The Dictionary of Human Geography (82 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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Oughton, 2006). Many commentators, inside and outside geog raphy, have insisted on a fundamental distinc tion between the methods of the natural sciences (that probe an ?object world?) and those of the humanities and social sciences (that probe a ?subject world?). Unlike pebbles rolling along the bed of a river or grains of sand cascading over the crest of a dune, human beings are suspended in webs of mean ing: those meanings make a difference to conduct in ways that have no parallel in the domain of the natural sciences, and their elu cidation requires radically different interpret ative procedures. Proponents of humanistic geography were among those most likely to advance these arguments in the 1970s and 1980s, but the rise of postmoDerNism and the correlative cuLturaL turn across the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s and in particular the so called ?science wars? epitomized by the Sokal affair (in which physi cist Alan Sokal successfully submitted a spoof ?cultural studies? article to the journal Social Text; cf. Ross, 1996) must have convinced many physical geographers that their commit ment to ?Science? put them at a considerable distance from many, if not most, human geographers. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There have been three major responses to such polarizing views. The first has been to appeal to science studies (see science) to argue that physical geography, like ?science? more generally, is a social practice too; it has its own, highly formalized rules, but it con stantly traffics in meanings and interpret ations. Seen thus, physical geographers are caught in the hermeneutic circle, and as invested in (serious) language games and qualitative modes of representation and hence in textualization, rhetoric and the like as human geographers (Sugden, 1996; Spedding, 1997; Phillips, 1999, pp. 758 9; Harrison, 2001). These commonalities extend beyond the notebook or the printed page, however, and include, crucially, the perform ance of fiELDwork (Powell, 2002). The second response has been to return to phiLosophy and explore post positivist phil osophies of science that provide more nuanced explanations of both social and biophysical systems, and allow for a more sophisticated understanding of contingency than the object ivist canon. reaLism has played a pivotal role here, not least through its qualified naturaL ism, and following its early consideration by human geographers (Sayer, 1992 [1984]) it has been explored by a growing number of physical geographers (Richards, Brookes, Clifford, Harris and Lane, 1998; Raper and Livingstone, 2001). The third response, stimulated by attempts to theorize the pro DuctioN of Nature (Smith, 2008 [1984]), has been to call into question the very distinc tion between the ?social? and ?biophysical? (Braun and Castree 1998; Castree and Braun, 2001) and to recognize the vital im portance of ?hybrid geographies? (Whatmore, 2002b). A host of new approaches has con founded the deceptively commonsensical par titions between ?culture? and ?nature?, including actor network theory, agent baseD moDeLLing, compLexity theory and non representationaL theory. With one or two exceptions, it seems that human geog raphers are more drawn to some of these pos sibilities and physical geographers to others, and they do not in themselves constitute a common intellectual language. But what C.P. Snow famously castigated as ?the two cultures? in the late 1950s, one literary social and the other physical scientific, has come to be rec ognized as an artifice, and there have been a number of attempts to conduct what the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of Brit ish Geographers called ?conversations across the divide? (Harrison, Massey, Richards, Magilligan, Thrift and Bender, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Not all observers of interventions like these are sanguine about the prospects for a plenary geography (cf. Johnston, 2005b; Viles, 2005), and at the end of the day it may not matter very much. Most physical and human geog raphers are probably too involved in their own teaching and research to bother very much about such meta issues. If they are interested in (say) residential segregation in cities or the dynamics of gravel bed rivers, most scholars pursue whatever avenues of enquiry seem most promising, and do not draw back at dis ciplinary borders or worry about disciplinary integrity. It is hard to say or see why they should. To be sure, some work is by its very nature hybrid hence the rise of various ?en vironmental? geographies but it is a mistake to identify institutional politics with intellec tual substance. Funding for teaching and re search has become a crucial issue for all disciplines, and its impact should not be min imized. Advertising the capacity of geography to bring together the sciences, social sciences and humanities may bring its institutional re wards, but the intellectual realization of an interdisciplinary project through disciplinary privilege is surely a contradiction in terms. Disciplines are contingent institutional ar rangements, and while each has a canon of sorts, activated through courses and text books, students and professors, societies and journals, and while there have often been at tempts to police the frontiers (or to extend them through disciplinary imperialism), the fact remains that intellectual work of any sig nificance has never been confined by adminis trative boundaries. Most scholars travel in interdisciplinary space, and while geography may have been unusually promiscuous in its encounters, it is by no means alone: as Gregson (2005, p. 7) astutely remarks, ?ours is increas ingly a post disciplinary world in which the geographical is critical but not ours to possess?