introducing human geographies

Introducing Human Geographies is the leading guide to Human Geography for undergraduatestudents, explaining new thinking on essential topics and discussing exciting developments in the field.

This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, and coverage is extended with newsections devoted to biogeographies, cartographies, mobilities, non-representational geographies,population geographies, public geographies and securities. Presented in three parts with 59contributions written by expert international researchers, this text addresses the central ideasthrough which Human Geographers understand and shape their subject.

Part 1: Foundations engages students with key ideas that define Human Geography’s subject matterand approaches, through critical analyses of dualisms such as local–global, society–space andhuman–nonhuman. Part 2: Themes explores Human Geography’s main sub-disciplines, withsections devoted to biogeographies, cartographies, cultural geographies, development geographies,economic geographies, environmental geographies, historical geographies, political geographies,population geographies, social geographies, and urban and rural geographies. Finally, Part 3:Horizons assesses the latest research in innovative areas, from non-representational geographies tomobilities, securities and publics.

This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting-edge introduction to the field is richly illustratedthroughout with full-colour figures, maps and photos. These are available to download on thecompanion website, located at www.routledge.com/cw/cloke.

Paul Cloke is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Exeter.

Philip Crang is Professor of Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway University of London.

Mark Goodwin is Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the Universityof Exeter.

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES

www.routledge.com/cw/cloke

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCING HUMAN

GEOGRAPHIESThird edition

EDITED BY PAUL CLOKE, PHILIP CRANG

AND MARK GOODWIN

First edition published 1999 by Hodder Arnold

Second edition published 2005 by Hodder Arnold

Third edition published 2014 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2014 Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin

The right of Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataIntroducing human geographies / [edited by] Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin. — Third edition.

pages cm1. Human geography. I. Cloke, Paul J. editor of compilation. GF41.I56 2013304.2—dc23 2012046354

ISBN: 978-0-415-82663-1 (hbk)ISBN: 978-1-4441-3535-0 (pbk)ISBN: 978-0-203-52922-5 (ebk)

Typeset in AGaramond and Futuraby Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

Contents

List of contributors ixAcknowledgements xiiiIntroducing Human Geographies: a guide xv

PART 1 Foundations 11 Local–global, Philip Crang 72 Society–space, Jo Little 233 Human–non-human, Hayden Lorimer 374 Modern–postmodern, Mark Goodwin 515 Self–other, Paul Cloke 636 Masculinity–femininity, Geraldine Pratt and Molly Kraft 817 Science–art, David Gilbert 968 Explanation–understanding, Rob Kitchin 1179 Representation–reality, Mike Crang 130

PART 2 Themes 145SECTION 1 BIOGEOGRAPHIES 147

10 Nature and human geography, Sarah Whatmore 15211 Animals and plants, Russell Hitchings 16312 Political ecology, Juanita Sundberg and Jessica Dempsey 175

SECTION 2 CARTOGRAPHIES 187

13 The power of maps, Jeremy Crampton 19214 Geographical information systems, Muki Haklay 20315 Counter-cartographies, Wen Lin 215

SECTION 3 CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES 227

16 Imaginative geographies, Felix Driver 234

17 Place, Tim Cresswell 24918 Landscape, John Wylie 26219 Material geographies, Philip Crang 276

SECTION 4 DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHIES 293

20 Theories of development, Katie Willis 29721 Rethinking development, Sarah A. Radcliffe 31222 Survival and resistance, Paul Routledge 32523 Human geographies of the Global South, Katherine Brickell 339

SECTION 5 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHIES 349

24 Spaces of production, Kris Olds 35325 Money and finance, Sarah Hall 36926 Consumption–reproduction, Juliana Mansvelt 37827 Commodities, Michael Watts 39128 Economic globalization, Andrew Jones 413

SECTION 6 ENVIRONMENTAL GEOGRAPHIES 427

29 Global and local environmental problems, Sally Eden 43130 Sustainability, Mark Whitehead 44831 Climate change, Harriet Bulkeley 461

SECTION 7 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES 475

32 Modernity and modernization, Miles Ogborn 48033 Colonialism and post-colonialism, Richard Phillips 49334 Space, memory and identity, Nuala C. Johnson 509

SECTION 8 POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES 527

35 Critical geopolitics, Joanne P. Sharp 53036 War and peace, Scott Kirsch 54237 Nationalism, Pyrs Gruffudd 55638 Citizenship and governance, Mark Goodwin 568

SECTION 9 POPULATION GEOGRAPHIES 583

39 Age, Peter Kraftl 58740 Health and well-being, David Conradson 59941 Migrants and refugees, Khalid Koser 613

CONTENTSvi

SECTION 10 SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES 623

42 Identities, Peter Jackson 62843 Identity and difference: age, dis/ability and sexuality, Sarah L. Holloway 64144 Exclusion, Jon May 65545 Diasporas, Claire Dwyer 669

SECTION 11 URBAN AND RURAL GEOGRAPHIES 687

46 Urban form, Chris Hamnett 69047 Urban senses, Lisa Law 70648 Rurality, Paul Cloke 720

PART 3 Horizons 739SECTION 1 NON-REPRESENTATIONAL GEOGRAPHIES 741

49 Emotional geographies, Hester Parr 74650 Affects, Ben Anderson 76051 Performances, Amanda Rogers 773

SECTION 2 MOBILITIES 787

52 Mobilities: politics, practices, places, Peter Adey 79153 Touring mobilities, Claudio Minca and Lauren Wagner 80654 Virtual mobilities, Julia Verne 821

SECTION 3 SECURITIES 835

55 Risk/fear/surveillance, David Murakami Wood 83856 International resources, Klaus Dodds 85257 Security life: new hazards and biosecurity, Stephen Hinchliffe 864

SECTION 4 PUBLICS 879

58 How to think about public space, Clive Barnett 88359 Ethical spaces, Keith Woodward 899

Glossary 919References 944Index 1024Section opener image sources 1057

CONTENTS vii

EditorsPaul Cloke is Professor of Human Geography

at the University of Exeter.

Philip Crang is Professor of CulturalGeography at Royal Holloway University ofLondon.

Mark Goodwin is Professor of HumanGeography and Deputy Vice-Chancellor atthe University of Exeter.

ContributorsPeter Adey is Professor of Human Geography

at Royal Holloway University of London.

Ben Anderson is Reader in Geography atDurham University.

Clive Barnett is Professor of Geography at theUniversity of Exeter.

Katherine Brickell is Senior Lecturer in HumanGeography at Royal Holloway University ofLondon.

Harriet Bulkeley is Professor of Geography atDurham University.

David Conradson is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University ofCanterbury.

Jeremy Crampton is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Kentucky.

Mike Crang is Professor of Human Geographyat Durham University.

Tim Cresswell is Professor of HumanGeography at Royal Holloway University ofLondon.

Jessica Dempsey is Assistant Professor inEnvironmental Studies at the University ofVictoria.

Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics atRoyal Holloway University of London.

Felix Driver is Professor of Human Geographyat Royal Holloway University of London.

Claire Dwyer is Senior Lecturer in Geographyand Deputy Director of the MigrationResearch Unit at University College London.

Sally Eden is Reader in Environmental Issuesand Geography at the University of Hull.

David Gilbert is Professor of Urban andHistorical Geography at Royal HollowayUniversity of London.

Pyrs Gruffudd is Senior Lecturer in Geographyat Swansea University.

Muki Haklay is Professor of GeographicalInformation Science at University CollegeLondon.

Sarah Hall is Associate Professor in Geographyat the University of Nottingham.

Chris Hamnett is Professor of HumanGeography at King’s College London.

Stephen Hinchliffe is Professor of HumanGeography at the University of Exeter.

Russell Hitchings is Lecturer in HumanGeography at University College London.

List of contributors

Sarah L. Holloway is Professor of HumanGeography at Loughborough University.

Peter Jackson is Professor of HumanGeography at the University of Sheffield.

Nuala C. Johnson is Reader in HumanGeography at Queen’s University Belfast.

Andrew Jones is Professor of EconomicGeography and Dean of the School of Artsand Social Sciences at City UniversityLondon.

Scott Kirsch is Associate Professor in Geographyat the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill.

Rob Kitchin is Professor of Human Geographyand Director of the National Institute ofRegional and Spatial Analysis at the NationalUniversity of Ireland, Maynooth.

Khalid Koser is Deputy Director and AcademicDean at the Geneva Centre for SecurityPolicy.

Molly Kraft is a graduate student in geographyat the University of British Columbia.

Peter Kraftl is Reader in Human Geography atthe University of Leicester.

Lisa Law is Senior Lecturer in the School ofEarth and Environmental Sciences at JamesCook University.

Wen Lin is Lecturer in Human Geography atNewcastle University.

Jo Little is Professor of Gender and Geographyat the University of Exeter.

Hayden Lorimer is Reader in HumanGeography at the University of Glasgow.

Juliana Mansvelt is Senior Lecturer inGeography at Massey University.

Jon May is Professor of Geography at QueenMary, University of London.

Claudio Minca is Professor and Head of the Cultural Geography chair group atWageningen University.

David Murakami Wood is Associate Professorin Sociology and Geography and CanadaResearch Chair in Surveillance Studies atQueen’s University.

Miles Ogborn is Professor of Geography atQueen Mary, University of London.

Kris Olds is Professor of Geography at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hester Parr is Reader in Human Geography atthe University of Glasgow.

Richard Phillips is Professor of HumanGeography at the University of Sheffield.

Geraldine Pratt is Professor of Geography atthe University of British Columbia.

Sarah A. Radcliffe is Professor of LatinAmerican Geography and Fellow of Christ’sCollege at the University of Cambridge.

Amanda Rogers is Lecturer in HumanGeography at Swansea University.

Paul Routledge is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Glasgow.

Joanne P. Sharp is Professor of Geography atthe University of Glasgow.

Juanita Sundberg is Associate Professor ofGeography at the University of BritishColumbia.

Julia Verne is Lecturer in Human Geography at Goethe University Frankfurtam Main.

Lauren Wagner is Lecturer in CulturalGeography at Wageningen University.

Michael Watts is Professor of Geography atUniversity of California, Berkeley.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORSx

Sarah Whatmore is Professor of Environmentand Public Policy and Fellow of KebleCollege at the University of Oxford.

Mark Whitehead is Professor of HumanGeography at Aberystwyth University.

Katie Willis is Professor of Human Geographyat Royal Holloway University of London.

Keith Woodward is Assistant Professor ofGeography at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

John Wylie is Professor of Cultural Geographyat the University of Exeter.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xi

Many deserve our thanks for their help withthis third edition of Introducing HumanGeographies. Once more we are indebted to thecohorts of first-year undergraduate studentsthat we have taught over the many years thatthis book has been part of our professionallives: at Lampeter first, and then at Bristol,Aberystwyth, UCL, Royal Holloway Universityof London and Exeter. They have consistentlyshown enthusiasm for engaging with new, oftencomplex ideas and materials, so long as thatcomplexity is not used as an excuse forexcluding all but a small clique from theconversation. We continue to strive to do thatenthusiasm justice. We thank too our expertcontributors, both those returning and those

new to this third edition. It was a pleasure toedit their chapters and in the process to bereminded once again of the vibrant intellectuallife across the range of Human Geography. Thisbook began life overseen by Hodder Education;we thank in particular Bianca Knights and BethCleall for their Herculean efforts on the thirdedition. When Taylor & Francis acquiredHodder’s Geography list, Andrew Mould andFaye Leerink at Routledge put in the hard yardsto get us to publication. On a personal note,special thanks are due, as ever, to Viv, Liz andWill; Katharine, Esme and Evan; and Anne,Rosa and Sylvie.

Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin

Acknowledgements

Introducing Human Geographies is a ‘travelguide’ into the academic subject of HumanGeography and the things that it studies. Now in an updated and much extended thirdedition, the book is designed especially forstudents new to university degree courses. Inguiding you through the subject, IntroducingHuman Geographies maps out the big,foundational ideas that have shaped thediscipline past and present (in Part 1); exploreskey research themes being pursued in HumanGeography’s various sub-disciplines (in Part 2);and identifies some of the current research focithat are shaping the horizons of the subject (in Part 3).

