The Dictionary of Human Geography (80 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
10.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
the world like that before.? Most of these have been confined to linguistic play in the pages of academic journals or monographs, however, though some human geographers have been drawn to the possibilities of art installations and dra matic performances as ways to reach wider audiences in non traditional, non academic forms. Without this outreach, which will al most certainly also involve the imaginative use of new technologies of communication, the possibility of public geographies will remain just that a possibility. On the other side, and closely connected to this concern, there have been remarkably few attempts to imagine other worlds in the sense that Harvey (2000b) gave the term: ?spaces of hope?. This too is crucial; the transformations and exten sions of geographical imaginations described above, and throughout this Dictionary, reveal an extraordinary capacity within and beyond the discipline for critique, for the pursuit and even the privileging of what Benhabib (1986) identified as the explanatory diagnostic. But, as she also shows, a genuinely critical enquiry must also include the anticipatory utopian (see utopia): without releasing and realizing our geographical imaginations in this vital sense, then, we will turn forever on the tread mills of somebody else?s present. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gregory (1994, ch. 2); Harvey (1990); Rose (1993, ch. 4). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
geographical societies
Voluntary organiza tions, some of them professional, whose goal is the promotion of geography as a subject and/ or an academic discipline. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The early and middle nineteenth century saw the formation of several societies in the former category both national (the Royal Geograph ical Society RGS and the American Geographical Society AGS, for example) and local (e.g. the Manchester Geographical Soci ety). Set within the context of a massive expan sion of trade associated with coLoniaLism, imperiaLism and miLitarism (Driver, 1998) the societies promoted expLoration, by finan cing expeditions and the dissemination of their findings, and cartography, to represent the ?new worlds? that were mapped. Some of that dissemination was focused on commercial and government users (cf. commerciaL geog raphy), but the societies also popularized geography, through their lecture programmes and publications. Some continue both func tions. In their popularizing role they have been joined by others, such as the National Geo graphic Society, whose National Geographic Magazine sells millions of copies each month: similar magazines are produced as commercial ventures, such as New Zealand Geographical and the Geographical Magazine, now called simply Geographical, which is owned by the RGS. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the late nineteenth century, many of these societies identified the need for geog raphy to be included in school curricula, as part of children's general education as world citizens as well as a means of promoting na tional identity (cf. nationaLism). They were more successful in some countries (notably the UK and several in continental Europe) than others (the USA, for example: Schulten, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . They then turned their attention to their countries' universities, seeking to have the discipline taught there in order to ensure an adequate supply of trained teachers and others knowledgeable about geography and its techniques: the RGS funded the initial appointments at Oxford and Cambridge, for example, and also provided support to fledg ling departments at Aberystwyth, Edinburgh and Manchester (Johnston, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) With the establishment of geography as a school and university subject, separate profes sions were created and societies formed to promote geographers' interests: for school teachers, for example, these included the Geographical Association in the UK and the National Council for Geographic Education in the USA. In the universities, the research cul ture was nurtured by professional learned societies such as the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and the Institute of Brit ish Geographers (IBG), whose main functions were to hold conferences and other meetings and to publish journals and monographs. These learned societies operated largely inde pendently of the longer established societies with their wider briefs, although the AGS provided much early support for the AAG: the IBG and RGS merged in 1996. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Identification of geography as an important subject in contemporary society and then the creation and continued existence of the aca demic discipline owes much to the pioneering and continued efforts of these societies crit ical ?spaces of science' in Livingstone's (2003c) geographies of scientific knowledge (see science). The societies are major nexuses in the social networks through which aca demic geographers collaborate and promote their discipline especially at a national level (NEW PARAGRAPH) and their journals are widely considered as among the leading media for the dissemin ation of and debate over research findings. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bell, Butlin and Heffernan (1995); Brown (1980); Capel (1981); Dunbar (2002); Martin (2005); Steel (1983). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
geographically weighted regression (GWR)
