The Dictionary of Human Geography (52 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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emotional geography
The study of the dynamic, recursive relation between emotions and pLace or space. Emotional geography includes diverse ways of understanding the differential topoLogies and topographies of emotion. As a body of work it responds, on the one hand, to the claim that emotions are an intractable aspect of life and thus potentially a constitutive part of all geographies (Anderson and Smith, 2001) and, on the other, to the recognition that emotions have long been manipulated and modulated as a constitutive part of various forms of power (Thrift, 2004a). As such, work on emotional geographies elicits the multiple ways in which different emotions emerge from, and re produce, specific socio spatial orders and engages with how emotions become part ofthe different relations that make up the lived geographies of place (Davidson, Bondi and Smith, 2005). Consequently, the term ?emotional geography? does not designate a sub discipline limited to the study of a set of emotions (such as fear, boredom or anxiety). Rather, it is composed of ways of considering how emotions, along with linked modalities such as feeling, mood or affect, are constitu tive elements within the ongoing composition of space time, and exploring how learning to respond to and intervene in such modalities could or perhaps should disrupt human geo graphy?s methodological and theoretical practices. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Attention to emotions, or at least calls to attend to emotions, have a long history in human geography, being central, for example, to the expansive version of what a human is and does that was articulated by humanistic geographies in the 1970s and, in particular, to feminist interventions in social geography (e.g., on fear, Pain, 2000). Current work on emotional geographies is animated by two intertwined sources both of which resonate with the attention in humanistic geography to the LifeworLd and the taken for granted worLd, and perform a sensibility that attends to the ebb and flow of everyday life. First, and most prominently, there is the careful atten tion in feminist geographies to the silencing or repressing of differential, often gendered, emotional experience and the subsequent attempts to reclaim and give voice to emo tional experiences. Second, attention is paid in non representationaL theories to the emergence, or individuation, of emotions from within more or less unwilled assembLages that gather together human and non human bod ies in broad fields of affect. These are by no means mutually exclusive or internally coher ent perspectives indeed, what is shared between them is a commitment to the rela tionality of emotions and thus an assumption that emotions are not contained by, or prop erties of, an individual mind. Yet the resulting theoretical and methodological pluralism raises questions about how to understand the role of the subject in what an emotion is and does, as well as broader questions of how to develop conceptual vocabularies attentive to differential emotional geographies. Both ques tions have been responded to through the recent experimentations with techniques such as practical psychotherapies (cf. psychoana Lytic theory) and performative methods (see performativity) that aim to witness different emotional or affectual geographies (cf. Tolia Kelly, 2006). The importance and interest of this new body of work is reflected in the publication of a new interdisciplinary jour nal, Emotion, Space and Society (2008 ). ba (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Anderson and Smith, (2001); Bondi (2005); Davidson, Bondi, and Smith (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
empire
An extensive territory and polity, encompassing diverse lands and peoples, that is ruled, more or less directly and effectively, by a single person (emperor/empress), sover eign state or centralized elite, and without the formal consent of all its peoples (cf. Lieven, 2005). The term is also used colloquially to denote great power and transcendent influ ence (as in ?corporate empire? and ?reason?s empire?), and the adjectives ?imperial? and ?colonial? are commonly used to characterize actions and processes befitting empire. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Empire has taken diverse forms and eludes a single meaning or explanation. Parallels have been drawn between the evolution of europe?s modern colonial empires, which reached their heyday in the early twentieth century, and since Roman times the ability to stretch power over space has figured centrally in debates about empire (see time space distanciation). There have been over 70 empires in history including those created by the Romans, Incas, Habsburgs and Ottomans, and by Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union and Niall Ferguson (2004, p. 11) typologizes them in terms in their metropolitan foundations, declared aims, economic and political systems, social character, and perceived benefits and drawbacks. Important distinctions have been drawn between ancient and modern, Western and non Western, maritime and land, and for mal and informal empires. And histories and theories of empire have long varied in accord ance with: (a) the relative importance given to six sources of power (economic, military, pol itical, geopolitical, demographic and ideo logical); (b) the ways and extent to which sovereignty is seen as unified or divided, and power as centralized and totalizing or lim ited and localized; and (c) the impact that empire has on the identity of colonizing and colonized peoples (Pomper, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term derives from the Latin word imperium, meaning ?sovereign authority?, and since the nineteenth century has been closely associated with imperiaLism and treated as pivotal to the globally uneven deveLopment of capitaLism. Empire has long been used as a term of abuse as quintessentially exploit ative, and the duplicitous means by which the west has sought to impose its values and institutions (of reason, civilization, progress, democracy and so forth) on others. But over time, and still today, empire has also been viewed in a more affirmative light as tolerant of difference, as a civilizing and modernizing influence, and as the harbinger of global order and a higher (perpetual) peace. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In recent years there has been a major revival of interest in empire, which is tied to three sets of (interrelated) factors. First, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the history and legacies of coLoniaLism one marked by a comparative turn in the study of world history that questions both eurocentric and nation centred histories of empire, and a heightened concern with the ?cuLture of empire? (Hall, 2000). Second, there has been vigorous debate, particularly since 9/11, about whether the USA should be regarded as an empire ?empire lite? and ?empire in denial? being important slogans in the debate (Dadalus, 2005: (see american empire)). Third, this debate feeds into a wider discussion of whether gLobaLization is better characterized as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, pp. xii xiii) see as a new age of empire that ?establishes no territor ial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries and barriers . . . a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that pro gressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers? (cf. biopoLitics). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since the late 1980s, an increasingly diverse geographical literature has critically examined the historical links between geography (as both a discipline and discourse) and empire, sensitizing geographers to the Western imperial white male biases and assumptions embedded in their disciplinary fabric. Close critical attention has been paid to how ?geo graphy?s empire? (Driver, 2001a) was fashioned at the level of knowledge and representation as a form of epistemoLogicaL vioLence through practices of exploration, mapping and landscape representation, and determinis tic and divisive discourses on cLimate and race (Clayton, 2004; cf. geography, history of). But geographers have also taken on board a wider interdisciplinary attempt to complicate understanding of empire?s rigid geography of core and periphery by recovering a commu nity of struggles over who was included and excluded in definitions of empire and nation, how lines and boundaries of difference were drawn between citizen and subject (see citi zenship), and the specific and cLass , race and gender inflected imperial and colonial locations (from museums to plantations) in which such dynamics were enacted and settled (Proudfoot and Roche, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recent geographical research bears witness to the contemporary liaison between geog raphy and empire in two further if contrary ways: first, through geohazards research and an emboldened miLitary geography, which are fired by GIS technologies and government contracts, and which serve the perceived security and surveillance needs of Western states; and, second, through geographers? oppositional engagement with America?s so called ?war on terror? (see terrorism). In two important studies of the historical and contemporary geography of American imperi alism, Neil Smith (2003c) uses the political influence of Isaiah Bowman ?Roosevelt?s geographer? to question teleological accounts of the passage from empire to nation state to globality, and recover the imperial spatiality of American visions of global development; and Derek Gregory (2004b) explores the spatial strategies and tactics ?colonising geographies? created and deployed by the USA and its allies in the middle east, showing how the USA now bestrides a ?colonial present? in which it exempts itself from international laws, insti tutions and limits on behaviour, creating ?spaces of exception? (of confinement, banish ment and punishment) that strip people of their dignity and most basic human rights (cf. biopolitics; exception, space of). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Three important insights that can be gleaned from this range of recent work are that: (a) past empires were less state centred than was previously thought, and current US imperialism is more centred on the projection of nation state power than contemporary the orists such as Hardt and Negri have proposed; (b) it is possible to analyse empires as both unitary and fragmentary, and as potent yet vulnerable apparatuses of power; and (c) his torical work on empire, and the recognition it brings of the diverse ways in which power has and can be exercised, is key to understanding the nature and limits of empire today. Del (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Howe (2002); Kirsch (2003); Lester (2006); Lieven (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
empiricism
A philosophy originating with the Greeks, and later formally codified by the English philosopher John Locke (1632 1704), that privileges experience of the outside world above all else as the basis of knowledge, truth and method. The contrast is with philosophies that favour intuition, or self revelation, or rationalism; that is, philosophies underpinned by internal mental processes independent of external senses. Empiricism most overtly entered human geography through the dis cipline?s use of the standard scientific method, which was most self conscious during the 1960s, but which existed both before and after in less explicit forms. This method (NEW PARAGRAPH) is unabashedly empiricist, averring that scientific theories and hypotheses are verifiable only against the gold standard of empirical data; that is, data observed though the senses. Nothing else counts. During the 1960s, this version of the scientific method and its concomitant empiricist philosophy was explicitly introduced into geography as part of the quantitative revoLutioN (Harvey, 1969). Ironically, though, what was so novel about ?the revolu tion? was the introduction of rationally derived theory, exactly the kind of pursuit most anathema to empiricism. This eventually clarified a crucial distinction between empiricist enquiry, which assumes that ?the facts? (obser vations) somehow speak for themselves and are independent of theory, and empirical enquiry, a substantive study that may be (and usually is) sensitive to the interdependence of theory and observation. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH)
empowerment
Defined by alternative deveLopment thinkers (Friedmann, 1992) as a process by which househoLds and their members wield greater socio political and psy chological power (e.g. knowledge, skills, voice, collective action, self confidence) to reshape the actions affecting their own lives, empowerment has come to mean different things for different players. While mainstream development agencies regard empowerment as a tool to improve efficiency, more alterna tive agencies claim it as a metaphor for funda mental social transformation. Still, ?empowerment as praxis? retains its localized, personal emphasis as a phenomenon that necessitates individuals and collectives to struggle towards new consciousness and actions (Parpart, 2002) (see also post deveL opment and anti deveLopment). rn (NEW PARAGRAPH)
