The Dictionary of Human Geography (25 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
6.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
civil society
Understood as a domain of associations autonomous from the state, this concept has been critical to the history of Western political thought. Originally posited in europe in the eighteenth century to denote a realm of social mutuality, the idea of civil society increasingly came to signify aspects of social existence that occur beyond the state. In its different uptakes, the concept of civil soci ety has been central to the development of both the liberal parliamentary tradition and the socialist Marxist one. Although demar cated differently by theorists of the French, German and Scottish enLightenments, all attempts to articulate a notion of civil society shared the perceived tensions between the public and the private, the social and the individual, collective responsibility and self interest, and state prerogatives and individual freedoms. But Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci offered an alternative perspective. In his Prison Notebooks (1971 [1929 35]), he explored aspects of the state and civil society that liberal theory ignores namely, the rela tions of power and influence between political society (what liberal theorists call ?state' or ?government') and civil society (the ?private sector' in liberal vocabulary), which mutually reinforce each other to the advantage of cer tain strata and groups. Contra LiBeraLism, Gramsci recognized civil society as the terrain of hegemony rather than freedom. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The contemporary revival of the idea of civil society within academia and policy circles is a curious event. It appears to be correlated to the demise of the Soviet Union and the market triumphalism that followed (see neo LiBeraLism). For advocates of economic gLoBaLization an institutionalized project of market deregulation the term ?civil society' functions as placeholder for an array of signi fiers that are used almost interchangeably: private sphere, free market, free society, democ racy, social capital and so on. In short, civil society denotes that desirable zone of activities and associations that is putatively free from state intervention. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contrast this usage with that by communi tarians and left liberals, who worry about the expansion of administrative and economic mechanisms into virtually all spheres of life under late capitaLism. For them, the concept of ?civil society? represents a fading terrain of democracy that must be preserved and resuscitated. Thus, civil society appears in their writings as the sphere of social interaction composed of ?the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (espe cially voluntary associations), social move ments, and forms of public communication' (Cohen and Arato, 1992, p. ix). It is differen tiated from both a political society of ?parties, political organizations and political publics (in particular, parliaments)' and an economic society ?composed of organizations of produc tion and distribution, usually firms, coopera tives, partnerships, and so on? (ibid.). vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Buttigieg (1995); Cohen and Arato (1992); Edwards (2004); Ferguson (1995 [1767]); (NEW PARAGRAPH) Seligman (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
civilization
(1) A complex sociocultural formation. (2) An evolutionary process of cultural development, most often associated with the German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897 1990), who traced a ?civilizing process' in post medieval Europe. The two have often been connected through the distortions of a colonialist imaginary that treats the ?west' as coterminous with ?civilization', divides the world into superiors and suBaLterns (often described as ?barbarians' or ?savages'), and advances its own ?civilizing mission' to ?enlighten' or ?develop' them (cf. primitivism). It is scarcely surprising to find that the term ?civilization' originated in Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century, when europe was so busily encountering its ?others' (Mazlish, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . In the course of the twentieth century, anthropologists, archaeologists, ancient histor ians and other scholars recognized multiple civilizations, however, and increasingly treated civilizations as complex, adaptive systems (Butzer, 1980). These more technical concepts were put to work in comparative historicaL geography: for example, in studies of urBan origins it is common to distinguish the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley or the Mayan civilization in Meso America. (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the older colonial distortions have also resurfaced through polemical arguments about a contemporary ?clash of civilizations?. The most detailed version of this thesis was proposed by American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1993, 1997; see also Kreutzmann, 1998). Huntington argued that questions of collective identity ?Who are we?? and ?Who are they?? (cf. imaginative geography) assumed a special force under the pressures of gLoBaLization. He saw these as intrinsically cultural questions, whose answers were almost invariably provided by reLigion. Far from the secular world of modernity carrying all before it Huntington believed that the world was witnessing a global religious revival. For this reason he used reli gion to identify seven or eight major civiliza tions and to explain the conflicts emerging on the ?fault lines? between them. His thesis was a (NEW PARAGRAPH) generalization of a polemic by British Orientalist Bernard Lewis on ?The roots of Muslim rage' and had the same destination (see orientalism). ?The overwhelming major ity of fault line conflicts,' Huntington con cluded, ?have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separ ates Muslims from non Muslims'. Huntington attributed this to what he called, with offensive disregard, ?the Muslim propensity toward vio lent conflict', and argued that since the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979, a ?quasi war' had been in progress between Islam and the West. Huntington?s ideas gained a new lease of life following 9/11 (Salter, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , but they have been sharply criticized both for their conceptual crudity in particu lar, Huntington's unsophisticated rendition of cultural interaction and identity formation (Said, 2000; Sen, 2006) and for their unre flective demonization of Islam, or Islamophobia. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kreutzmann (1998); Robertson (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
class
