The Dictionary of Human Geography (75 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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gender and development
A contested land scape of theoretical and political approaches to gender, or the woman question in development, where Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD) emerged as major discur sive fields, broadly paralleling liberal, radical and Marxist/socialist feminist perspectives (Saunders, 2002). Of these, WID (whose begin nings can be traced to the works of Esther Boserup) has been instrumental in defining the hegemonic field of feminist development prac tices. Although it has enjoyed legitimacy and integration with major bi /multilateral devel opment agencies and the United Nations, WID has been critiqued within feminist and alternative development circles for its assum ptions about sisterhood and its erasure of differences based on class, nationality and co lonial histories and geographies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For WAD theorists, inclusion and exclusion is related to hierarchical spatialization of the global capitalist economy that shapes the dif ferentiated spaces of core, semi periphery and periphery; urban and rural; capitalist and sub sistence sectors (see uneven deveLopment). Since peripheral spaces are central to develop ment?s local, regional and global formations, the third wood?s poorest women are seen as an integral piece of exploitative capitalist development processes. For many theorists and collectives from the south, this under standing translates into a close correspondence between ?experience? and ?visions? in their the oretical centring of those poor Third World women whose bodies have become the objects of developmentalist interventions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The GAD theorists centre on gender and class relations rather than on women per se. They emphasize broader interlocking relation ships between the rules, resources, practices and power through which social inequalities (gender, caste, class etc.) are constituted and played out in specific contexts (Kabeer and Subrahmanian, 1999). Like WID, GAD is also gynocentric. Unlike WID however, GAD?s socialistic orientation is reflected in a belief in the state?s redistributive and welf are role (see socialism). At the level of practice, the strategy of gender mainstrea ming particularly NGO linked women?s empowerment has become increasingly identified with GAD. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since the 1980s, writings by post colonial and Third World feminists have sparked sus tained reflection and debate on the political and intellectual representations of the Third World woman in Western feminist discursive practices, and underscored that ?woman? is not a ?real? but a political subject, shaped through discourses and institutional actors with high political stakes (see post structur aLism; post coLoniaLism). For geographers, engagements with post structuralist insights also translated into examination of how strug gles over labour and resources reveal deeper contestations over gendered (and other) meanings in the ways that rights to re sources are negotiated and redefined within the political arenas of household, workplace and state (Carney, 1996). Katz (2004, p. 227) further spatializes processes of development and resistance through the notion of time space expansion, which allows a simultaneous theorizing of: (a) the expanded field within which gendered and generational subjects en gage in material social practices of production and reproduction; (b) the growing distance of the Third World?s villages from global centres, whose own interactions have been intensified through time space compression; and (c) an acute awareness among people living in impoverished rural places, not only of being marooned in a reconfigured global space, but also of what is to be had and the pain of absences created by this expansion of desire. (See also feminist geographies.) rn (NEW PARAGRAPH)
genealogy
A mode of historical enquiry that seeks to trace the emergence and descent of terms and categories, and the interrelation of power and knowledge in their deployment. The term is used in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche?s 1882 work On the ge nealogy of morality (1994; see Ansell Pearson, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , although it is in a key essay by the French thinker Michel Foucault (1977c [1963]) and his subsequent adoption of the term to describe his own work that it took on its modern importance. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault is concerned with showing how taken for granted phenomena actually have complicated and often forgotten histories. In works on disciplinary power (1976a [1975]), sexuality (1978 [1976]) and political rationalities (see governmentaLity), Foucault sought to undermine in the sense of excavate and challenge standard accounts and inter pretations. He suggested that genealogy did not confuse itself with a quest for origins, but rather looked to the moment of emergence of a problematic and to trace its descent through all the circuitous paths it may have taken. Words have not remained with the same meanings, and so etymology may reveal much about a subject an approach favoured by Nietzsche, and his fellow German philosopher Martin Heidegger nor have established logics always been seen the same way. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault claimed that his purpose in writing was not to write a history of the past, but a history of the present, in order to illuminate how we have arrived where we are, which will open up future possibilities of change and resistance. Foucault?s earlier writings had been described as archaeologies, and although the two approaches are sometimes seen as opposites, it makes more sense to see them as complementary, as Foucault often intimated. In Foucault?s usage, archaeology tended to look at the logics that conditioned the formations of knowledge in a given epoch (see episteme), while genealogy introduced a complementary analysis of power, of the practices that follow from, and enable, knowledge. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Critics have charged Foucault?s approach as too negative, with Nigel Thrift (2000b, p. 269) claiming that ?in Foucault country it always seems to be raining?. However, Foucault?s an alysis of power sought to decentre it from con centration in the hands of a monarch, a state or a dominant cLass, and to show how power flowed throughout society, was not simply re pressive and worked in complex interrelations what he called ?games of power?. In his terms, ?where there is power, there is the possibility of resistance?, which his genealogical works sought to exploit. It was in this period that Foucault himself became much more politically active in campaigns around prisons, sexuaLity and in journalism on the Iranian revolution. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault refused any kind of teLeoLogy in history, suggesting that there was no preor dained logic to the course of events. Things could have been otherwise, and could be other wise in the future. Geographers have made use of these ideas to take into account the spatial and well as temporal aspects (see, e.g., Driver, 1993; Philo, 2004), to which Foucault himself was generally attentive (see Elden, 2001). A whole range of historical analyses have been undertaken that are inspired by Foucault?s ge nealogical work, which are informed by a pol itical and critical sensibility, an attentiveness to small details and textual analysis, and to de ployments of power and constructions of iden tity and subjectivity. se (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Dean (1994); Elden (2001, chs. 4, 5). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
general linear model (GLM)
A family of statistical procedures, used in the analysis of two or more variables, based on the covaria tion among those variables the degree to which the pattern for one variable across a set of observations is replicated in another. Techniques based on this model are at the core of much spatiaL anaLysis, as well as in the analytical procedures of comparable disciplines (cf. spatiaL econometrics), and operational algorithms are available in most computer statistical software packages (cf. software for quantitative anaLysis). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The core of GLM is the technique of regression, which identifies relationships among variables, one or more specified as the independents (or causes, where causality is implied in the modelling) and another as the dependent (or effect): the associated correL ation coefficient evaluates the regression's goodness of fit. Other commonly used tech niques include factor anaLysis and principaL components anaLysis, which seek underlying common patterns in the correlations among groups of variables. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Data deployed in GLM techniques can be at any one of the four different levels of meas urement nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio and variables of each type can be used in techniques incorporated within GLM, each having particular technical issues that may need resolution for it to be validly deployed. (Some ratio variables have pre defined upper and lower values such as percentages and proportions and have to be transformed in order to meet the GLM requirements, as in categoricaL data anaLysis, Logit regres sion modeLs and poisson regression modeLs: see also coLLinearity.) Spatial data raise the particular problems of spatiaL auto correLation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Apart from regression using interval and/or ratio data for both the independent and dependent variables, commonly used GLM techniques include the following: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Analysis of variance (ANOVA), in which the dependent variable is either interval or ratio and the independent variables are nominal or ordinal (although nominal vari ables can be incorporated within a regres sion framework using dummy variables and continuous interval and ratio variables can be placed in ANOVAs using covariates). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Binomial and multinomial regression, in which the dependent variables are nominal or ordinal (in binomial regression, there are only two possible outcomes; in multi nomial there are more than two) and the independents are also nominal/ordinal although continuous variables can also be incorporated as independent variables. (NEW PARAGRAPH) muLti LeveL modeLLing, a form of regres sion (with either continuous or nominal/ ordinal variables), in which the observa tions are clustered into nominal categories. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Factor and principal components analysis. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discriminant analysis, in which the depen dent variable is either nominal or ordinal and the independent variables are factors/ components comprising groups of related continuous variables (with the groupings derived empirically rather than predeter mined). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Many techniques in spatial analysis (such as geographicaL weighted regression: see also local statistics) are based on the GLM. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) O?Brien (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