Engaging with research literatures throughacademic journals and books is an importantpart of degree level study. The debates going onwithin them are exciting, challenging us notonly to think about new subjects but also to think in new ways. However, it can takesome time to get to grips with that publishedresearch. It is huge and diverse. It is dynamic,so that as a new student you can feel like youare coming into conversations halfway through,trying to figure out what people are talkingabout, why they are interested in it, and howcome they are so animated about things.Academic publications are also by and largeaddressed to other researchers, deploying whatmay feel like rather arcane vocabularies ascommunicational shorthand. So not only hasthe conversation already begun, but it can alsosound like it is in a foreign language. The ethosof Introducing Human Geographies is to makethat cutting edge of contemporary Human

Geography accessible; to map out key areas ofstudy and debate; to guide you on forays intoits somewhat daunting collections of ideas andinterests; and to help you, as students of thesubject, to participate in its conversations.

The Human Geography you will be introducedinto here feels very different to some of thepopular images of the subject. It is not a drycompendium of facts about the world, itscountries, capital cities, and so on. Apologies inadvance if this book is of limited help in gettingthe geography questions right in a quiz ortelevision game show. Of course, knowinggeographical facts and information is useful andimportant in all kinds of ways. But it is notenough. Human Geography today castsinformation in the service of two larger goals.On the one hand, it seeks out the realities ofpeople’s lives, places and environments in alltheir complexity. Geography is a subject thatlives outside the classroom, the statisticaldataset or the abstract model, gaining strengthfrom its encounters with what (somewhatcomically) we academics have a tendency to call ‘the world out there’. On the other hand,Human Geographers are also acutely aware thatthis worldly reality is not easy to discern. Thenature of the world is not laid out before oureyes, waiting for us to venture out blinkingfrom the dark lecture theatre or library so thatwe can see it. ‘Reality’ only emerges throughthe carefully considered ways of thinking andinvestigating that we sometimes call ‘theory’. As the contributions to this book show,Human Geography is characterized by a refusal to oppose ‘reality’ and ‘theory’, worldly

Introducing Human Geographies: a guide

engagement and contemplative, creativethought. Both are needed if we are to describe,explain, understand, question and maybe evenimprove the world’s human geographies.

As you may have noticed (when putting yourback out trying to pick it up . . .), this thirdedition of Introducing Human Geographies is alarge book. It has a lot in it. Its contents arediverse. In this general introduction wetherefore want to do three things. First, wefocus on what unites this variety by addressinghead on the question ‘What is HumanGeography?’. Second, we expand on the kindsof approaches and styles of thought thatcharacterize Human Geography today across itsrange of substantive fields. Finally, we brieflymap out the layout of the book itself, both interms of structure and presentational style,offering some advice on how you mightnavigate around it.

What is HumanGeography?A common exercise for an initial HumanGeography tutorial or seminar is a request tomine a week’s news coverage and to come backwith an example of something that seems toyou to be ‘human geography’. Have a go atdoing this now. Think about the last week’snews. Draw up a shortlist of two or threestories that strike you as the kinds of things thatHuman Geographers would study or that youthink are ‘human geography’. Then reflect onhow you decided on these and what youthought was ‘geographical’ about them. Whatdoes your selection tell you about what humangeography means to you?

The word ‘geography’ can be traced back to ancient Greece over 2,200 years ago.Specifically, it was Eratosthenes of Kyrene (ca. 288–205 BC), Librarian at Alexandria, who

wrote the first scholarly treatise that establishedGeography as an intellectual field, the three-volume Geographika (Roller,2010). In Greek, Geography means ‘earth (geo)writing (graphy)’. Writing the earth was whatGeographers did two millennia ago, and it stilldescribes what Geographers do today. In allkinds of ways, it is a wonderful definition of the subject. It speaks to Geography as afundamental intellectual endeavour concernedwith understanding the world in which we liveand upon which our lives depend. It expresseshow Geography is all around us, a part of oureveryday lives. It suggests that Geography is notconfined to academic study but includes a hostof more popular forms of knowledge throughwhich we come to understand and describe ourworld. But it also raises questions, in particularabout breadth and coherence. To return to thatexercise of reviewing the week’s news forexamples of Human Geography, if what wewere looking for were cases of ‘earth writing’then an awful lot of stuff could fit that brief insome way. Most of the news is about thingshappening on the earth.

How do we deal with that breadth, with that seeming absence of specialization inGeography? We would suggest there arethree sorts of responses: to recognize theunderpinning intellectual commitments builtinto the very notion of geography; to embracethe diverse topics and events to which theserelate; and to recognize the ways in whichdifferent areas of Geography are defined andorganized. Let us take these in turn.

First, then, we need to think a little moredirectly about the ‘geo’ in geo-graphy, aboutwhat we mean by the earth in earth writing.This word is not just a general designation of everything around us but signals twointerconnected cores to Human Geography’sinterests (Cosgrove, 1994): what we might callan ‘earthiness’ and a ‘worldliness’; or, to use

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExvi

more current academic vocabulary, the relationsbetween society and nature and between societyand space (see Figure I). In terms of ‘earthiness’,the ‘geo’ in geography signifies ‘the living planetEarth’, the biophysical environments composedof land, sea, air, plants and animals that we livein and with. These are central concerns forGeographers. The relations between humanbeings and the ‘nature’ we are also part of havebeen a consistent preoccupation of HumanGeography. There is a second meaning to ‘geo’as well, though, that is equally central, one weuse when we talk about ‘the whole Earth’ or ‘the world’. Here, to write the earth means toexplore its extents, to describe its areas, placesand people, and to consider how and why these may have distinctive qualities. HumanGeographers have long been fascinated withhow various parts of the Earth’s surface differ, with the relations between differentareas, and with ways of knowing this (such as mapping and exploring). Geographyendeavours to know the world and its variedfeatures, both near to home and far away. The‘geo’ in Geography designates this commitmentto world knowledge.

The precise forms such concerns with ‘earth’and ‘world’ have taken in Geography havevaried over time of course, but both are centralto the project of Human Geography today.Thus, Human Geographers lead debates over what are now often called the relations

between society and nature, on environmentalunderstandings and values, on the causes andresponses to environmental change. They do so at a variety of scales, from global concernswith climate change to local debates overparticular environments and landscapes.Human Geographers are also concerned withhow human lives, and our relations to nature,vary across the surface of the Earth. Everythinghappens somewhere and Human Geographersargue that this matters. A variety of centralgeographical notions reflect this: space, place,region, location, territory, distance, scale, forexample, all try to express something about the ‘where-ness’ of things in the world. Incontemporary parlance, Human Geographersemphasize the relations between society andspace or what can be called spatiality. Theyargue both that human life is shaped by ‘whereit happens’ and that ‘where it happens’ issocially shaped. The world and its differencesare not innate; they are made. HumanGeographers study that making.

Our argument, then, is that Human Geographytoday still lives up to the original meaning of its name, revolving around both ‘writing theearth’ (in contemporary academic parlance the relations between society and nature) and‘writing the world’ (the relations betweensociety and space). However, and this is thesecond point we want to develop, these coreconcerns are developed through a vast range of substantive topics. In this book you will findsubject matters that range from the meaningsof development and modernity to how we relate to plants when gardening, from theinternational financial system to tourism, from the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ to urbangentrification, from global climate change to shopping. And, for very good reasons, you’ll also find a chapter largely devoted to a discussion of oven-ready chickens. It is quite common to have mixed feelings about

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDE xvii

GEOGRAPHYGeo Graphien

Writing the Earth: Writing the World:Society–Nature relations Society–Space relations

Figure I Human Geography: writing the earth andwriting the world

this range. Many people choose to studyGeography because of it, appreciating the wider understanding of human life suchbreadth seems to offer in comparison to manyacademic disciplines. In contrast, some reactagainst it, worrying that Geographers seem tobe ‘jacks of all trades’ and ‘masters of none’,complaining that Human Geography todayseems to study things that ‘aren’t reallyGeography’.

In our view, the diversity of Human Geographyis a strength not a weakness, for at least tworeasons. First, it reflects how Geography existedwell before, and exists well beyond, the kinds of specialization promoted by academicinstitutions over the last century or so(Bonnett, 2008). Geography is notable for howit challenges the divisions that have come tocharacterize academic organizations, spanningas it does the natural sciences, the socialsciences and the arts and humanities. Theworld doesn’t present itself to us in thosecategories and Geography resists being confinedwithin them. As an academic disciplineGeography has a healthy scepticism towards the disciplining of knowledge. Its diversityembodies that. Second, we would also

encourage you to embrace the diversity ofHuman Geography in the spirit of being opento what might matter in the world. It isimportant that our thinking, and our academicdisciplines, are not defined by inertia, pursuingtopics simply because those are the subjects thatwe have traditionally pursued. Convention isnot a good way to define and delimit whatcounts as Human Geography. You may findsome of the subjects discussed in IntroducingHuman Geographies more familiar to you – forexample, economic globalization – some less so – the idea of ‘emotional geographies’,perhaps – but all of them represent howHuman Geography today is pursuing its tasksof ‘writing the earth and the world’. Knowingthe traditions of Human Geography isenormously valuable, but one of the cruciallessons we learn from that history is that whatcounts as Human Geography has always beensubject both to change and to contestation (seeLivingstone (1992) for an excellent, sustainedanalysis of this). For instance, shaped by thesocial worlds in which it was being produced,for much of its history Human Geographylargely ignored over half the world’s humanbeings. It reduced human to man. Even wellinto the latter half of the twentieth century,

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExviii

Figure II Which of these photographs of work look more like it should be in a Human Geography textbookto you? Why? Credit: (left) Jose Luis Palez, Inc./Corbis; (right) Brownie Harris/Corbis

Economic Geographers largely ignored thedomestic work done by women at home;Development Geographers paid too littleattention to the gendered nature of bothdevelopment problems and practice; issues andunderstandings that were seen as feminine wereroutinely trivialized and cast as less worthy ofacademic attention. Human Geography wasmasculinist (Women and Geography StudyGroup, 1997; Domosh and Seager, 2001).Countering this involved introducing intoGeography many novel topics and ideas. Theissue for us, then, is not whether a topic isfamiliar as Geography but whether attending to it is part of ‘writing the earth’ in ways thathave value.

Let’s go back to the example of the oven-readychicken that we mentioned earlier. We areassuming that if you told friends or family you were studying the Human Geography ofchickens they might raise a quizzical eyebrow.But in fact, as Michael Watts explains inChapter 27, the lives and deaths of chickensspeak profoundly to how human societies today

relate both to our living Earth and to the spatialorganization of the world. An oven-readychicken such as that pictured in Figure IIIembodies very particular ways for humanbeings to relate to nature, based on logics andpractices of domestication, industrializedproduction, purposive modification andcommodity consumption that reach wellbeyond this one member of the animalkingdom. The oven-ready chicken is also anembodiment of forms of spatiality that are very common in the world today. Differentpeople and places are all connected togetherthrough the economic systems of the chickenworld – the consumers eating it, the farmersraising it, the large companies controlling itsproduction and its distribution, the scientistsgenetically modifying it – but at the same timethese connections are forgotten or hiddenthrough a distancing of places of chickenproduction and consumption – even avid meateaters would be unlikely to want to see videofootage of broiler production and death as theytuck into their roast bird. An oven-readychicken presents us with the geography of themodern world on our plates. It is Geography.

Generally, then, Introducing HumanGeographies presents a diverse and dynamicsubject, and poses questions for you about whatmight count as valuable forms of geographicalknowledge. There is, however, also a thirdresponse to the diversity inherent inGeography’s intellectual remit: to organize itinto various ‘sub-disciplines’ and researchspecialisms. The very idea of HumanGeography already manifests this response,reflecting the widespread division betweenPhysical Geography (placed in the naturalsciences) and Human Geography (located in the social sciences and humanities).Contemporary research literatures and curricula take the process of dividing andspecializing much further, organizing

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDE xix

Figure III Human Geography? Credit: BritishChicken Information Service

Human Geography itself into the kind of sub-disciplines we present in Part 2 of this book (biogeographies, cartographies, culturalgeographies, development geographies,historical geographies, political geographies andso on). These each possess their own researchliteratures (via their specialist journals) and,indeed, their own introductory textbooks.Quite often these sub-disciplinary designationsform the basis of how Human Geography istaught within universities. Sub-disciplines arehelpful in a number of ways. They map out the diversity of Geography into recognizableareas of work. They promote the developmentof expertise. They focus Geographers’engagements with other academic disciplines(Political Geographers engaging with PoliticalScience and International Relations, HistoricalGeographers with History, and so on). But

they can also be problematic. If one gets toohung up on sub-disciplines one can lose theanti-disciplinary holism that is one of thestrengths of the subject. The much discussed‘divide’ between Physical and HumanGeography is a case in point. Furthermore, sub-disciplinary labels bear the imprint ofuniversity bureaucracy and job titling; weacademics are very used to them but outside ofuniversities they don’t much help people relateto the Geography that we do. So, the usefulfoci provided by the various sub-divisions of Geography need to be accompanied by an ongoing commitment to seeing thedistinctively geographical contribution thatthey make to understanding our worlds. At its best, Human Geography has a strongintellectual coherence, but applies it with aninvigorating catholicism.