In The communist manifesto(2002 [1848]), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels asserted that ?[t]he history of all hitherto exist ing society is the history of class struggles'. This declaration marks the foundations of class analysis. Although the concept of class has since come into wide usage, it remains contested. There is disagreement on how best to define it, on its general role in social the ory and on whether it remains relevant to the analysis of contemporary societies. For some, classes have become largely redundant in today's societies; for others, class persists as one of the fundamental forms of social inequality and power. Some view class as a narrow economic phenomenon, while others embrace a more elastic conception that spans cultural dimensions and economic conditions. In its most persistent popular sense, class refers to a social division or system of rank order, evident in the phrase ?upper, middle and lower classes', that is associated with position, privilege and hereditary advantage (or the lack thereof). Class is also construed as distinctive bodily practices, such as attire, carriage, speech, diet, habitation and forms of lifestyle consumption all linked to under lying unequal structures of material resources. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Uses of the term ?class' are always evaluative, whether positive or pejorative. Hence, the upper classes are sometimes the ?aristocracy' endowed with a natural authority and disposition to rule or else the ?leisured class' parasitic on society's sur pluses and given to ostentatious consumption. Correspondingly, the middle classes are sometimes the ?enterprising' classes, who embody individual initiative, toil and pru dence, and form the mainstay of civil society. Alternatively, they are the bourgeoisie merchants, traders, entrepreneurs and profes sionals, committed to defending the inequal ities and privileges of private property and to organizing the exploitation of the working classes. The lower classes are sometimes the ?working classes' or the ?working poor' sim ple, hard working and law abiding people, who can claim no inherited privileges or, alternatively, the ?lower orders' uncivilized and unruly (and in some renderings, criminal and sexually promiscuous), who court idleness and are a drag on economic progress. The eventful ?discovery? of an underclass by US based conservative academics and com mentators in the 1980s added a gendered and racial twist to these negative portraits. In this ?culture of poverty' discourse, which significantly influenced the 1990s policy shift in the US from welfare to workfare, the under class came to signify a disaffected layer of work shy, feckless, criminal, undeserving and semi detached poor people, typically black and from disorganized households headed by single mothers, who had grown accustomed to surviving on excessively generous handouts from government run welfare programmes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From an academic standpoint, the analysis of class has taken two dominant forms, sorted by historical lineage. The first set of approaches, deriving from Karl Marx, pivots around the concepts of class relations and class structure (see Marxist economics). Other adjectival uses of the term class class location, class conflict, class interests, class formation and class consciousness obtain their meanings from their link to class relations and class structure. Sociologist Erik Olin Wright con tends that class relations should be viewed, sensu stricto, as a specific form of prevailing social relations of production (Wright, 2005). These, he says, designate the different kinds of rights and powers of persons in society who participate in production. When the rights and powers of people over productive resources are unequally distributed when some people in a society have greater rights and powers with respect to certain productive resources than do others these relations can be described as class relations(see capitalism). It is important to note that the rights and powers in question do not pertain to the own ership or control of things in general, but spe cifically to resources or assets as they are deployed in production. The fundamental contrast in cap italist societies, for example, is between owners of means of production (machines, inputs, space etc.) and owners of labour power, where each category of owner the capitalist and the labourer deploys the resource that they own in production. That said, it is worth emphasi zing that class relations as defined are elastic enough to recognize patriarchy within the household and beyond and racial discrimin ation within society (see racism) as concurrent class processes. Meanwhile, work in radicaL geography has convincingly shown that exploitative class relations are fundamentally spatial and that this spatial organization is crit ical to understanding the nature of uneven deveLopment. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ambiguity of class location or location within social relations of production is force fully illustrated by managers within corpor ations, who exhibit the rights and powers of both capital (they can hire and fire workers, make decisions about new technologies and changes in the labour process, etc.) and labour (they cannot sell a factory, they have limited discretion in the use of surplus or profit, they can be fired from their jobs if the owners are unhappy, etc.). Workers as corporate share holders (via an employee stock ownership plan, for example) provide another vivid illus tration of ambiguity, since they simultaneously occupy two class locations. Other instances that complicate the empirical exercise of class location include persons who work at two jobs, one as a worker in a firm and the other as a self employed tradesman; professional women, who employ a full time housemaid; or historically, working class sepoys stationed in colonies who, by virtue of racial difference, found themselves in positions of class super iority vis a vis natives (one imagines a similar phenomenon at work in today?s imperial out posts). In short, class relations, class structure and class location in societies are complex as such, we should presuppose neither unity of purpose (class interest) nor consciousness (class agency) within a given class category (see Marx, 1963 [1852]). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The German sociologist Max Weber?s analysis of class is the primary alternative to Marxist class analysis. In Weber?s scheme, classes are distinguished by positions of rela tive advantage and disadvantage in terms of wealth and income. He writes: ?We may speak of a ??class?? when (1) a number of people have (NEW PARAGRAPH) in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as (2) this compon ent is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and oppor tunities for income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets? (Weber 1968 [1946], p. 181). While there are overlaps here with Marx?s understanding of class, there are also clear differences. Weber, for instance, emphasizes ?personal life experiences? and ?life chances? as critical aspects of ?class situation?, and takes class to be ?any group of people that is found in the same class situation? (ibid.). Thus, whereas for Marx class is an objective set of social relations, for Weber subjective elements become key. Also in contrast to the Marxist view of class as relational, the Weberian view emphasizes class as market position. Classes are hierarchical arrangements, but potentially dynamic ones because market position may be changed by collective strategies in the labour market (e.g. through professional asso ciations or trades unions). In underscoring the ?life chances? that accompany ?class situation?, Weber draws attention to individuals? pro spective ?personal life experiences?: ?the prob abilities of social and occupational mobility; of educational access and achievement; of illness and mortality? (Clarke 2005, p. 40). While classes, in Weber?s view, derive unambigu ously from economic interest, they are linked to political organization (party) and social pos ition (status), both of which may be shaped by non economic processes and may influence ?class consciousness?. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent example of a scholar who has creatively fused the Marxist and Weberian perspectives of class in his analysis of various forms of capitaL. vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bourdieu (1984); Massey (1995); Weber (1968 [1946]); Wright (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

One Moment by Kristina McBride
Charity Moon by DeAnna Kinney
Death in Daytime by Eileen Davidson
Desperation by Stephen King
Tracers by J. J. Howard
Everything on the Line by Bob Mitchell
Deliver Us from Evil by Ralph Sarchie
Surrounded by Sharks by Northrop, Michael