enclave
A small piece of territory that is culturally distinct and politically separate from another territory within which it is located. ?Enclave? originally referred to a territory situ ated within a state but outside its political jurisdiction, such as the Vatican City in Italy. The term is also used to denote areas in which a minority population that identifies with one state is located in the territory of a neighbour ing state, such as Ngorno Kharabach, which is an enclave within Azerbaijan but has an Armenian population. The term is increas ingly used to refer to a city neighbourhood displaying distinctive economic, social and cultural attributes from its surroundings. (See also excLave.) cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Aalto (2002); Parks (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
enclosure
In historicaL geography, enclosure refers to the extinction of ?common rights? and the replacement of open or com mon fields, pastures and meadows with ?enclosed? fields free of such rights. Across large swathes of medieval and early modern europe, much agricultural land was common land that was subject to various forms of use by all individuals holding ?common rights? (De Moor, Shaw Taylor and Ward, 2002). These included rights to graze animaLs on common pasture and sometimes the right to gather fuel; rights over common fields, where individual cultivators might own a large number of scattered strips of arable land that alternated seasonally between private cultivation of the strips and communal grazing by those with common rights; and rights over common woodlands. Such common rights were not available to everyone, and were regulated by institutions such as manor or village courts. Enclosure replaced common land with fully private land that in some regions was physically ?enclosed? by a hedge, wall or ditch within its boundaries, the owner or tenant normally has exclusive rights to use that land. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In England, the parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the best known, but enclosure began in the Middle Ages. It become an important process during the fifteenth century and probably peaked during the seventeenth century. Elsewhere in Europe, enclosure tended to come much later, principally during the nine teenth and twentieth centuries (as in the Soviet Union), though some common land still survives. In England, much medieval enclosure may have taken place by seigniorial edict, and is often associated with the conver sion of arable to pasture and the destruction of villages (there are over 3,000 deserted medieval village sites known to archaeolo gists), but certainly by the early seventeenth century, and probably by the early sixteenth century, tenurial security had improved to the point at which it was legally necessary to secure the written consent of all proprietors, giving even the smallest owner an effective veto. Such enclosures by agreement became increasingly difficult to secure and during the eighteenth century, particularly after 1750, enclosure by agreement generally gave way to parliamentary enclosure. This required an Act of Parliament that allowed the larger landowners to override the vetoes of small owners, though not to appropriate their property. By 1500, around half of England?s surface area was either already enclosed or had never been common. Perhaps 20 25 per cent was enclosed during the seventeenth century and a similar amount between 1750 and 1830 (Wordie, 1983). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The importance of enclosure in England has been stressed in three major historical processes. First, enclosure reshaped the landscape. Second, enclosure was entangled with the destruction of the English peasantry (see peas ant) and the rise of agrarian capitalism, though its importance remains a matter of debate (Humphries, 1992; Neeson, 1993; Shaw Taylor, 2001). Third, enclosure played an important role in raising agricultural product ivity during the agricultural revolution (Overton, 1996). By allowing farmers to spe cialize in the most profitable crops, enclosure facilitated regional specialization and thus higher overall productivity, and enclosure was also a precondition for certain techno logical changes in agriculture; for example, installing under drainage or the selective breeding of animals. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While enclosure has been subject to long standing historical scrutiny, more recent work has also begun to reinterpret the concept of enclosure as a means of exploring the contem porary forms and processes of neo liberalism (see RETORT, 2005). Human geographers have seized upon enclosure as an ongoing feature of capital accumulation. Whereas traditional historical accounts of enclosure emphasized its relationship to ?the commons?, recent work has proposed a more complex spatial formation operating across a number of scales, sites and practices, from special economic zones to genetic modification and biometrics (see biopower). Three major axes of investigation have been identified (Vasudevan, McFarlane and Jeffrey, 2008). The first focuses on the role of enclosure as a technology of contemporary neo liberalism. Narratives of enclosure help illuminate the reconfiguration of political sovereignties, modes of subjectification and neo liberal eco nomic norms through a variety of territories and networks. The second explores the role of law as a key instrument through which both old and new forms of enclosure are legitim ized, regulated and policed. The third addresses the significance of enclosure as a key dimension of our colonial present. While studies of colonialism underline the import ance of land tenure as a precondition for par ticular forms of displacement, dispossession (NEW PARAGRAPH) and discipline, contemporary instances of imperial enclosure have also mutated into new forms of the enclave capitalism that has accompanied the securitization of global mineral extraction (see Ferguson, 2006). Such an expansive re conceptualization of enclosure has highlighted not only a complex set of logics of spatial inclusion and exclusion, but increasingly urgent forms of resistance that centre on a messy and highly conflicted reclaiming of the ?commons?. lst/av (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) De Moor, Shaw Taylor and Warde (2002); Mingay (1997); Vasudevan, McFarlane and Jeffrey (2008). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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