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExx

• Geography means ‘earth writing’. As a subject with that aim, Geography is notable for itswide-ranging concerns and interests.

• The first meaning of the ‘geo’ in Geography is ‘the Earth’. The first of Human Geography’smain intellectual contributions is to understand the relations between human beings and thenatural world of which we are a part.

• The second meaning of the ‘geo’ in Geography is ‘the world’. The second of HumanGeography’s main intellectual contributions is to understand the world both near and far.More abstractly, this means recognizing how all facets of human societies – the economic,the environmental, the political and so forth – are bound up with questions of ‘spatiality’.

• These fundamental concerns of Human Geography are pursued across diverse andchanging subject matters. We would encourage you to be open to that diversity andchange; resist restricting your Human Geography to topics and approaches with which youare already familiar.

SUMMARY

Approaching HumanGeography todayUp to this point we have been outlining whatHuman Geography is about, emphasizing itsfoci on both ‘the earth’ (society–naturerelations) and ‘the world’ (society–spacerelations). Now we turn to how HumanGeographers approach these issues and thekinds of knowledge that they try to create. Our interest is not in well-defined schools ofthought or even intellectual paradigms but inthe looser sensibilities that shape how HumanGeography is done today.

At the outset, it is important to note that theapproaches of Human Geography have changedover time and differ from place to place.Human Geography in the 1920s or 1960s wasdifferent to Human Geography today. Theapproaches to Human Geography in Germany,Brazil or China are not identical to those inBritain. Even individual university departmentscan have distinctive research cultures. In factthe situation is more complex still; as you mayfind in your courses, at any one time and in anyone place there are likely to be different kinds ofHuman Geography being done. There is not asingle agreed view on what kinds of knowledgeHuman Geography should produce. IntroducingHuman Geographies contains some of thatvariety; it does not present a single version of the subject. But it does reflect and supportsome recurrent emphases that, in our view,characterize much of Human Geography today. We see these as commitments to fivekinds of knowledge: description, experience,interpretation, explanation and critique (seeTable I). Not all of these are equally endorsedby all Human Geographers, indeed they areoften argued over; but they are commitmentsyou will find frequently evidenced both in thisbook and in the course of your studies. Let uselaborate on each in turn.

First, then, Human Geography looks to describe the world. Sometimes dismissed withthe epithet ‘mere’, in fact description has a very special value. Geographical description is not synonymous with dry compendia ofinformation about a region or place. It involvesattending to the world unusually carefully. Thenature of that attention can vary. It might mean,for example, fashioning and mapping forms of statistical data (perhaps via a GeographicalInformation System (GIS)) that allow us todescribe things that we can’t fully see with ourown eyes – spatial differences in wealth or accessto services perhaps. It might involve tracing out the often hidden networks of connectionslinking people and places, as when HumanGeographers ‘follow’ the things that peopleroutinely consume (our food or clothes, forexample) to see how they came to be, wherethey come from, and what kinds of trade governtheir movements (e.g. Cook, 2004). Or it mightmean being peculiarly observant in person.Think, for example, about how we normallymove around the world, head often down,taking our surroundings somewhat for granted.Now contrast that to a more geographicalengagement with place, perhaps a public square,where we look to document the details of thebuilt environment, its history, the people whoare present and absent, the kinds of action goingon. Here, to describe a place geographically is to bear witness to its material textures and theforms of life that unfold through it. Ourargument, then, is that Human Geography is anattentive discipline. It describes in order toreveal what we might otherwise overlook and tobring into focus what we might otherwise onlyvaguely perceive. It crafts ways of presenting the fruits of this attention, using forms ofdescription that range from maps to statistics,prose, photography and film/video-making.

Second, Human Geography also commits tounderstand the world through experience. In

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDE xxi

part we see this in the discipline’s commitmentto fieldwork. Geography places a value ontrying to understand issues not just from afarbut through actually being there, in a place,amongst the action, conversing with people,getting a feel for things. The status of this kindof first-hand field knowledge is philosophicallycomplex, but Human Geography tends to viewunderstanding gained only from more ‘remote’sorts of sensing with some suspicion. It is not asubject that is comfortable with being confined

to the lab or library. Important here too are thepeople-centred approaches trumpeted initiallyunder the label humanistic geography (forexemplary collections, see Ley and Samuels(1978) and Meinig (1979); for a more recentrevisiting of such humanistic work seeHolloway and Hubbard (2000)). HumanisticGeography emphasizes engaging with people’sreal lives, their values and beliefs, their dailypreoccupations, their hopes and dreams, theirloves and hates, what they think about things,

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExxii

Type of knowledge

Approach Illustrative examples

Description Paying close attention to, and findingways to represent, geographies thatwe normally struggle to perceive.

Statistical descriptions, GISvisualizations and maps; tracings ofspatial networks and associations;detailed evocations of particularplaces.

Experience Understanding geographies as part ofhuman experience.

The emphasis placed on theexperiential knowledge generated byfieldwork; humanistic concerns withunderstanding other people’s diverseexperiences of the world.

Interpretation Recognizing and engaging with themeanings of the world’s geographies.

Work focusing on geographicalrepresentations and on the discoursesof which they are a part. Oftenassociated with the so-called ‘culturalturn’.

Explanation Explaining why the world’sgeographies exhibit the forms andprocesses that they do.

Geographical explanations rangefrom spatial science’s search forspatial laws to (more commonlytoday) socio-spatial analyses ofcausal processes.

Critique Rigorously evaluating and judging theworld’s geographies, as well as one’sown and others’ understandings ofthem.

Critique can be understood as abroad stance to geographicalknowledge. It has also come to beassociated with bodies of work thatexplicitly designate themselves asforms of ‘critical geography’.

Table I Approaches to Human Geography today: a schema

the ways they feel about and sense theirsurroundings. Human Geographers are thusnot only interested in experiencing places forthemselves; they want to understand otherpeople’s geographical experiences and thoughtsin all their variety.

A commitment to interpreting the meaningfulnature of the world is apparent here too.Geographies are not just brute realities; it isfundamentally human to invest the world withmeaning. We don’t only sense the world, wemake sense of it. Human Geography isconcerned with interpretation insofar as itrecognizes the importance of the meanings ofthings. Think, for example, about the interestGeography has in ‘the Earth’ and society–nature relations. The things we call ‘natural’,indeed the very notion of the ‘natural’, aredeeply imbued with meanings. Reflect for a few seconds on geographical notions like‘wilderness’ or ‘rainforest’ or ‘the tropics’. Thesewords are not narrowly factual; they come witha host of (often complex and even conflicting)meanings and connotations. The same is trueof how we describe the world’s different spaces.Consider what geographical designations suchas ‘urban’, ‘suburban’ and ‘rural’ might mean to you and others; or the continents (Europe,Asia, Africa, Antarctica . . .); or a seeminglysimple geographical label like ‘The West’ or‘The Western World’. All these terms are, touse a colloquialism, ‘heavily loaded’. HumanGeography’s approaches here are informed bywider bodies of thought in the humanities on interpretation and meaning (with greatnames like ‘hermeneutics’, ‘semiotics’ and‘iconography’). They are also often identifiedwith what has been called ‘the cultural turn’taken within the discipline since the 1990s(Barnes and Duncan, 1992). Prominent is afocus on representation, with research teasingout the meanings given to geographies in formsboth obviously imaginative (literature, the arts,

film and television drama and so on) and lessobviously so (maps, documentaries, newsreports, policy documents, etc.). Interpretingthese representations is important because theyare not just an imaginative gloss that wehumans add to our worlds, a subjective filterthat obscures objective reality. Representationsshape how we see things, think about them andact with and upon them. They partly make ourworlds. They are part of reality. In academicterminology, by interpreting what things meanwe engage with the discourses that produce theworld as we know it. As an interpretiveendeavour, Human Geography both looks tounderstand those discourses and to presentother ways of ways of seeing, describing andacting upon our geographies.

So far we have outlined that when HumanGeographers undertake their ‘earth writing’(geo-graphy) they look to describe, experienceand interpret. A fourth commitment hasflickered in and out of these discussions: toexplanation. Human Geography is not onlyconcerned with what the geographies of theworld are, but also with how they came to be.The nature of geographical explanation hasvaried over time and is subject to much debate.Divergent views are underpinned by differentunderstandings of both the world ‘out there’and the sorts of knowledge required to grasp it.For some, Human Geography should be aspatial science, formulating and testingtheories of spatial organization, interaction anddistribution in order to establish universalspatial laws about why geographical objects arelocated where they are and how they relate toeach other. Emerging in the 1960s, spatialscience distinguished itself from earlier regionalgeographies, criticizing them for being overlydescriptive and lacking the explanatory powerof scientific analysis. However, otherapproaches in Human Geography resist theequation of explanation with spatial science.

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDE xxiii

They are wary of its kind of ‘social physics’.Historical Geographers, for instance, emphasizehow forms of historical narrative can haveexplanatory power. To put it crudely, ahistorical approach explains the world today byunderstanding past events and processes. Moregenerally, most Human Geography is wary ofexplaining things via reference only to spatialfactors (what is called ‘spatial reductionism’),emphasizing instead the two-way relationsbetween ‘space and society’. Aspects of society – the modern nation-state, for example, or thecapitalist economy – are seen both to shape the nature of space and themselves to havespatial dimensions. Thus, there are no universalspatial laws that can explain our geographies;any explanation must recognize the sociallyproduced nature of spatiality. There is also aconcern about seeking universal laws asexplanations; instead, a range of theories –most visibly represented by an approach knownas ‘critical realism’ (Sayer, 2000) – have soughtto understand causality in relation both tomore abstract powers and more concrete,contingent, contextual factors. As you haveprobably gathered by now, it is hard to dojustice to these sorts of complex debates in abrief introduction (sorry!). But, in essence, ourview is that Human Geography today widelyexhibits a commitment to explain thegeographical phenomena it studies, butgenerally undertakes that explanation throughnuanced accounts that weave togetherunderlying tendencies/forces with morecontextually specific factors.

Fifth, and finally, contemporary HumanGeography is concerned with critique. It is easy to misunderstand this word. In everydayspeech, when we say someone is being criticalwhat we often mean is that they are beingnegative or finding fault. But that is not whatwe have in mind here. True critical thought isas much about seeing strengths as weaknesses.

Critique, then, means exercising judgement.For Human Geography, a commitment tocritique means that the subject not onlydescribes, experiences, interprets and explainsbut also rigorously evaluates the world’sgeographies. A general consequence of thiscommitment is that the ‘rightness’ of ouranswers to geographical questions is not given.There is room for debate and argument.Critique is not just a matter of expressing one’sopinion, but its reasoned judgement involvesvalues, beliefs and perspectives. For all of us, asstudents of Human Geography, there are notoften agreed correct answers that we simplyhave to remember. Doing Human Geographyinvolves developing rigorous analyses of issues,evaluating both information and arguments,and thereby figuring out not only what theanswers are but also what the most importantquestions might be. This means not takingthings for granted, questioning the assumptionsheld by others and, crucially, ourselves. Criticalthought – and this is a tricky balance –combines a determined, questioning scepticismwith a profound openness to unfamiliar ideasand voices. It seeks to evaluate present and pastconditions and to disclose future possibilitiesand alternatives.