general systems theory (GST)
An attempted development of universal statements about the common properties of superficially different systems, initiated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901 72: see von Bertalanffy, 1968). GST was introduced to geographers during its quan titative revoLution as a framework that could unite various strands of work, and used by some to promote links between human geog raphy and physicaL geography (Haggett, 1965; Coffey, 1981): Chisholm (1967) dis missed it as an ?irrelevant distraction'. The search for isomorphisms across systems focused on three ?principles': (NEW PARAGRAPH) allometry the growth rate of a subsystem is proportional to that of the system as a whole; (NEW PARAGRAPH) hierarchical structuring (as in central place theory); and (NEW PARAGRAPH) entropy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Few substantial achievements resulted, how ever, apart from the early work on macro geography and more recent analysis of fractals. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
genetic algorithm
A search technique deployed in computers to identify solutions to large optimization and other problems. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Initially, a large number of possible solutions is identified using random generating processes, and by iterative processes built in to the search algorithm alternatives are generated and assessed according to a fitness function until a solution is found that meets predetermined criteria (cf. cen^ar automata; neural networks). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
genetic geographies
An umbrella term for the ways in which geographers, among others, have been developing critical analyses in novel theoretical and methodological direc tions to address some of the profound social challenges to ideas of bodily integrity and intervention (see body); social identity and kinship; and the distinctiveness of living, in contrast to other material kinds generated by the practices and technologies of the life sci ences (see also human genome). Geographers have been slower than some (notably anthro pologists) to rise to the new questions and analytical opportunities presented by the bio technological capabilities, processes and prod ucts that rely on various forms of genetic engineering, data banking and commercia lization (Haraway, 1997). As well as contrib uting to the analysis of the space times of bio informatic scientific practices themselves (see Hall, 2003), geographers have been involved in studying the political economy of global struggles over corporate attempts to commercialize bioDiversity (Hayden, 2003), the history of the genetic framing of ideas and practices of social ?improvement? (Flitner, (NEW PARAGRAPH) and various interrogations of the bio informatic management and manipulation of human genetic materials (see Greenhough and Roe, 2006). In this, genetic geographies can be thought of as a subset of the renewed interest in, and framing of, the project of biogeography that is distinguished by the ways in which it refocuses that project from the malleability of the world of nature ?out there? to the human being ?in here?. sw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Flitner (2003); Greenhough and Roe (2006); Hall (2003); Haraway (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) genius loci The spirit of place, or the dis tinctive atmosphere found in a place. In Roman mythology, each place was protected by a guardian deity (a ?genius?), embodied in the form of an animal or supernatural being. While resonances of this idea remain (e.g. in New Age notions of sites of mystical energy, such as Stonehenge), genius loci now primarily (NEW PARAGRAPH) refers to the unique assemblage of cultural and physical characteristics that make a place distinctive, with a characteristic ambience. Loukaki (1997, p. 308) describes genius loci as ?a place?s fingerprint?. Often found in liter ary depictions (the novelist Lawrence Durrell?s works are perhaps the most well known, especially his Alexandria quartet), gen ius loci has enjoyed only sporadic use in human geography, because it is such an imprecise, difficult to use and contested term. Early on, it was taken up by Herbertson (1915, p. 153), who viewed genius loci as the equivalent to the historian?s Zeitgeist or ?spirit of the age? (?There is ... a spirit of place, as well as of time?). During the 1970s, kindred versions of genius loci, although rarely the exact term itself, were championed in humanistic geography under the guise of?sense of place,? ?topophna? and ?personality of place?. More recently, the term has been taken up critically by Loukaki (NEW PARAGRAPH) , who has been concerned with its im plications for iDeology, and by Barnes (2004b), who links the term to recent work in science stuDies. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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