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The emphasis on process based explan ations is common to human geography, phys ical geography and many of the interchanges between them. Contemporary geographical enquiry does not stop at mapping outcomes a sort of global gazetteer and the friction of distance is no longer viewed as an adequate surrogate for the operation of the processes that produce those outcomes. Hence the focus on practices and structures, micro processes and systems. In human geography, the argument was put with characteristic force by Soja (1989, pp. 37 8), who identified a per sistent disciplinary tendency to limit enquiry to the description and calibration of ?outcomes deriving from processes whose deeper theor ization was left to others? in ?an infinite regres sion of geographies upon geographies?. His solution, like those of an increasing number of his peers, was not to import theorizations of processes from sociaL theory, but (much more radically) to ?spatialize? social theory ab initio and to think about the production of space in ways that eventually troubled the dualism (even the diaLectic) of spatial form and social process. Others followed other routes to different destinations, but the com mon result was to underline the importance of ontoLogy to human geography. Some phys ical geographers had started to focus on pro cess based explanations in the 1950s, under the influence of American geologist and geo morphologist Arthur N. Strahler (1918 2002) and his graduate students, and by the time human geographers were recoiling from spatiaL fetishism, their physical colleagues were heavily invested in the measurement of atmospheric, biological and geomorphological processes. But here too there has been a con certed attempt to think about process in less mechanistic terms than those early projects allowed, and in consequence to recognize the practical importance of ?philosophical speculation about the fundamental ??stuff?? or substance of reality? for geomorphology and other fields of physical geography (Rhoads, (NEW PARAGRAPH) p. 15; cf. Harvey, 1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This interest in process is, in one sense, a peculiarly modern fascination: in a world where, as Marx so famously put it, ?all that is solid melts into air?, there is a particular pre mium on describing, monitoring and account ing for change. But there is also a vital interest in planning, predicting and implementing change. This has had two crucial impacts on the development of contemporary geography. The first is a renewed interest in political and ethical questions. Intervening in situations of politico ecological catastrophe or war, where environmentaL justice, human rights and even our very survival as a species may be at stake, requires more than a detached, ana lytical gaze. In its classical, Greek form, geog raphy was closely associated with political and moral philosophy, and the luminous writings of the gentle anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin (1842 1921) provided a rare, modern insistence on the importance of such questions. These were revived most effectively by David Harvey in the second half of the twentieth century, whose forensic dissection of late capitaLism through a close reading and reformulation of Marx?s writings did much to alert human geographers to the in eluctable politics of their enquiries. This raised a series of questions about epistemoLogy and the limits of geographical knowledge that re quired a critique not only of geography?s tech nical and conceptual armatures including those derived from its newfound interest in marxism but of (for example) the masculin ism that was reproduced through its concepts and practices (Rose, 1993). The ongoing for mation of a criticaL human geography, in cluding criticaL geopoLitics and feminist geographies, reinforced and generalized these concerns (see also radicaL geography). Physical geographers were by no means indif ferent to them, but they seem to have been more directly moved by the consideration of an explicitly environmental ethics. Indeed, moral philosophies more generally have as sumed such prominence alongside philosophies of science in contemporary geographical enquiry that some observers have discerned a ?moral turn? across the discipline as a whole (Barnett and Land, 2007; cf. Smith, 2000a; Lee and Smith, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second consequence of orienting geo graphical enquiry towards change and the future has been a recognition that geography?s responsibilities extend beyond a critical in volvement in pubLic poLicy important though that is to a considered engagement in public debate (Murphy, 2006). This involves a more rigorous refLexivity: not only a care ful and constructive critique of theories, methods and materials, but also an examin ation of the circumstances in which geographies are being produced and circulated and of the consequences in which they are implicated. This process might well begin ?at home?, in the classroom and the lecture theatre, but it cannot end there. The late modern corporate university, with its audit culture, its vested interest in the commodification of knowledge, and its incorporation of many of the modal ities of neo LiberaLism, materially affects teaching and research. At the same time, how ever, precisely because geographical know ledges are produced at so many sites outside formal educational institutions, public respon sibility