215), and historians and historical geograph ers followed in their footsteps to study the diffusion of printing, the spread of literacy, the spatial impress of censorship and other topics. These historical treatments underscore that both the forms and meanings of literature have changed dramatically. Literature?s mean ing as a form of imaginative writing endorsed by a critical establishment came about over time (see Williams, 1977; Eagleton, 1983). Its early meaning (into the eighteenth century) was closer to the idea of literacy; that is, it was the property or characteristic of learned, read ing elites. Literature?s meaning as a mark of distinction regarding what one could do (read) was then extended to what one read (books). The question of what kinds of books counted as literature then followed (Williams, 1977). There was (and there remains) no easy distinc tion between fiction and fact as the way to demarcate literature from other sorts of writ ing witness the example of travel writing. The difference between works of, say, philoso phy, history and politics as opposed to fic tional writing was codified in response to industrial capitalism, which was seen as sup pressing creativity. This is not to say that lit erature, or more specifically what cultural elites claimed counted as literature, escaped an ideological function within industrial capit alism (Eagleton, 1983). Literature as creative output was also caught up with the notion of a ?national? literature and the establishment (and struggle over) nation state based literary canons. The formation of the literary canon carried with it a new meaning: literature exemplified for national critical establishments the best of what a nation state could achieve and served the purposes of unifying national identity (see also nation; nationaLism). (The logic of specifically regional literatures and regional literary canon formations runs in parallel. But contrast these impulses towards national and regional narratives of literary formation with the recent identification of a ?global literary space? a la world systems theory: see Casanova, 2005.) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Yet the meanings of literature have in fact remained multiple, or perhaps become mul tiple once again, albeit in different ways. Most of what human geographers have had to say about ?literature? has focused on the book, specifically the novel or the travel nar rative, and yet many of the scholars on whose work they draw have also had important things to say about other cultural media: art, drama, fiLm, music, photography and video. Human geographers have explored these too, but they have displayed much less interest in literary dramatic works (other than their staging: see Chamberlain, 2001; Pratt and Johns, 2007) except, by analogical extension, in ideas of performance. This is surprising since, as the image of Shakespeare?s Globe Theatre reminds us, drama has long had important things to show us about the production of human geographies (cf. Gillies, 1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Printed work of many kinds continues to be referred to as literature, whether this is the ?lit erature? produced by political campaigns, ad vertising literature, best selling novels or, still, literature capital. Within the academy, ?litera ture? also means the collective, published schol arly work pertaining to some field (?the geographical literature?), which typically has its own (contested) canon and its own (conten tious) critical establishment. Literature as spe cifically scholarly work is not simply a product found on the bookshelf or downloadable as a PDF. It is a process that involves discernment, vetting, peer review, editorial negotiation and not a little politics. The scholarly literature is thus not a thing: it is a social relation out of which are wrought scholarly debate or consen sus, cases for tenure (or not), new journals or lapsed subscriptions, expectations among re searchers and between teachers and students, and struggles won or lost over the lingua franca of scholarship as such. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A much less explored resonance between geography and literature is the idea that scholarly geography can be literature in the creative sense of the word (cf. Bunkse, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , though today?s human geography is no stranger to experiments with literary form, as in the work of Marcus Doel, Gunnar Olsson or Allan Pred, for example, and there are many other human geographers who write with an ear to cadence and an eye to image. But even ?geographical literature? in (NEW PARAGRAPH) its radically non experimental, more technical sense can be subject to the same disciplined processes of critical reading that literary scholars apply to poems and novels, and in as many ways. The process of theoretical critique in human geography is not only about the collision of contending concepts, therefore, but is also about its text ures, the very languages and grammars ofgeograph ical enquiry: it can and should include the analysis of metaphor and rhetoric, a dis closure of the mascuLinism and phaLLo centrism of the formal structure of an argument or the deconstruction of geo graphical texts. This ought to come as no surprise: the root meaning of ?Geo graphy?, after all, is ?Earth writing?. ghe/dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bunkse (2004); Thacker (2005 6). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
Blood Sport by J.D. Nixon
Nine Lives by Sharon Sala
Alexander Hamilton by Chernow, Ron
A Crooked Rib by Judy Corbalis
Tomb of Atlantis by Petersen, Christopher David
Garden of Lies by Amanda Quick
A Pimp In Pumps by Nika Michelle