More narrowly, these general critical attitudeshave shaped distinctive bodies of philosophy,theory and practice that take them forward.Within Human Geography, ‘critical geography’has emerged as a designation that folds inearlier appeals to radicality – as seen in thefoundation in the 1970s of the ‘radical journalof geography’, Antipode – and the ‘dissidentgeographies’ of feminist, Marxist and post-colonial writers (Blunt and Wills, 2000).The words of ACME, an open access onlinejournal of ‘critical geography’, give a sense ofthis; for this journal, ‘analyses that are criticalare understood to be part of the praxis of social and political change aimed at challenging,

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExxiv

dismantling and transforming prevalentrelations, systems and structures ofexploitation, oppression, imperialism,neoliberalism, national aggression andenvironmental destruction’ (ACME, 2012). A range of work discussed in this third editionof Introducing Human Geographies would fitthat definition in some part, but criticalthinking in the more general sense is notnecessarily signed up to particular politicalcolours. It spans, too, both cerebralphilosophical thought and the kinds of workmore directly invested in practical change.Critique, then, can be taken as a more generalstance, committed to questioning, reasonedjudgement, and a hopeful search for possiblebetter futures. That stance can be usefullyadopted within your own studies and writing of Human Geography.

Above, we have outlined various commitmentsthat shape Human Geography today – todescription, experience, interpretation,explanation and critique. Whilst keyed intowider debates over forms of knowledge and theinterests they pursue, these five categories are,inevitably, something of a heuristic device.They are not exhaustive. They are also notmutually exclusive; many kinds of geographicaldescription might also see themselves asinterpreting and/or explaining and vice versa, for example. But, with those caveats, webelieve that this schema conveys some of theprincipal rationales for why Human Geographyundertakes its ‘earth writing’ and a sense ofwhat you can achieve by studying it.

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDE xxv

• Human Geography undertakes its ‘earth writing’ for a number of reasons. It is helpful toreflect on these reasons as you develop your own geographical imagination.

• We have suggested five undertakings that shape Human Geography today. We termedthese: description, experience, interpretation, explanation and critique.

• This is not an exhaustive list of all the rationales that underpin Human Geography but one,some or all of these commitments shape a great deal of the scholarship that you will beintroduced to in this book.

SUMMARY

Introducing HumanGeographies: finding yourway aroundWe have used the metaphor of a travel guide to describe this book. Guidebooks are notdesigned to be read from front to back in onego. They set scenes, provide contexts, and thenas a reader we dip into them, dependent on our

interests and our travel schedules. This newedition of Introducing Human Geographies is thesame. It is designed to accompany and guideyou as you find your way around HumanGeography. Exactly how you read it, whichparts you spend most time in and so on, willdepend on your own intellectual itinerary andyour programme of studies. The format wehave created for the book, with a large numberof comparatively short chapters organized into

parts and sections, supports that kind oftailored reading ‘on the go’.

Nonetheless, it may be helpful to explain thebook’s structure. The fifty-nine main chaptersare organized into three parts – Foundations,Themes and Horizons. The nine chapters inFoundations (Part 1) give you the latestthinking on some of the ‘big questions’ thathave long shaped the thinking of HumanGeographers. An introduction to Part 1 says more about the individual chapters, but let us a say a little here about their remit. In setting out our foundations we haveeschewed two common approaches: on the one hand, a narrative or episodic history of thesubject; and on the other, abstract summaries of key theoretical approaches or ‘-isms’. (Oftenthese are offered in combination; a chronologyof different theoretical schools, dated on thebasis of when they became influential withinHuman Geography.) There are excellent booksthat adopt variants of such approaches (forexample Cresswell (2013), Livingstone (1992)and Nayak and Jeffrey (2011)) that we wouldencourage you to read, but for our purposeshere we wanted to avoid a division oftheoretical foundations from the geographieswe live with every day. The foundationspresented here therefore weave togetherconceptual ideas with examples andillustrations. Each chapter is framed around a binary relationship that frames both thetopics Human Geography focuses on (its ‘geo-’)and how it thinks about them (the nature of its ‘-graphy’). Binaries are often central to how we think; critically engaging with themprovides a powerful window on key elements of geographical thought (see also Cloke andJohnston (2005)). The chapters in Part 1 maynot match with particular, substantive lecturesin a taught course, and don’t always exist aseasily locatable debates in the discipline’sjournals. They crop up everywhere because in

many ways they deal with some of the mostimportant questions to think about as a newHuman Geography student. They give you a sense of why Human Geographers pursuemore specific studies in the way they do andintroduce you to ideas and ways of thinkingthat you will be able to use across a range ofsubstantive topics.

Those substantive areas of the subject areturned to directly in the second and largest part of the book, Themes. It has thirty-ninechapters, divided into eleven sectionsaddressing major thematic ‘sub-disciplines’ of Human Geography in alphabetical order: biogeographies, cartographies, culturalgeographies, development geographies,economic geographies, environmentalgeographies, historical geographies, political geographies, population geographies,social geographies, and urban and ruralgeographies. Each of these sections has its own brief editorial introduction, setting outboth the sub-disciplinary field and how thefollowing chapters engage with it. This part of the book provides you with thought-provoking arguments on the key issuescurrently being debated within sub-disciplines,as well as giving you a feel for the distinctivekind of Human Geography undertaken within each.

As we noted above, thematic sub-disciplines are one of the major ways in which teachingcurricula are organized and research activitystructured, to the extent that geographers areoften labelled according to these specialisms (aseconomic geographers, political geographers,and so on). However, the world we live in is(unsurprisingly) resistant to these neatclassifications. Economy and politics andculture and environment (and so on) allinterweave with each other. You can’t go outand find something that is purely ‘economic’(or purely political, cultural or environmental).

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExxvi

In fact, a lot of the most innovative work inHuman Geography goes on in the border zonesbetween these sub-disciplinary territories. Forthese reasons, the final part of the book,Horizons, comprises eleven chapters organizedaround four contemporary research themes thatdo not fit neatly in any one sub-discipline. Thefour foci – non-representational geographies,mobilities, securities and publics – each have their own brief editorial introduction,contextualizing the chapters that follow. Eachhighlights current agendas in the discipline that are influencing debates in a number of itssub-disciplines.

Stylistically, while every chapter has its ownauthorial signature all the contributionscombine discussions of challenging ideas andissues with accessible presentation. Unfamiliaracademic terminology is kept to a minimum,but where central to an argument and notexplained fully at the time it is marked in boldtype and defined in the Glossary at the back ofthe book. Chapters include periodic summariesof key points, enabling you to pull out thecentral lines of argument. Potential discussionpoints are given at the end of chapters, offeringoptions for group debates or individual essayplan development. Generally, IntroducingHuman Geographies aims to make you thinkand to challenge you intellectually, but to dothat through being lively and engaging.Scholarly knowledge doesn’t have to be dry andself-obsessed. Chapters are deliberately shortand punchy, but there is guidance for how to

develop and deepen your knowledge viasuggested further readings included at the endof chapters and the section introductions.

The mention of further readings marks anappropriate place for us to stop introducing.Like any guidebook, the intention ofIntroducing Human Geographies is to take youaround the subject so you can experience it foryourself. We rarely read guidebooks withouttravelling; the book is a companion on ajourney not a destination in and of itself.Likewise, you shouldn’t read this book withoutmoving on from it to experience more directlythe areas of research and debate it guides youtowards. If it helps to mix metaphors, think ofthis book as an introduction agency, setting youup for a relationship with Human Geography.Studying a subject means getting to know it,figuring out what you like about it and whatyou don’t, and maybe even falling in love withsome of what it does. It also means ‘asking itout’. Let Human Geography get to know you;introduce it to your life, your enthusiasms;liberate it from the library, lecture or textbook.Take some of the geographical ideas in thisbook to your favourite haunts and see whatthey make of each other. In other words, see what happens when not only are youintroduced to Human Geography but HumanGeography is introduced to you. Use this bookas a guide both to reading Human Geographyand to doing it yourself by thinkinggeographically. Join in the age-old endeavour of ‘earth writing’.

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDE xxvii

1. Look at a newspaper from the last week. Identify three stories that seem to you to addressHuman Geography topics. Explain your choices and why you think they are ‘geographical’.

2. What makes Human Geography a distinctive subject?

DISCUSSION POINTS

INTRODUCING HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES: A GUIDExxviii

3. ‘Human Geography is a down-to-earth subject, concerned with facts not theories.’ Discussthis assertion.

4. Outline your understanding of Human Geography’s commitment to one of the following:description, experience, interpretation, explanation, critique.

There are a number of other texts that fulfill different functions to this book, but offer valuablecomplementary overviews and resources that help introduce Human Geography. These include:

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is Geography? London: Sage.

In this book Alastair Bonnett develops his personal response to the question ‘what is geography?’. Hisanswer is thoughtful and thought-provoking, casting geography not as just another academic subject butas ‘one of humanity’s big ideas’. The book covers the two central foci identified in this chapter (what wecalled ‘writing the earth and the world’); geographical interests in cities and mobilities; the doing ofgeography in forms of exploration, mapping, connection and engagement; and the institutionalization of geography within and beyond universities.

Cloke, P., Cook, I., Crang, P., Goodwin, M., Painter, J. and Philo, C. (2004) Practising HumanGeography. London: Sage.

This book focuses on how research in Human Geography is done, covering both the production ofgeographical materials or ‘data’ and the production of varying kinds of geographical ‘interpretations’ ofthese data. This, and other books on geographical research methods, provide invaluable links betweenthe kinds of materials introduced in this volume and the opportunities that exist for you to undertake yourown geographical investigations in project work and independent dissertations.

Gregory, D., Johnston, R.J., Pratt, G., Watts, M.J. and Whatmore, S. (eds.) (2009) The Dictionary ofHuman Geography (5th edn). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

This dictionary has concise but comprehensive definitions and explanations relevant to almost everyaspect of Human Geography. As a reference tool it is invaluable and has no better. Human Geographycan be hard to engage with because of the density of its specialist terms. This is a book you will be ableto use throughout your time studying Human Geography as you look to master that specialist vocabulary.

Kneale, P. (2011) Study Skills for Geography, Earth and Environmental Science Students (3rd edn).London: Hodder Education.

A guide to the study skills that Geography students need and use at university level. A very useful book.

Livingstone, D. (1992) The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell.

A scholarly rendition of the history of Human Geography, a topic we pay comparatively little attention toin this book. Livingstone concentrates on the longer-term history of the subject rather than on its recentdevelopments. Throughout, one gets fascinating insights into how the concerns of Human Geographershave run in parallel with wider social currents.

FURTHER READING

PART ONE

FOUNDATIONS

IntroductionSometimes the start of Human Geographytextbooks, and indeed courses, can be verydaunting. This is because of the perception bysome of the authors of the books and coursesconcerned that it is necessary to throw in a loadof theoretical stuff at the beginning, beforegetting on with the more interesting stuff.While it may indeed be preferable that certaintheoretical foundations are laid before dealingwith systematic issues, the net result is likely tobe that the reader/course-attender can either bebored to tears or bemused by the abstractnature of those foundations. Well, here’s thebad news – we have also decided to begin thisbook with some theoretical dimensions. But,here’s the good news – we utterly reject the falsedivision between abstract theory and thesubstantive issues of everyday life. Indeed, webelieve that our everyday lives are simplyteeming with the kinds of issues and questionsthat are often pigeon-holed as theory. Much ofthe excitement and value in Human Geographylies in addressing these issues and questions bythinking through aspects of our own lives andof the world(s) in which we live.

As an illustration to get you thinking aboutHuman Geography in terms of everyday life,here is a very short account of a typical journeyto work for one of us – Paul Cloke. Neither thestory nor the journey is in any way special; thatis the point of narrating it. It could be any partof your everyday experience, whoever you areor wherever you live. What it does show is that different sets of Human Geographyrelationships crop up all over the place, andcertainly not just in the abstract treatments oftheory in books and lectures. So, imagine if youcan a small hillside village in Devon, some 15miles from the city of Exeter.

The alarm clock does its disturbing work andoff we go. There’s just the two of us now as our

daughter lives in Horfield, Bristol and our sonin Dalston, London. So we still get plenty ofopportunities for city-time with them, but ourhome is distinctly rural. Throw open thecurtains and there opening out before us is afamiliar scene, described in a recent chapter onrural landscape:

My gaze is drawn past landmark trees, acrossthe tidal estuary of the River Teign, and upagain to the valley side beyond. Rollingtopography and ancient field enclosures –frequently re-patterned, re-coloured and re-lit with diurnal and seasonal change – areintersected by narrow lanes and stragglyfootpaths. The ebb and flow of the rivercontinuously refresh the scene, imposingalternative senses of time on what can seemtimelessly pastoral. A picture postcard? Yes,but so much more. This is where we walkour border collie, Ringo, where I ride mybike for exercise, where I am periodicallyenchanted by the affective capacity ofbluebell woods, of the colour and texture of birch and rowan, of the persistence and beauty of goldfinch, blue tit andwoodpecker, yet can remain relativelyunaffected by the scenic presence of theview, or by the potential for hands-on

PART ONE2

Figure IV Bishopsteignton, south Devon. Source:Bishopsteignton Village Website

proximity with nature in the performance ofgardening.