also involves a willingness to learn from and engage with audiences far beyond the academy, many of whose lives have been ravaged by the unregulated intrusions of the supposedly ?free? market, by new rounds of accumuLation by dispossession and by the forcible installation of radically new geograph ies (Harvey, 2003b; Lawson, 2007). To ana lyse and challenge these impositions requires more than ?earth writing? in its literal sense; geographers neglect the art of writing at their (NEW PARAGRAPH) peril, but they also need to write in different (?non academic?) styles for different audi ences, to explore new technologies and media, and to experiment with different modes of presentation. None of this is about experimentation for its own sake, because the new found interest in pubLic geographies is not only about producing counter publics imbued with a critical geographicaL imagi nation: it is also, crucially, about learning from and engaging them in open and respect ful dialogue. This matters because geography is not, as the old saw has it, ?what geographers do?: it is, in an important sense, what we all do. Claims about ?the end of geography? have been made since at least the early twentieth century, but (then as now) they have also always been claims about the rise of new geog raphies and, less obviously perhaps, the grids of power that they forward (Smith, N., 2003c). ?Geo graphing?, whether ?professional? or ?popular?, thus never works on a blank surface: it always involves writing over (superimpos ition) and writing out (erasure and exclusion: Sparke, 2005, p. xvi). Textbooks and diction ary entries are no exception. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bonnet (2007); Castree, Rogers and Sherman (2005); Livingstone (1992); Thrift (2002) [and subsequent debate]. (NEW PARAGRAPH)
geography, history of
The term ?geog raphy? defies simple definition. The standard, non specialist dictionary characterization of it as ?The science which has for its object the description of the Earth?s surface? fails to cap ture the complexity of geography?s history: the disorderliness of the past, to put it another way, resists essentiaList specification. As an enterprise whether scholarly or popular, whether in terms of disciplinary history, dis cursive engagements or practical operations geography has meant different things at differ ent times and places. In fact, geographical knowledge and practice been intimately inter twined with a host of enterprises: natural magic, imperial politics, celestial cartography, natural theology, conjectural prehistory, math ematical astronomy, speculative anthropology, traveL writing, national identity and various species of literary endeavour. It is therefore understandable that there is no unchallenged consensus on what it means to write geogra phy?s history. And although the task of recon structing geography?s history has had its critics, some of whom are suspicious of the entire enterprise (Barnett, 1995), it would not be unreasonable to suggest that some of the most significant interventions into recent debates on the relationships between knowl edge, representation and power have eman ated from those concerned with the ways in which geographical knowledge is constituted socially, historically and spatially. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As a professional discipline, geography?s geneaLogy is part and parcel of the story of the division of intellectual labour that deliv ered modern ?disciplines? around the end of the nineteenth century. It has been claimed that before this period, in particular during the period of the European enLightenment, the label ?geography?, as the precursor of the modern discipline, had fairly specific connota tions that distinguished it from other fields of endeavour through its focus on the deter mination of relative location and description of ?phenomena to be found in those locations? (Mayhew, 2001, p. 388). But it has been shown that boundaries around the subject were never quite so sharply delineated and that geography took various shapes in dif ferent texts, at different sites and in different practical pursuits (Withers, 2006). However that particular terminological debate is to be resolved, histories of geography as a Discourse continue to be written without the definitional constraints that recent history and contingent institutional arrangements necessarily impose on the modern day discipline. To be sure, the histories of geography as discourse and discipline are interrelated in intimate ways, and there is good evidence to suppose that recent practitioners of these enterprises deploy similar historiographical tactics, though there do remain differences of substance and style in the conduct of these two enterprises. The increasing acknowledgement too that geographical pursuits in the public sphere popular geographies are in need of further scrutiny parallels, in some respects, the surge of interest in social studies of popular science. (NEW PARAGRAPH) So far as the modern discipline of geography is concerned, then, those chronicling the course of historical change have conducted their investigations in a variety of ways. A range of different strategies has been pursued. First: institutional history. Those dwelling on the history of geography?s institutions have con centrated on the subject?s organizational ex pression, and accordingly have produced narratives of a range of geographicaL soci eties, or have enquired into the evolution of geography in different national traditions. Such projects have tended to concentrate on geography?s modern narrative, but even in its pre professional guise, the subject?s institu tional manifestation was significant. Its pres ence in university curricula, for example, has been traced back to the period of the scien tific revoLution, when it was taught in con junction with practices such as astronomy and practical mathematics (Withers and Mayhew, 2002; Livingstone 2003c). Yet there remains significant work to be done. For the English speaking world, to take a single example, the dimensions of the Royal Geographical Society?s influence on the mutual shaping of geographical knowledge and Victorian society still remain to be charted. In other national and provincial settings, similar questions are in need of resolution. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Second: biography. The life stories of a number of key professional geographers, including Halford Mackinder, Ellsworth Huntington, Mark Jefferson, William Morris Davis and Elisee Reclus, have been narrated. Some (though not all) of these accounts have been frankly disappointing in their lacklustre narrative line and an absence of historiograph ical sophistication, though N. Smith?s (2003) more recent analysis of Isaiah Bowman displays a richness and depth to which other accounts could profitably aspire. Alongside these full length studies, a suite of shorter bio graphical sketches of a wider range of figures continues in the serial Geographers: Biobiblio graphical Studies. Biographical treatments are also available of figures looming large in the history of the subject?s pre professional past, including more recently studies of Alexander von Humboldt (Rupke, 2005), George Perkins Marsh (Lowenthal, 2000) and Nathaniel Sha ler (Livingstone, 1987b). New energy has also been injected into the biographical impulse by the pursuit of what might be called ?life geog raphies? or ?life spaces? namely, by taking with much greater seriousness the sites and spaces through which human beings transact their lives (Daniels and Nash, 2004). Recent autobiographical experiments by geographers have also added to this perspective; these raise significant questions about the relative value of autobiography and biography, the differ ence between a ?life as it is lived? and ?a life as it is told?, and the inescapable hermeneutic complications involved in fusing present horizons with those of the past. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third: histories of ideas. Alongside institu tional history and biographical narrative, a number of works dwelling on the history of geographical ideas within academic geography have appeared. Some are specialist treatments of how modern geographical thought has engaged with wider theoretical currents (Peet, (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; some rehearse the internal history of sub disciplines (for historicaL geography, for instance, see Butlin, 1993); others have centred on school geography texts and their role in conveying imperial attitudes about race and gender (Maddrell, 1998). Cumula tively, works such as these demonstrate the diverse range of interests and styles employed to interrogate geography?s academic history. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contributions dealing with geographical discourses also come in a variety of guises and encompass a wide spectrum of topics. Beazley?s (1897 1906) The dawn of modern geography emphasized the history of medieval travel and exploration; Eva Taylor?s (1930) portrayal of Tudor geography centred on mathematical practice, surveying and naviga tion; and J.K. Wright?s (1965 [1925]) account of the Geographical lore of the time of the Cru sades rehearsed place description, cartographic ventures and cosmographical convictions in a project that self confessedly covered ?a wider field than most definitions of geography? (p. 2). Newer ways of thinking about medieval geography have also recently surfaced, notably the researches of Lozovsky (2000), who ex plores medieval scholars? perceptions and rep resentations of geographical space and its transmission. Glacken?s (1967) monumental Traces on the Rhodian shore mapped the contact zone between nature and cuLture, and openly acknowledged that he transcended the conventional limits of the modern discipline. Bowen?s (1981) compendious survey of geo graphical thought from Bacon to Humboldt constitutes a sophisticated historical apologia for an ecological, anti positivistic vision of the subject. Alongside these treatments of geo graphical discourse is a range of related con tributions dealing with allied subjects such as biogeography (Browne, 1983), meteorology (Anderson, 2005a), Earth and environmental science (Bowler, 1992; Rudwick 2005), car tography (Edney, 1997; Burnett, 2000), oceanography (Rozwadowski, 2005) geo morphology (Davies, 1969; Kennedy, 2005), humAn ecology (Mitman, 1992) and ideas of Nature (Coates, 1998). In many cases, these undertakings have deepened connections be tween geographers and historians of science, and opened up new and fertile lines of enquiry. (NEW PARAGRAPH) If these works are indicative of geography?s long standing location within the scientific tradition, there is equally abundant evidence for the subject?s textual heritage that connects it with the humanities. Since the period of the scientific revolution, geography has also been concerned with matters of commerce and strategy, and also with regional descriptions (Cormack, 1997). This realization has led Mayhew (2000) to argue that early modern geography was deeply implicated in debates about political theology and cultural identity during the so called long eighteenth century. The subject?s intimate connections with historical scholarship, moral philosophy, speculative anthropology and various species of literary endeavour, alongside its association