Standard regression models, like most Quantitative methods, fit an average rela tionship across all measured units; that is, an overall global modeL is fitted, thereby assuming that processes are constant over space. GWR, as proposed by Brunsdon, Fotheringham and Charlton (1996), is an ex pLoratory data anaLysis technique that al lows the relationship between an outcome and a set of predictor variables to vary locally across the map. The approach aims to find spatial non stationarity and distinguish this from mere chance; as such it is a development of Casetti?s (1972) expansion method. With its emphasis on the potential importance of local contextuality, GWR is similar in intent to muLti LeveL modeLLing: indeed, GWR like models can be regarded as a specific type of multilevel model, the multiple membership model (Lawson, Browne and Vidal Rodeiro, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . As always, however, there is the danger that the results reflect not genuine spatial non stationarity but, rather, simple mis specification, as when important predictor variables have been omitted from the model, with these variables themselves varying geographically. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The GWR technique works by identifying spatial subsamples of the data and fitting local regressions. Taking each sampled areal unit across a map in turn, a set of nearby areas that form the ?local' surrounding region is selected, and a regression is then fitted to data in this region in such a way that that nearby areas are given greater weight in the estimation of the regression coefficients than those further from the sampled unit. This sur rounding region is known as the spatial kernel or bandwidth; it can have a fixed spatial size across the map, but this could result in un stable estimation in some regions where there are relatively few areas on which to base the local regression, and possibly miss important small scale patterns where a number of local areas are clustered together spatially. Conse quently, an adaptive spatial kernel is often preferred, so that a minimum number of areas can be specified as forming the region and the kernel extends out until this number has been achieved. Changing the kernel changes the spatial weighting scheme, which in turn produces estimates that vary more or less rapidly over space. A number of tech niques have been developed for selecting an appropriate kernel and testing for spatial stationarity (Leung, Mei and Zhang, 2000; Paez, Uchida and Miyamoto, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Once a model has been calibrated, a set of local parameter estimates for each predictor variable can be mapped to see how the relation varies spatially. Similarly, local measures of standard errors and goodness of fit statistics can be obtained and mapped. An increasing number of applications of GWR includes models of house price and educational attain ment level variations. Software for GWR is available from the original developers at http://ncg.nuim.ie/GWR. kj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Fotheringham, Brunsdon and Charlton (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
geography
Literally, ?earth writing' from the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing), the practice of making geographies (?geo graphing') involves both writing about (con veying, expressing or representing) the world and also writing (marking, shaping or trans forming) the world. The two fold in and out of one another in an ongoing and constantly changing series of situated practices, and even when attempts have been made to hold ?geo graphing' still, to confine its objects and methods to a formal discipline, it has always escaped those enclosures. In consequence, as Livingstone (1992, p. 28) insisted, ?The idea that there is some eternal metaphysical core to geography independent of circumstances will simply have to go'. While the history of geography (see geography, history of) is neither bounded by its disciplinary formation nor the North Atlantic, recent historians of geography have paid close attention to the institutionalization of geography as a univer sity discipline in Europe and North America from the closing decades of the nineteenth century onwards. This focus on the academy overlooks two important considerations. First, ?the institutional and intellectual form of the university is itself a series of [situated] prac tices that have changed over time': the present sense of a ?discipline' was alien to the early modern university, but this did not prevent the provision of instruction in both descriptive and mathematical geography (Withers and Mayhew, 2002, pp. 13 15). Second, like Moliere?s M. Jourdain, who was astonished to learn he had been talking prose all his life without knowing anything about it, many scholars (and others) have produced what could be regarded as geographical knowledge in the course of enquiries that they construed in quite other ways. More than this, their re ception within the discipline has been uneven. Some contributions have been recognized (and even appropriated) as geography, while others have been disavowed for nominally ?professional' reasons: so, for example, re search in spatial statistics may be seen as cen tral to the discipline by some geographers, while traveL writing may be rejected as the impressionistic work of the amateur. As these examples suggest, however, such evaluations are themselves necessarily historically contin gent, and Rose (1995) has cautioned that dis ciplinary geography ?has so often defined itself against what it insists it is not, that writing its histories without considering what has been constructed as not geography is to tell only half the story'. (NEW PARAGRAPH) All boundary drawing exercises are fraught with difficulties, therefore, and intellectual landscapes are no exception: such projects are never ?only' about ideas, but also about the grids of power in which they are impli cated. The boundary question became intru sive with the creation of modern disciplines, and the inclusion of modern geography among them. Its disciplinary formation was a response to political and economic concerns (most viscerally, the demand for a miLitary geography in the service of modern war and, in the UK at least, a commerciaL geog raphy to underwrite international trade) and also to pedagogical ambitions (the