(Cloke, 2012: forthcoming)

Alongside its beautiful natural setting, though, rural life can be a place of tension and struggle. I struggle with political andreligious conservatism; I struggle with socialmonoculturalism; I struggle with thevehemence of local opposition to new housingdevelopments, especially from those whooccupy the previous rounds of development. As I start the day, I reflect that this place that Icall home is gazed on, lived in, performed andexperienced in myriad different ways. Theassemblage of human and non-human actorsdisplayed out of that window is as diverse in its meaningful representation as it is it in itseveryday life practices.

Away from the window, our home displays(consciously and unconsciously) all kinds ofother geographies of connection. Paintings andphotos provide constant reminders of otherplaces that are precious to us – New Zealand,Khayelitsha in South Africa, Kenya – and thereare other intentional reminders of ethicalconnections close to our heart, of fair trade,anti-slavery and anti-homelessness campaigns.And yes, glory of glories, the latest charitablecraze from Cord and Tearfund of toilettwinning. Our toilet is proudly twinned with alatrine in Uganda, with a framed photo to markthe occasion. Charity must be regular . . . butthere are uneasy relationships between privateethics and their public display. Of course wedon’t recognize other less progressive moralconnections that will be evident to others in the exploitative relations entombed within ourconsumer goods, food miles, commuting andunsustainable lifestyles. No matter, to thebackground sound of music which canvariously be drawn from Australia, Iceland and the USA as well as Britain, and with theforeground conversation of international news

on the radio, we speed through breakfast. Foodfrom all around the world, brought to us bymultinational corporations via supermarkets.The global and the local come together at every turn.

Time marches on, so I begin my commute into Exeter. At first, my journey traversesfarmland through tiny lanes, passing the localgolf course; however early my commute, thereis always earlier activity there. Then throughHalden Forest to Telegraph Hill and on intothe city. Halden represents a place of idyllicrecreation and natural habitat for many, but itstraverse is characterized by the modernism of acrowded dual-carriageway. In the winter itslocal microclimate renders it susceptible toheavy snowfall and ice which have in the pasttrapped unwary drivers for several hours. Inmany ways, then, natural, mechanical andhuman risk and hazard lie shallow beneath thesurface of this kind of commuter journey. As Ireach its outskirts, the city remains somewhatdetached from the vantage point of the driver’sseat, partly because of a necessary focus ontraffic management and partly because theradio tends to fill in much of the ‘thinkingspace’ of the journey with national andinternational issues. Situated on the River Exe,Exeter snarls up at key bridging points duringthe rush hour, so along with many others Iweave my way through the social geographiesof housing estates and suburban lifescapes toavoid traffic on the way to the University. In sodoing I bypass the centre of the city with itsdesigner pubs and clubs, with Irishness here,and Walkabout there, interspersed with whatare by now unremarkable Indian and Chineserestaurants. Designer-label beer and wine fromall over the world is spilt here over designer T-shirts from all over the world. Where I usedto work, in Bristol, the University was locatedin the heart of the city, and I would oftenencounter the heady contrast of financial

FOUNDATIONS 3

centres and homelessness, side by side on my journey in. Exeter, however, is a campusuniversity on the edge of the city, and thesedisturbing downtown hybridities aretemporarily avoided by geography. Finally, it is up to Geography, passing through themultinational, but somehow overwhelminglymiddle-class, throng of students on campus.Once inside my office, the first move is to fetch a cup of (fairly traded) coffee, switch onthe PC and check my e-mails, hardly noticingthe rows of shelves loaded with the productionof particular knowledges about governments,policies, plans and politics, and how the lives ofreal people in real places intersect with so muchin the geographical world.

There is so much else that I could (and perhapsshould) have mentioned, but this much sufficesto invite parallels with many of the themescovered in this opening section of the book.Philip Crang, in Chapter 1, discusses therelations between the global and the local, andthe sights, sounds, histories and commodities ofthe global crop up time and again in the localstory of my journey to work. Local places gettheir distinctive character from their past andpresent connections to the rest of the world,and therefore we need a global sense of thelocal. Conversely, global flows of information,ideas, money, people and things are routed into local geographies. We therefore also need a local sense of the global. Crang’s core messageis that ideas about global and local are not one-dimensional inputs to our Humangeographical understanding. Rather local andglobal are interrelated and each helps to shapethe other.

The same can be said for relations betweensociety and space. In travelling from homethrough villages, suburbs and estates, mynarratives are jam-packed with references tohow and where different social groups live,work and take their leisure. In Chapter 2,

Jo Little shows how spatial patterns can reflectsocial structures, and how spatial processes canbe used as an index of social relations. Myjourney seems to traverse particular social areas,but she warns that social categories cannot be taken for granted. Such categories areconstructed socially, politically, culturally, andare mediated by the organization of space; inother words, society and space are co-constructed. Moreover, we can no longer relyon two-dimensional maps of society and space.Beyond the obvious, there is complexity,ambiguity and multi-dimensional identity.Whether in rural communities, spaces of thenight-time economy, or in the hopefulthirdspaces of liminality and change, societyand space both shape each other, and areshaped by each other.

Just as local–global and society–space haveseemed like binary terms but have beeninvestigated by Human Geographers in termsof their co-dependence, so the relationshipbetween human and non-human has also comeunder scrutiny. As Hayden Lorimer writes inChapter 3, geographers have taken a stronginterest in how humans understand and valuethe lives of other living creatures, not only interms of issues around food and clothing, butalso focusing on the companionship of pets(such as Ringo the border collie) and thelifeworlds of ‘wild’ animals (such as the deerthat run free in Halden Forest). In so doing wehave moved away from geographies that focusonly on humans, and instead have emphasizedthe relations between humans and non-humanbeings, materials and ideas. One significantoutcome of this shift has been an interest in theappropriate ethical responses that arise fromthese inter-relationships.

Part of the intellectual climate that has allowed Human Geographers to begin todeconstruct some of these key binary terms has arrived on the coat-tails of postmodernity.

PART ONE4

Mark Goodwin’s account in Chapter 4 of theshift from ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’ charts theway in which wider society has moved awayfrom the austere and geometrically plannedpatterns of life and thought under modernityinto a more postmodern emphasis on diversity,plurality and playfulness. Tracing the outcomesof this shift in terms of architecture, culturalstyle and philosophical approach, Goodwinoutlines a transformation in HumanGeography by which many researchers havebegun to reject any kind of search for universaltruth, and instead have recognized that allknowledge is socially produced. As with othersuch categories of knowledge however, theboundaries between modern and postmodernare contested, and elements of each are visiblein contemporary cultural and physicallandscapes.

In Chapter 5, Paul Cloke explores theimportance of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ in thesecontestations over socially producedknowledge. Being reflexive about the self is avital part of understanding how our knowledgeof Human Geographies is situated. Ourexperience, politics, spirituality, identities, andso on, can add to our stories about the world,and denying their importance in search of‘objectivity’ could well be dishonest. Myjourney to work will not be the same as yours,even if it follows much the same route.However, there is also a danger that we only see the world in terms of ourselves and thosewho are the same as us, thus creating categoriesof ‘otherness’ according to the essentialcharacteristics of our selves. What escapes us areother ‘others’ – those whom we cannotcategorize or pigeonhole; those who surprise usand cannot be accommodated in ourorganization of knowledge.

Gender is a fundamentally importantdimension of how Human Geography canpresent understandings of how knowledge

about the world (for example the domesticworld of the household and the employmentworld of the academic workplace) isconstructed. Geraldine Pratt and Molly Kraft, in Chapter 6, discuss how differencesbetween masculine and feminine ways of bodily comportment lead to variations in self-perception and cognitive ability(especially spatial awareness). So the capacity to explore and know our environment can beconditioned, for example, by gendered (as wellas racialized) geographies of fear and safety thatcharacterize some local places. They argue that much of women’s experience has long beenignored by Human Geographers, with theresult that different types of masculinities have been formative in the production ofgeographical knowledge. It is therefore crucialthat we seek to situate knowledge (see Chapter5) so as both to acknowledge the validity of a range of perspectives, and to develop acommitment to communicate across differentperspectives and types of knowledge. In thecontext of this chapter situating knowledge is important not least because gender itself isinterwoven with other social identities thatrender it unstable over time and space.

From Chapter 7 onwards, this introductorysection dealing with Foundations turnsspecifically to address the diversity in the waysin which Human Geography is studied andapproached. In Chapter 7, David Gilbert notesthe potentially confusing range of ‘hard’ and‘soft’ approaches, ranging from scientificobjectivity to having an opinion that counts.For example, my journey to work could havebeen portrayed in terms of time–space data andcartography rather than as a loose personalnarrative. Alongside the continuing energeticfocus on geographical information systems(GIS – see Chapter 14), Human Geographyhas over recent years mostly emphasized acritical social scientific approach to the subject,

FOUNDATIONS 5

seeking to deal with issues of agency,meaningfulness, power and positionality. In parallel, however, there has also been acollaboration with the humanities – especiallyhistory, philosophy and literature – toinvestigate the importance of the creativeimagination to places using analysis both ofwritten texts (novels, travel writing and thelike) and visual images (film, television,photography). Initially the focus here was onhow these texts represented different places andpeople, but more recently Human Geographershave looked to the arts for inspiration abouthow we sense and move within the world in a more non-representational register (see Chapter 50).

The distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’approaches to Human Geography is ofteninfluential in how we develop conceptualframeworks, undertake research and interpretthe findings. It is common to encountersignificant divisions between quantitative andqualitative approaches – an expression ofHuman Geography identity according tomethodological choice rather than substantivefocus or theoretical viewpoint. Rob Kitchin inChapter 8 explains that these methodologicaldivisions of Human Geography identity aremisleading; rather, it should be theory,philosophy and ideology that shape choicesabout methods. While quantitative research can produce explanation and prediction, andqualitative research can produce meaning and understanding, these methodologicalapproaches should not be regarded as dualistic.Quantitative approaches fit the assumptions ofsome philosophies and qualitative approachessuit others. However, mixed methods including

both quantification and qualification are oftenuseful and even advisable.

A key part of the conceptual thinking throughthat Human Geographers have to engage inrelates to how the truth of the world isvariously represented in differentcircumstances. In Chapter 9, Mike Crangsuggests that the relationship betweenrepresentation and reality is more complex than a binary between truthful or deceptivedepictions of places and people. Differentpeople and organizations will understanddifferent places and circumstances differently – living in a Devon village provokes manydifferent portrayals, not all of which reflectidyllic rural life. It follows that all kinds ofrepresentations will contribute to ideas aboutand understandings of the world, and will helpto shape the world rather than simply depict it.Human Geographers need to understand theselective angles from which representations are presented, not least because theserepresentations are often subject to the powerand control of the global political economy,which increasingly seems to trade on sign-values rather than ‘truth’.

The nine chapters in this part of the book on‘Foundations’, then, represent the very stuff oflively, interpretative, relevant and accessibleHuman Geographies. They help us to thinkthrough some of the recurring questions and issues involved in understanding theinterconnections of people and places, and theyhelp us to place ourselves in the picture as well.Far from being the ‘boring theoretical stuff ’,they offer some keys with which to unlockthoughtful and nuanced accounts of theHuman Geographies of everyday life. Enjoy!