with natural philosophy, have thus been em phasized. One mark of this connection is the way in which geographical works depicted denominational spaces, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and political insurrection at the time of the English Civil War; thereby, the inescapably political character of regional description and geographical compilation is disclosed. Another indication is the extent to which writers such as Samuel Johnston and Shakespeare?s commentators were concerned with matters of geographical sensibility (Roberts, 1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These relatively specialist studies are sup plemented by a number of what Aay (1981) calls ?textbook chronicles? synthetic treat ments designed for student consumption that provide an overview of the field. It is now plain, however, that these surveys have all too frequently lapsed into apologetics for some particular viewpoint geography as regional interrogation, the study of occupied space or some such. Moreover, their strategy was typically presentist, namely using history to ad judicate on present day controversies (though the inescapability of certain dimensions of the present as indicated above need to be regis tered); internalist, in the sense that they paid scant attention to the broader social and intel lectual contexts within which geographical knowledges were produced; and cumulative, portraying history in terms of progress towards some perceived contemporary orthodoxy. Scepticism about precisely these assumptions has fostered greater sensitivity to currents of historiographical thinking, and a range of strategies have therefore been deployed in the endeavour to deepen analyses of geography?s genealogy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Leaving aside their problematic reading of Kuhn, some have turned to his Structure of scientific revolutions (1970 [1962]) to charac terize the history of geography as an overlap ping succession of paradigms enshrined in a number of key texts: Paul Vidal de la Blache?s possibiLism, Ellsworth Huntington?s environ mentaL determinism, Carl Ortwin Sauer?s (NEW PARAGRAPH) Landscape morphoLogy, Richard Hartsho rne?s areaL differentiation and Fred K. Schaefer's exceptionaLism are typical candi dates for paradigm status (see scientific rev oLution(s)). In such scenarios, however, a good deal of historical typecasting and editor ial management has had to be engaged in. Others have taken more seriously the role of ?invisible colleges' and ?socio scientific net works' (Lochhead, 1981). At the same time, perspectives from historicaL materiaLism have been marshalled as a means of elucidating the way in which geographical knowledge and practices have been used to legitimate the social conditions that produced that knowledge in the first place (Harvey, 1984). Still others have seen in the philosophical literature on the cognitive power of metaphor a key to unlocking aspects of geography?s history (Buttimer, 1982), through delineating the different uses of, say, mechanistic, organic, structural and textual analogies. The insights of Foucault on the in timate connections between space, surveiL Lance, power and knowledge, and of Said on the Western construction of ?non Western' realms (see orientaLism) have also opened up new vistas to the history of geography by unmasking the pretended neutrality of spatial discourse in a variety of arenas both within and beyond the academy. The related need to open up conventional histories of geography to non Western traditions is a real desideratum. (NEW PARAGRAPH) More recently, rapprochement with science studies has opened up new lines of enquiry in which the social constitution of knowledge and an empirical examination of actual knowledge making practices have come to the fore. Barnes (1996, 1998), for example, has drawn on the methodology of social stud ies of scientific knowledge in his account of the history and conceptual structure of modern economic geography in general, and geo graphy's Quantitative revoLution in parti cular. Other applications of this general perspective within human geography are ad vertised in this Dictionary?s entry on science (including science studies). Among these are the actor network theory of Bruno Lat our, the so called Edinburgh strong program me in the sociology of knowledge, a range of feminist epistemologies, the ethnographic methodologies of the micro anthropology of science and various other constructivist per spectives. All of these combine to situate cog nitive claims in the conditions of their making, and to render problematic distinctions be tween internal and external history of scientific knowledge. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cumulatively, such calls for re reading geography's history have contributed to a wide range of revisionist accounts of particular episodes, among which mention might be made of the links between magic, mysticism and geography at various times (Livingstone, 1988; Matless, 1991), geography?s complicity in the shaping of imperial ambitions and national identity in the early modern period (Withers, 2001: see imperiALism), the intim ate connections between geography, empire, heaLth and racial theory (Livingstone, 1991; Bell, 1993; Godlewska and Smith, 1994; Driver, 2001a), the relations between Land scape representation, artistic convention and denominational discourse (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Mayhew, 1996), the cir cumstances surrounding debates over the boundary between geography and sociology in turn of the century France (Friedman, 1996), the imperial mould in which early environ

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