desire to transmit particular, nationalistic geographical knowledges through school curricula: see education; nationalism). These practical considerations were hardly unique to the nine teenth century. Geography had long articu lated political and commercial interests in the seventeenth century Varenius had empha sized the importance of Special Geography (or regionaL geography) to both ?statecraft? and the mercantile affairs of the Dutch Repub lic, for example and it was already deeply invested in what Withers (2001) calls ?visual izing the nation?. But its academic institution alization raised questions about the distance between ?professional? and ?popular? geog raphies, and about the very possibility of geog raphy as a field of scholarly research (rather than the compilation of others? observations) that continue to resonate today. Soul searching (or navel gazing) about the ?spirit and pur pose? or ?nature? of geography has become markedly less common in recent years, however, as the contingency and fluidity of intellectual enquiry have been embraced. There has been much greater interest in chart ing future geographies, whose variety confirms the radical openness of geographical horizons: there is no single direction, still less a teleo logical path, to be pursued (cf. Chorley, 1973; Johnston, 1985). (NEW PARAGRAPH) It follows that no definition of geography will satisfy everyone, and nor should it. But one possible definition of the contemporary discipline is: (The study of) the ways in which space is involved in the operation and outcome of social and biophysical processes. When it is unpacked, this summary sentence provides six starting points for discussion: (NEW PARAGRAPH) As the opening brackets indicate, ?geog raphy?, like ?history?, has a double meaning: it both describes knowledge about or study of something (most formally, a discipline or field of intellectual enquiry) and it constitutes a particular object of enquiry, as in ?the geog raphy of soil erosion? or ?the geography of China? (so that ?soil erosion? and ?China? have geographies just as they have histories). In fact, the relations between geography and history have long exercised philosophers. Classical humanism distinguished between choroLogy and chronology, for example, or derings in space and orderings in time, while enLightenment aesthetics asserted that the object of the visual arts (painting or sculpture) was the imitation of elements coexisting in space and that of the discursive arts (narra tive poetry) the expression of moments unfolding in time. In the course of the twenti eth century, disciplinary geography was increasingly troubled by both ways of making the distinction. (NEW PARAGRAPH) First, Hartshorne?s attempt to legislate The nature of geography (1939) had treated geog raphy and history as non identical twins born under the sign of exceptionaLism. They were held to be different from one another because they classified phenomena according to their coexistence either in space (geography) or in time (history), but this also made them both different from all other forms of intellectual enquiry, which classified phenomena accord ing to their similarity to one another (see kantianism). This, in its turn, was supposed to limit concept formation in geography and history to particularity rather than gener alization, to the idiographic rather than the nomothetic (which was the preserve of the sciences). These distinctions proved to be constant provocations. Most geographers insisted that time and history could not be excluded from geographical enquiry, and Hartshorne eventually conceded the point. In deed, studies of landscape evolution, physical and cultural, were regarded as such mainstays of geographical enquiry that Darby (1953, p. 11) could describe geomorphology and his toricaL geography as its twin foundations: even then, ?space? was not understood as a static stage. More than this, however, particu larly after the quantitative revolution of the 1960s, the study of diffusion, the develop ment of dynamic modelling and the capacity to capture the modalities of environmental and social change required any rigorous analy sis of the concrete specificities of geographical variation to be informed by the theories and methods of the mainstream sciences and social sciences: geography could not be separated from other fields by philosophical fiat. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Second, the emphasis on geographical change raised what Darby (1962) called ?the problem of geographical description?: How was it possible for a field that placed such a pre mium on the visual to convey any sense of pLace and Landscape by textual means? Darby?s original sense of this reactivated that Enlightenment sensibility: ?We can look at a picture as a whole,? he wrote, ?and it is as a whole that it leaves an impression upon us; we can, however, read only line by line.? The ques tion (and Darby?s way of framing it) later seemed problematic to many human geograph ers, who enquired more closely into practices of representation and interpretation. They examined the visual ideologies of cartography and the poetics of prose, for example, both the nominally objective prose of scientific enquiry that dominated geographical journals and more evocative modes of expressing places and landscapes. En route, geography's connec tions with the humanities spiralled far beyond history, to include art history, dance, fiLm studies, the literary disciplines, music and performance studies. These were more than exercises in critical interrogation or decon struction; they also involved creative experi ments in writing (see, e.g., Harrison, Pile and Thrift, 2004; Pred, 2004) and collaborations with artists, curators, film makers and per formance artists. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These close encounters with the sciences, social sciences and humanities have ensured that there is no single paradigm or method of enquiry in geography. In order to elucidate the multiple ways in which space is involved in the conduct of life on Earth and in the transform ation of its surface, geographers have been drawn into many different conversations: human geographers with anthropologists, art historians, economists, historians, literary scholars, psychologists, sociologists and others; physical geographers with atmospheric scien tists, botanists, biologists, ecologists, geologists, soil scientists, zoologists and others. These conversations have varied through time, and the history of geography (see history of geog raphy) is an important part of understanding how the contemporary field of geographical enquiry has come to be the way it is, marking both its ruptures from as well as its continuities with any presumptive ?geographical tradition' (Livingstone, 1992). These conversations have also varied over space, so that there is a ?geog raphy of Geography' too. The same claims can be made about any discipline, but in geography they have been increasingly interconnected. Most recent studies of the history of geography have recognized the importance of the spaces in which geographical knowledge is produced and through which it circulates. This has involved attempts both to contextualize geography to understand the development of geographical ideas in relation to the places and situations from which they have emerged and the predica ments to which they were responding and to de territorialize geography: to open the disciplin ary ring fence, to appreciate that geography is not limited to the academy and to interrogate the production of geographical knowledges at multiple sites (Harvey, 2004a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These studies have produced a heightened sensitivity to the specificity and partiality of Euro American and, still more particularly, Anglo American geography. Contracting geo graphy's long and global history, Stoddart (1985) proclaimed that modern geography was a distinctively European science that could be traced back to a series of decisive advances in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. It was then, so Stoddart argued, that ?truth? was made the central criterion of objective science through the systematic deployment of observation, classification and comparison, and in his view it was the exten sion of these methods from the study of nature to the study of human societies ?that made our subject possible'. But the critique of the assumptions that underwrote such a claim, sharpened by the rise of post coLoniaLism, prompted many commentators to re situate that project as a profoundly Eurocentric and, more recently, Euro American science (see eurocentrism: Gregory, 1994). Geography has thus come to be seen as a situated Know Ledge that, of necessity, must enter into conversations with scholars and others who occupy quite different positions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This is not only (or even primarily) a matter of interdisciplinary dialogue; it also implies inter locational dialogue. The more restricted idea of an Anglo American geography was largely a creature of the 1960s and 1970s when, at the height of the Quantitative revo Lution, it seemed that a unified and coherent modeL based geography was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. ?theory', too, seemed to offer a universal language that held out the promise of a unified, even unitary discipline. The subsequent critique of spatiaL science opened up many other paths for geog raphers to explore, and in that sense promoted diversification, but in human geography in particular it also heralded divergence as it prised apart the commonalities that once held the Anglo American corpus together (cf. Johnston and Sidaway, 2004). This coherence (or rigidity, depending on your point of view) has also been assailed by a growing concern about the grids of power and privilege that structure the international academy, and in particular the silences and limitations of a nar rowly English language geography. If, as Witt genstein observed, ?the limits of my language mean the limits of my world', then a geog raphy that privileges one language is not only limited: it is also dangerous (Hassink, 2007). This poses an obvious difficulty for dictionar ies of geography such as this one (cf. Brunotte, Gebhardt, Meurer, Meusburger and Nipper, 2002; Levy and Lussault, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) That said, Anglophone geographers have not been wholly indifferent to work in other languages. Hartshorne?s (1939) enquiry into the nature of geography was an exegesis of a largely German language tradition, and British and American historians of geography have long acknowledged the foundational role of figures such as Alexander von Humboldt (1769 1859), Karl Ritter (1779 1859), Friedrich Ratzel (1844 1904) (see anthropo geography) and, in France, Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845 1918). From the closing dec ades of the twentieth century, however, as human geography took an ever closer inter est in continental European phiLosophy Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, JÂÂ81rgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva and Henri Lefebvre have all occupied prominent posi tions in contemporary discussions there was, until very recently, little or no equivalent interest in continental European geography (apart from the work of Nordic and Dutch geographers available in English). One of the ironies of Stoddart?s thesis about geography as a European science has been the extraordinary indifference of much of the Euro American discipline to the multiple European genealogies of geographical discourse (cf. Godlewska, 1999; Minca, 2007b: see AngloceNTrism). colonial ism and imperiaLism continue to cast long shadows over the discipline too: outside deveL opmeNt geography there has been a compar able lack of interest in the work of geographers

Other books

Lux by Courtney Cole
El Niño Judio by Anne Rice
Composed by Rosanne Cash
The Perfect Mistress by Betina Krahn
The Four Kings by Scott Spotson