PART ONE6

IntroductionMy reasons for becoming a geographer werenot particularly well considered or original,indeed they were pretty lame in some ways. Yet they still ring true to me today. I enjoyedGeography as a subject, and decided to do it fora degree at university, because throughGeography I got to hear about, see pictures of,and maybe even go to a lot of different places.Geographers travel – both literally through anemphasis on fieldwork and various sorts ofexploration, and more virtually in the form ofslide shows and reportage. Why did I think thatwas a good thing? I valued the pleasures ofgetting to know particular, distinctive places,both familiar and unfamiliar. I enjoyedspending time in a place, getting a feel for it,finding out about it. A lot of my most powerfulmemories and attachments were with places of various sorts, from the house I grew up in, to the fields and moors I explored as a young runner, to the ‘milk bar’ where mygrandmother took me for ice cream treats. ButI also thought it was important to learn aboutareas of the world and people of which I wouldotherwise be largely ignorant. I was bothmoved and discomfited by how much of theworld only came onto my TV screen whendisasters struck, people died, and emergencyproblems needed responses. I knew my own life

was parochial in the extreme, and while Ienjoyed its confines, I also wanted to getbeyond them.

Those feelings I had as a seventeen year old stillanimate my interest in Geography. I knowmuch more about the subject now, but I stillthink my views then located something veryclose to its heart. They home in on atriumvirate of ideas that have long fosteredHuman Geography’s understanding of itself asa distinctive intellectual endeavour. First, in the emphasis on the distinctive characters ofparticular places, they highlight the idea of thelocal. Second, bound up with a desire tobroaden horizons and foster a greater ‘worldawareness’ is the idea of the global. And third,central to this interest in both the local andglobal is an emphasis on difference (betweenplaces and people). This chapter examines therelations between these three ideas: the local,the global and difference. It will, I hope, give asense of how productive they have been, andcan still be, for geographers. However, it alsoargues for critical reflection. Notions of thelocal, the global and difference are not assimple and obvious as they might at first seem.It is important to think carefully about each ofthese ideas, and perhaps even more so abouthow they relate to each other. If we fail to dothat, then we run the risk of unwittingly

CHAPTER 1LOCAL–GLOBALPhilip Crang

reproducing conventional arguments about ourworld’s geographies, closing off other possibleways of thinking and acting. We may end uplearning rather less about places, theirparticularities and their differences than weshould as thoughtful ‘travellers’.

The chapter starts by briefly outlining how andwhy ideas of the local and the global have beenso important to Human Geography. I then setout three takes on local–global relations. I callthese mosaic, system and network.

Local matters, globalvisionsHuman Geography has long combinedattention to local matters with some sort ofglobal vision. To start with the local, it, andassociated notions such as place and region,have long had a particular centrality ingeographical imaginations. Many academicgeographers have spent whole careers trying to document, understand and explain theindividual ‘personality’ of an area (Dunbar,1974; Gilbert, 1960). So, why is the localdeemed so important to Human Geography’sresearch and teaching? In his thoughtful bookThe Betweeness of Place, Nick Entrikin (1991)argued that geographers have been interested inthe local for three interrelated reasons. First,they have emphasized the actually existingvariations in economy, society and culturebetween places; or what Entrikin terms the‘empirical significance of place’. Despite thehomogenizing ambitions attributed to the likesof McDonald’s, everywhere is not the same.Landscapes vary. Life chances are materiallyaffected by the lottery of location. Whether youhappen to be born in Lagos or London or LosAngeles, or indeed in Compton or BeverlyHills, has an impact on the kind, and evenlength, of life you can expect. And location isnot just something we encounter and deal with.

It is part of us. Where we are is part of who weare. Most obviously, this is the case through the spatial partitioning of the world intonationalities, imaginative constructions that are part of our identities, so powerful as to get people to kill and die in their name (seeChapter 37). So, places and the differencesbetween them can be seen to exist and have real effects.

But the local also matters in a second way.Spatial variations do not only exist. They arevalued, or seen as a good thing, not least byHuman Geographers. There is, then, whatEntrikin calls a ‘normative significance toplace’. Sometimes this is expressed as acelebration of difference: whether out of asuspicion of the power of global, homogenizingforces (‘the media’, ‘American multinationals’,and so on); or out of a pleasure gleaned fromexperiencing variety and the unexpected.Sometimes the local is cherished for itscommunal forms of social organization, forembodying an ideal of small and democraticorganizations (for a critical and suggestivereview see Young, 1990). And sometimes thissocial idealization goes hand in hand with an environmental utopia of self-supporting,environmentally sustainable livelihoods(Schumacher, 1973), or at least an appeal to the local as a way of living more lightly on the planet, as when calls are made to reduce‘food miles’ by ‘re-localizing’ supply networksand supporting local producers. But whetherculturally, socially or environmentally framed,in all such arguments the local does not justmatter. It matters because it is in some way‘good’.

The third importance attached to the localwithin Human Geography, according toEntrikin, involves a concern with the impact of the local on the kinds of understanding orknowledges that geographers themselvesproduce; what he calls the ‘epistemological

PHILIP CRANG8

significance of place’. In part this involves a scepticism towards general theories that claim equal applicability everywhere. It alsomeans a sensitivity to where knowledges comefrom (to their ‘situatedness’). Geographers don’tonly know about localities, they produce localknowledges.

At the same time as having this local fixation,Human Geography is also determinedly globalin its scope. Even as it values them, it also tries

to break out of purely local knowledgesthrough appeals to global awareness.Geographical interest in the global has beendeveloped through a number of differentemphases. Let me draw out four. Figure 1.1 displays a picture of the world thatrepresents each.

First, we can identify a geographical concernwith exploration, driven by a desire to ‘know theworld’. Exploration was central to geography’s

LOCAL–GLOBAL 9

Figure 1.1 Four global visions. (a) The conversion of the spherical globe into a flat map is achieved herethrough a Mercator projection. Developed in the seventeenth century, the Mercator world map is ideal forexploration as a constant bearing appears as a straight line, but this is achieved by distorting sizes, whichmakes tropical regions look far smaller than they actually are. (b) The Peters projection, by contrast, is anequal area projection that distorts shape rather than size. First published in 1973, this projection wasdesigned within development discourse to ensure the ‘South’ was given its proper global importance © Professor Arno Peters, Oxford Cartographers/Getty Images. (c) ‘Spaceship earth’ is an icon ofcontemporary environmentalism, portraying a living whole without apparent national boundaries or other political divisions. (d) The shrinking earth of ‘globalization’ and telecommunicational hype. Credit:(a) Royal Geographical Society, UK/www.bridgeman.co.uk; (b) © Oxford Cartographers and HuberVerlag; (c) NASA; (d) Courtesy of DHL

(a)

(c)

(b)

(d)

www.bridgeman.co.uk

early history – such that geography’sdevelopment as a science, from the sixteenthcentury onwards, went hand in glove withEuropean explorations to the farthest corners of the earth (Driver, 2001; Livingstone, 1992;Stoddart, 1986). Today, exploration continuesto excite popular cultures of geography,whether in forms of travel that offer experiences‘off the beaten track’ (for more, see Chapter 53)or the mass-circulation National Geographic’spromotional claim to give American readers a‘window to the world of exotic peoples andplaces’ (cited in Lutz and Collins, 1993: xi).Second, there is an emphasis on development,with its hope of ‘improving the world’. Here, aworld vision matters not only in order to rectifyignorance of the world’s diversity, but also toexplain and act against global inequalitiesbetween North and South. Third, there isglobal environmentalism, with its concern for‘saving the world’ against planetary threats suchas global warming or ozone depletion. Here,thinking globally is essential not only torecognize the scale of these problems but also to understand the true environmental impactsof our local actions (so, when I set thethermostat on my central heating I need to beaware of the impact of my domestic energy useon CO2 emissions). Finally, there is a concernwith global compression or the ‘shrinking of theworld’ (see Harvey, 1989: 240–307). Theemphasis here is on the increasingly denseinterconnections between people and places onother sides of the world from each other,whether through telecommunications, globalflows of money or migrations and other formsof travel. ‘Globalization’ has become the mostprevalent term to describe such compression(for a very good overview, see Murray, 2006).In a globalized world our local lives are led on aglobal scale. The food we eat, the clothes wewear, the television programmes we watch, the cars we drive or bicycles we ride, all thesematerials of our mundane, everyday lives come

to us through enormously complex and globallyextensive production and retail systems.

There are, then, many good reasons whyHuman Geography should not myopicallyfocus on the local but also attend to the global:because global scale processes impact on, andresult from, our local places and lives; becausethinking globally allows us to compare, andeven more usefully connect, our own lives andplaces to those of others; and because the globalstands for important, ‘big’ issues and processesthat we cannot afford to ignore.

My argument, then, is that Human Geographyis characterized by a concern with both the localand the global. At times, these can beunderstood as competing scales of interest: aswhen calls are made for geographers to escapelocal trivia and address the really importantglobal issues; or, conversely, when globalaccounts are criticized for not paying dueattention to local differences. But, the local andthe global can also be seen as two sides of thesame coin. Travellers set out across the world tofind new ‘locals’ to encounter and report backon. Environmentalists and multinationalcorporations both sloganize about ‘thinkingglobally and acting locally’. So, how weunderstand and construct the global shapes our understanding of the local, and vice versa.

PHILIP CRANG10

Figure 1.2 Figures of the local–global: mosaic,system and network

SYSTEM NETWORKS

GLOBAL

LOCAL 1 LOCAL 2

> (GLOBAL) LOCAL

(LOCAL) GLOBAL

MOSAIC

For the remainder of this chapter I want to turnmore directly to these relations between thelocal and the global. They can, I want tosuggest, be thought of in a number of different

ways. To illustrate, I will review three schematicaccounts of local–global relations: the world as mosaic, the world as system, and the world asnetwork (see Figure 1.2).

LOCAL–GLOBAL 11

• Human Geography has fashioned itself as a distinctive intellectual endeavour throughemphasizing its interest in local places and specificities, and showing how these matterempirically, normatively and epistemologically.

• Human Geography has also fashioned itself as a discipline through stressing various globalconcerns, for example with exploration, development, global environmental change andglobalization.

• While the local and the global can be seen as alternative and competing scales ofconcern, we need to recognize that they are always constructed in relationship to eachother.

SUMMARY

MosaicOne very popular way of thinking aboutHuman Geographies is in terms of a mosaic.Here, the world is conceived as a collection oflocal peoples and places, each one being a piecein a broader global pattern. This way of seeingthe world can be drawn out at a number ofdifferent scales, from neighbourhoods right upto whole continents. It is perhaps most obviousat the level of the nation-state. The whole ideaof nationalities depends upon constructingdistinctive pieces of an international mosaic;establishing borders and territories; anddistinguishing between this country and thatcountry, our people and those foreigners.Political maps of the world present this mosaiccartographically, national pieces set next to eachother and the ‘open’ spaces of the sea. Mosaicsare made too at the smaller scales of the city, inmappings of a patchwork of local areas, eachcharacterized by different economies, residentsand built environments. Think, for example,

about how estate agents and others seekingvalue in the property market such as retaillocation analysts or gentrifiers, map out citiesinto areas, neighbourhoods and streets with supposedly distinctively differentcharacters. (For more on the use of GIS,location decision making, and this sort ofmapping, see Chapter 14.)

Move up to the supranational scale, and againmosaics are a common way of thinking aboutthe world’s geography. The global is divided up through reference to the compass points:South and North, East and West becomedesignations of geopolitical and cultural entitieswhen we refer to some people as, for example,being ‘westerners’. (A classic account of thisway of imagining the world is given in EdwardSaid’s book Orientalism, which is about how‘the West’ or Occident has defined itselfthrough opposition to ‘the East’ or Orient.Said, 1995 [originally 1978].) At other timesthe mosaic pieces are defined in terms of

latitude, as when the ‘tropics’ designate a partof the world with supposedly identifiablecharacteristics of ‘tropicality’ (Driver andMartins, 2005; Thompson, 2006). Or it maybe distinctive continental economic, political,cultural units that are identified and contrastedin what Lewis and Wigen (1997) call a‘mythical metageography’: Asia and Asiansframed as different to Europe and Europeans,North America and North Americans asdifferent to Africa and Africans, and so on.

These kinds of designations are commonplace,from geopolitical thought to popular culture.In many ways, the notion of the geographicmosaic has been so influential (see Gregory,1994: 34–46) that it can be hard for us to see it as anything other than common sense, adescription of an obvious reality. Tourism, theworld’s largest industry, feeds off and actively

constructs such an understanding, as itshowcases a world of different destinations that the holidaymaker can visit (see Chapter 53for a fuller discussion). But the mosaic is onlyone possible way of framing local–globalgeographies and it is a very particular framing,with its own preoccupations and blind spots.

Three features are especially important. First,the mosaic puts an emphasis on boundaries andborders. Geographical difference is seen interms of distinct areas that can have lines drawnaround them. Second, these areas areunderstood in terms of their unique characters,personalities or traditions. That is, each piece of the mosaic is seen as having distinctive‘contents’, whether that be its people, culture,economic activities and/or landscape, whichcohere into some sort of unified geographicalidentity. Third, this means that any intrusions

PHILIP CRANG12

Figure 1.3 Are global products a threat to local differences? Credit: Anders Ryman/Corbis

into a distinctive area tend to be seen as a threatto its unique character. For an example onecould think of worries about how the globalpredominance of American popular culture,from fast food to TV programmes, is destroyinglocal cultures and producing one Americanizedglobal monoculture, where everybody, whereverthey are, eats Big Macs, drinks Coca-Cola andwatches American soaps (see Peet, 1989). Orone could think about claims that humanmigrations pose problems for the culturalintegrity of receiving areas, overwhelming or insome way undermining indigenous cultureunless immigrants are properly assimilated (see Chapter 41 for more on migration).

All these features of the mosaic model can be questioned evidentially. First, the world’sdifferences do not fit into the frame of ageographical mosaic, no matter how manyscales it is imagined at. The contents of any onearea are never uniformly the same. To claimthey are is to produce what statisticians call an ‘ecological fallacy’, applying the general,average qualities of an area to all its inhabitants.Second, one reason why difference refuses to becontained within the pieces of a mosaic is thatthe world does not stay still. If we think aboutthe continental ‘metageography’ of people, thenwe know that Europeans haven’t stayed inEurope, Africans haven’t stayed in Africa, and so on (these population movements aresometimes called ‘diasporas’; see Chapter 45).We know that our economies too areinterlinked, with fluid forms of capital able tomigrate around the world (see Chapter 28 oneconomic globalization). We cannot simplydraw boundaries around local or national orcontinental economies. The world is not a fixed array of pieces; much of it is mobile, onthe move.

Third, in analyzing the impacts of suchmobilities, we cannot assume that the openingup of local places to global forces necessarily

results in the destruction of difference. Instead, global forms are often ‘indigenized’ or‘localized’ in different ways in different places.While living and researching in Trinidad theanthropologist Danny Miller was struck by thefact that he had to stop his research for an houra day while everyone watched the daytime US soap The Young and the Restless (Miller,1992). This might seem an obvious sign ofhomogenizing Americanization. In fact, Millerargues, ‘paradoxically an imported soap operahas become a key instrument for forging ahighly specific sense of Trinidadian culture’(1992: 165). In the extensive chat about thissoap, what viewers identified was not an alienAmerican world, to be aspired to or despised,but themes that resonated with deep existingstructures of Trinidadian experience. Inparticular, viewers liked the way it dramatizedwhat they called ‘bacchanal’, or the confusionand emergence of hidden truths throughscandals, something also central to otherTrinidadian cultural forms such as Carnival. So,this globally distributed American soap was notdestructive of Trinidadian difference; as part ofa dynamic local culture it helped to produce adistinctive Trinidadian sensibility. Elsewhere,Miller makes similar arguments about botholder global imports – analysing how Cokebecame a ‘black sweet drink from Trinidad’ and part of the national drink of rum ‘n’ black– and newer global forms – reporting onTrinidadian uses of Facebook (Miller, 1998;2011). To use a popular local expression, Miller suggests that all of these global productsare not alien invaders but ‘True True Trini’,functioning as authentic forms of local culturaldifferentiation.

The problems with the figure of the mosaic arenot only factual – they also stem from itspolitical impulses and ramifications. To be fair,there are many positive elements to the notionof the geographical mosaic. Often underlying it

LOCAL–GLOBAL 13

is a desire both to recognize and respectdifferences; to appreciate, in both senses of theword, that everyone is not the same as you are,and that everywhere is not the same as here.But it is not enough just to appreciatedifference. We have to think about how theidea of difference is being constructed andused. In the case of the mosaic, all too ofteneither the impulse or the effect is defensive and exclusionary. Difference is locked into a geography of territories and borders. It isframed in terms of insiders and outsiders. The mosaic also depends on stereotyping. Itunderstands and recognizes differences bysimplifying them and their location. This wayof seeing the world is not so much a descriptionof it as a powerful way of claiming andattributing difference in spatial terms. Itprojects differences on to distant people andplaces in order to create some sense of unity ‘athome’; ‘they’ and ‘there’ are different to ‘us’ and‘here’. It can legitimate claims for a place to

belong to some and not to others. It entanglesgeography with a politics of ‘purification’, inwhich sameness should be here and differenceshould be there. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ would be anexample of practices that have followed themosaic and its logic of each different thing inits own different place to the most brutalconclusions.

The idea of a world made up of differentgeographical areas is commonplace and is likely, initially, to be seen as both obvious andnon-contentious. However, while not withoutits merits – in particular its recognition ofdifference – the mosaic is but one way of thinking about local–global relations, and it can be deeply problematic because of how itrecognizes difference. We need to think, then, about whether Human Geography can combine the local and the global in otherways too.

PHILIP CRANG14

• A very common way of imagining local–global relations is to envision a world of manydifferent local places and peoples, each being a piece in a wider Human Geographicglobal mosaic.

• This constructs the local as a bounded area, made distinctive through the character of lifeand land within it. It also tends to construct global-scale processes as destructive to that localdiversity.

• There are factual problems with this way of framing local–global relations. For example,local differences are not inevitably destroyed by global level processes; in fact they areoften produced through them.

• There are also political dangers attached to it, in particular an impulse towardsdefensiveness and the exclusion of non-locals.

• The mosaic is only one way of imagining local–global relations, so rather than seeing it asa simple portrait of geographical reality the reasons for, and effects of, its use need to beanalysed.

SUMMARY

SystemAn alternative way of thinking aboutlocal–global relations is to see local differencesas produced by a global system. That is, thedifferences between places are not seen as aconsequence of their internal qualities but as aresult of their location within the wider world.The mosaic of geographical difference is notinnate but made systemically. We need tounderstand the processes and powers that makeit. I have been intimating at this kind ofargument already. We might, for example,argue that the very idea of a geographicalmosaic is a framework that makes difference,forming the world through particulartemplates. However, perhaps the best examplesof this argument come from withindevelopment studies and through attempts to understand the extreme differences thatcharacterize our world.

One way of thinking about the differences and inequalities in wealth and life chancesbetween different parts of the world would be to identify internal characteristics thatexplain them. So, we could say (and many do)that Europe and North America are socomparatively wealthy because of the economicinnovation they have shown since the time ofthe Industrial Revolution or due to longer-termadvantages conferred by temperate climates andthe early adoption of agriculture. And then wemight argue that the Philippines, say, arecomparatively so poor because of their lack ofnatural resources, an inhospitable climate or some perceived deficiencies in their culture(e.g. endemic corruption or laziness). What thiskind of explanation ignores, though, is the factthat Europe and the Philippines are not justseparate places, they are places with longhistories of interconnection through worldpolitical, economic and cultural systems. It ispossible, then, that Europe and the Philippinesare so different because of these relationships

with each other rather than because of theirinternal qualities. To put it bluntly, maybe we need to think less about Europe and thePhilippines separately, and rather more aboutwhether Europe is rich precisely because thePhilippines are poor. That is a very simplisticassertion but it has its virtues. It sensitizes us tothe idea that there is a set of global relationsbetween local places. In emphasizing howglobal relations actively produce differencesbetween places it reorients our efforts awayfrom just documenting diversity (Europe andthe USA are like this, the Philippines are likethat) and towards understanding the processesof that differentiation.

Central to such efforts of understanding howand why differences are produced at the global scale has been work focused on theworld-system. Here the world is treated as a single economic and social entity. At the heart of its operations is the capitalist worldeconomy. This is how Jim Blaut puts it, inarguing against the idea of a special Europeancharacter that has led to its relative economicsuccess:

Capitalism arose as a world-scale process: as a world system. Capitalism becameconcentrated in Europe because colonialismgave Europeans the power both to develop their own society and to preventdevelopment from occurring elsewhere. It is this dynamic of development andunderdevelopment which mainly explainsthe modern world.

(1993: 206)

A more concrete example may help to show theimportance, and limits, of this systemic view of local–global relations. That example is theworld coconut market as portrayed by JamesBoyce (1992).

Boyce notes two main things about the globalcoconut trade in the period 1960–85: first, ‘the

LOCAL–GLOBAL 15

Philippines is king’ with over 50 per cent ofworld exports; second, the Filipino producersof coconuts do not seem to be doing very wellout of this dominant market position.Understanding either of these facts requires aglobal systemic focus. The prevalence ofcoconut production in the Philippines wouldhave to be traced back to Spanish colonization(for example, a 1642 edict for all ‘indios’ toplant coconut trees to supply caulk and riggingfor the colonizers’ galleons), to demand in thenineteenth century from European and NorthAmerican soap and margarine manufacturers,and to US colonial control and post-colonialpatronage in the twentieth century (which ledto preferential tariff rates for Filipino coconutproducts in the US market until 1974). Itreflects, then, an emergent international systemin which the Philippines was positioned, by

external powers, as a supplier of an agriculturalcommodity, while those powers used thatcommodity for their own purposes (for theirships or their manufacturing industries). Lowrewards for this agricultural production reflectdeclining global terms of trade, such that eachbarrel of coconut oil exported in 1985 wouldbuy only half the imports it would have in1962. The explanation for this decline iscomplex, but principally stems from the successof manufacturers of potential substitutes in thedeveloped world – both ground nut oilproducers and petro-chemical companies – atgetting subsidies and protection from theirgovernments, thereby depressing world pricesfor all traded fats and oils. That is, it is thepolitical and economic power of developed-world producers and governments which meansthat the Filipino coconut industry gets an ever

PHILIP CRANG16

Figure 1.4 Why do the Philippines produce coconuts? Credit: Getty Images

worse deal for its efforts. The world tradingsystem not only differentiates through aninternational division of industries (you growcoconuts, we have petro-chemicals), itdiscriminates in relation to the value of theseactivities.

However, as well as stressing the global relationsthat have stimulated Filipino coconutproduction and worsened its terms of trade,Boyce’s study also suggests some limits topurely global explanations. In particular, hestresses how the local trading relationshipswithin the Philippines meant that while themajority of small growers reaped little reward,vast fortunes were made by a few powerfulindividuals. Under the guise of concern forsmall producers, the Marcos regime reorganizedthe industry to concentrate power in the handsof a single entity that controlled raw materialpurchases from farmers and marketing at homeand overseas. This concentration was in turnused to reward a few close political associates,such as ‘coconut king’ Eduardo Cojuangco andthe Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, whosiphoned off much of the dwindling nationalearnings from the coconut trade. Thus, existinginequalities in economic and political power

within the Philippines allowed actions thatmade these inequalities greater still. Decliningglobal terms of trade were experiencedparticularly severely and responded to inparticularly unproductive ways, because of thedistinctive (if not unique) political system inthe Philippines. Local processes, as well asglobal processes, played their part in theimpoverishment of coconut producers. Anyattempt to rectify that impoverishment wouldhave to deal with local and global tradingrelations and the political–economic structuresof each.

The example of the Philippines and coconuttrade illustrates how the differences betweenplaces cannot simply be understood throughcomparison. Differences are made throughrelations between places, as well as withinthem. In this section, I have used the notion of the ‘system’ to capture this emphasis onglobal interrelations, local agencies and theirproduction of geographical differences. Thatkind of argument is well developed in accountsof the global differences associated withdevelopment and underdevelopment, but canbe applied more generally too.

LOCAL–GLOBAL 17

• Differences between places are not just the result of their ‘internal’ characteristics. They areproduced by systems of global relations between places.

• Human Geography should therefore do more than document diversity. It should investigatethe processes of differentiation through which diversity and inequality are produced.

• These processes of differentiation operate at both global and local scales.

SUMMARY

NetworksSo far we have seen two differing ways to thinkabout the relations between the global and local. In the model of the mosaic, the global isportrayed as a collection of smaller locals. In themodel of the system, the global is portrayed as aset of relations through which local differencesare produced, and the emphasis is less oncollection and comparison than on connection.In this final section I want to take the idea ofconnection further. I want to suggest that wecan see both the local and the global as made upof sets of connections and disconnections thatwe can call ‘networks’. In consequence, we mayneed to view the local and the global not asdifferent scales (small and large) but as two waysof approaching these networks, in which thelocal is global and the global is local.

Let’s start by looking at the local (and its globalcharacter). In highly influential arguments, theBritish Geographer Doreen Massey coined thephrase ‘a global sense of place’ to reference howthe distinctiveness of a particular place is notthreatened by connections to the wider worldbut actually comes from them (Massey, 1991,1994). Whether thinking about a metropolitanurban neighbourhood or a seemingly isolatedrural village, Massey argued that localities gaintheir different, specific characters throughdistinctive historical and contemporary links toother places (see Case Study box). This alsoproduces a more ‘progressive’ politics of place,in which the appreciation of local differencesdoes not slip into a reactionary, defensiveparochialism. Massey has since developed thisargument within her book For Space (2005), awider theorization of how Human Geographyapproaches core concepts such as space andplace. Places for her are less ‘things’ (such aspieces in a geographical mosaic, to use myphrasing from this chapter) than they are‘ever-shifting constellations of trajectories’

(Massey, 2005: 151). Places are less containersof different and distinctive contents than theyare ‘open and internally multiple’; less fixed,more of an ‘event’, a ‘coming together of thepreviously unrelated’ (Massey, 2005: 141, 138).

If we think of the world in terms of networks,then we see local places as gaining theirdifferent characters through their distinctivepatterns of associations with other places. Inturn, we begin to see how the global is lesssome neat, all-embracing system with a singlelogic, than a mass of globally extensive yetlocally routed practices and technologies ofconnection. Not only do we need to globalizethe local, but we also need to localize theglobal, understanding the global as somethingother than a single entity or system.

Writing in the context of debates overglobalization, Arjun Appadurai (1990) providesa classic early intimation of such an approach.He argues that we can imagine the global as comprised of a range of interacting butdistinctive ‘-scapes’ or morphologies of flowand movement. ‘Finanscapes’ comprise globalnetworks and flows of money (often inelectronic and virtual forms, routed throughthe casino economies of major internationalfinancial centres in New York, Hong Kong,Tokyo and London). ‘Ethnoscapes’ are forgedby global networks and flows of people(migrants, tourists, business travellers, evengeographers), each with their own ratherdifferent patterns of movement. ‘Mediascapes’are made up of communication technologiesand product distributions. And so on. Manyflows, many networks, often interconnected butpossessing their own distinct geographies. So,for example, money moves across nationalborders with ease at the same time as the richestnations look to reinforce their disciplining ofthe movements of people cast as ‘economicmigrants’. Appadurai argues for breaking down

PHILIP CRANG18

the idea of the global into these different kindsof flows, and for seeing how those flows thencome together (and sometimes clash) as thetrajectories producing different places.

At least two influential broader approachesrelate to such concerns for localizing the globaland globalizing the local. The first has beencalled the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Shellerand Urry, 2006). In opposition to the staticmapping of the world implied by the notion ofa geographical mosaic, this approachemphasizes how the world is made through theinterrelated mobilities of people, things andideas. At its heart are explorations of thedialectics between fixity and fluidity. (Chapters52–54 give much more information on this

approach and examples of how it has beenapplied within Human Geography.) Thesecond approach is most commonly calledActor-Network Theory (or ANT for short). AsJohn Law puts it, ANT ‘treat[s] everything inthe social and natural worlds as a continuouslygenerated effect of the webs of relations withinwhich they are located’ (Law, 2009: 141).Despite its name, ANT is less an explanatorytheory than it is ‘a toolkit for telling interestingstories about, and interfering in, those relations’and how they manage to ‘assemble or don’t’(Law, 2009: 141–2). ANT has been widelyinfluential within Human Geography, but forour purposes here it is most important for howit emphasizes both ‘localizing the global’ and‘redistributing the local’, to quote one of its

LOCAL–GLOBAL 19

Doreen Massey on the global–local geographies ofKilburn, London and a Cambridgeshire villageTake a walk down Kilburn High Road, my local shopping centre. It is a pretty ordinary place,north-west of the centre of London. Under the railway bridge the newspaper stand sells papersfrom every county of what my neighbours, many of whom come from there, still often call theIrish Free State . . . Thread your way through the often stationary traffic . . . and there’s a shopwhich as long as I can remember has displayed saris in the window . . . On the door a noticeannounces a forthcoming concert at Wembley Arena: Anand Miland presents Rekha, live, withAamir Khan, Salman Khan, Jahi Chawla and Raveena Tandon . . . This is just the beginningsof a sketch from immediate impressions but a proper analysis could be done, of the linksbetween Kilburn and the world . . . It is (or ought to be) impossible even to begin thinkingabout Kilburn High Road without bringing into play half the world and a considerable amountof British imperialist history.

(Massey 1991: 28)

Think of the [seemingly isolated] Cambridgeshire village. Quite apart from its more recenthistory, integrated into a rich agricultural trade, it stands in an area which in its ancient pasthas been invaded by Celts and Belgae, which was part of a Roman Empire which stretchedfrom Hadrian’s Wall to Carthage . . . The village church itself links this quiet place into areligion which had its birth in the Middle East, and arrived here via Rome.

(Massey 1995: 64)

CASE STUDY

principal advocates, Bruno Latour (2005: 173,193). Contesting the idea that the global is alarger system within which local events must becontextualized, ANT proposes a much ‘flatter’way of seeing the world, in which ‘movementsand displacements come first, places and shapessecond’ (Latour, 2005: 204). Rather thanfocusing on something like global capitalism,ANT advocates studying particular sites, suchas Wall Street dealing rooms, tracing out howthey become ‘global’ through the density andreach of the connections that they have to othersites. Like Massey, advocates of ANT alsocontest ideas of places being self-contained andbounded, instead looking to document how‘what is acting at the same moment in any oneplace is coming from many other places, manydistant materials, many faraway actors’ (Latour,2005: 200). Both the local and the global areimagined as having ‘networky shapes’comprising ‘the intersections of many trails’(Latour, 2005: 204).

ANT has its own distinctive lexicon fordescribing these networky shapes and how theyoperate which, to be frank, can be slightly off-putting for the uninitiated. So, to illustrate thenetwork approach I want to take a moreaccessible example: Ian Cook’s work on the

networked geographies of tropical fruits (2000; 2004). You are perhaps most likely toencounter the bananas and papaya he writesabout on a supermarket aisle or in a fruit bowlin your house. Cook’s interest is in part in theconnections these fruit enact, linking as they dofarm workers and farmers in the tropics (hisown research focuses on the Caribbean),supermarket and fruit company technicians,managers and marketing people, and ‘firstworld’ consumers. When you eat a banana you become directly connected into a host ofnetworks, obviously including those related tothe production and retailing of the banana itselfbut also spreading out in multiple directions(the production of fertilizer for Caribbeanfarmers, the ships and planes that cross theAtlantic, the banking systems that allowpayments to be made, the plastics in which thefruit are packaged, and so on). For Cook, thesefruit represent geographies that cannot becontained in mosaic-like distinctions of hereand there: both because of their individualtravels from Caribbean farms to British orAmerican mouths, and through their muchlonger implication in processes of botanical,economic and cultural exchange and theirwider status as ‘fruits of empire’ (Walvin,1996).

But Cook is also interested in thedisconnections these fruit networks enact.These fruit change status and meaning as they‘travel’: changing from plants to be tended for a wage, to ‘exotic’ fruit, to domestic treats.Cognitive and emotional distances are madebetween the people and places that have thesefruit in common. The Caribbean farm workerknows the papaya or banana eater only as ‘theconsumer’ who dictates market pressures ofdemand. The banana or papaya eater knows thefarm worker only as an invisible producer or asa vague stereotype, whether that be the smilingCaribbean labourer or the oppressed thirdworld worker.

PHILIP CRANG20

Figure 1.5 Not just a fruit bowl but networks ofconnections to many other places and actors.Credit: iStockphotos

‘Following’ tropical fruit is just one way toaccess a world comprising multi-directional,multi-fibred networks, the geographies ofwhich are not mappable on to neat territoriesor overarching systems. Faced with suchnetworks, the task of Human Geographybecomes not to produce knowledge of

either the Caribbean or the UK, nor just toexplain their differences through understandingglobal systems, but to explore the networks of connection and disconnection that bringthese places and their differences into being.

LOCAL–GLOBAL 21

• Local places get their distinctive characters from their past and present links to the rest of theworld. In consequence, we need a ‘global sense of the local’.

• Global networks – with their flows of information, ideas, money, people and things – havelocally routed geographies. In consequence, we need ‘localized senses of the global’.

• Wider literatures on ‘mobilities’ and ‘Actor-Network Theory’ have informed recent attemptsto map out ‘networky’ geographies that both ‘localize the global’ and ‘redistribute the local’.

SUMMARY

ConclusionHuman Geography is rightly interested in boththe local – the specific place, with its distinctivequalities – and the global: the wider world,with its bigger picture. A crucial question thathas always faced Human Geography is how toconceptualize the relations between these two.Three general arguments have informed thediscussion here. First, that appeals to ideas ofdiversity – a global collection of many locals –may be problematic: factually, politically andconceptually. Second, that rather than diversitythe conceptual keystone of geographical work

in this area should be ‘differentiation’ – that is,an investigation of the ongoing productions ofdifferences between peoples and places. Third,it is debatable whether these processes ofdifferentiation accord to singular global logics(such as ‘developed countries make othercountries underdeveloped as part of their owndevelopment’). Rather, they may operatethrough the multiple networks that constituteboth the local and the global. Tracing out thesenetworks offers a particularly fruitful way oftheorizing and studying local–globalgeographies.

1. Why might you, as a Human Geographer, be interested in ‘the local’ and ‘the global’?

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of seeing the world as made up of a mosaic ofdiverse places and peoples?

DISCUSSION POINTS

PHILIP CRANG22

3. Why are some places, like the USA, so rich and other places, like the Philippines, so poor?

4. What does it mean to say the local and the global have ‘networky shapes’?

5. Debate the relative merits of the ‘mosaic’, ‘system’ and ‘network’ models.

Blaut, J.M. (1993) The myth of the European miracle & after 1492. In: The Colonizer’s Model of theWorld. New York: The Guilford Press, 50–151 and 179–213.

It is worth attempting a read of this for its powerful restatement of a world-systemic approach. It isparticularly strong on debunking the idea that European ‘development’ stems from qualities internal toEurope itself.

Connell, J. and Gibson, C. (2003) Sound Tracks. Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge.

This is a book that surveys the geographies of popular music, exploring how they combine economic,cultural and political dynamics. I suggest it here because its approach is explicitly framed around seeingthe geographies of music as simultaneously global and local, so it provides a great case study if youwant to get a sense of how those dual emphases of Human Geography can be combined in practice.Chapter 1, called ‘Into the music’, sets out the book’s approach in terms of a dialectic between fixity andfluidity.

Massey, D. (1994 [orig. 1991]) A global sense of place. In: Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge:Polity Press, 146–56.

Massey, D. (2005) The elusiveness of place. In: For Space. London: Sage, 130–42.

Doreen Massey is perhaps Human Geography’s leading writer on issues of the local and the global. ‘A global sense of place’ is a classic essay. There are lots of ideas in it about globalizing the local andlocalizing the global and it is very accessible. The other extract suggested here is from Massey’s laterbook For Space, and it provides a more explicitly conceptual elaboration of the thinking that underlies thenotion of a global sense of place. They make a good pairing for getting into Massey’s ideas.

Murray, W.E. (2006) Geographies of Globalization. Abingdon: Routledge.

An excellent textbook that both considers the implications of globalization for the practice of HumanGeography and surveys the discipline’s contributions to globalization debates.

FURTHER READING

IntroductionAt the heart of Human Geography lie questions about the relationship between social characteristics and places. How do thedifferences between groups and individualswithin society map on to, reflect and reinforcespatial categories? Do the qualities of differentplaces affect how society uses, enjoys and even accesses those places? And perhaps more challengingly – why do some socialcharacteristics seem to have a much strongerrelationship with place than others?Geographers have recognized the relevance of these questions across a range of scales fromthe global to the local and paying attention to them has shaped not only the content ofwhat we study as Human Geographers but also the methodologies through which weconduct our research. While we may have long agreed that Human Geography is aboutthis central relationship between space andplace, how we have chosen to study it has beenthe subject of much more variation and debate.

In this chapter I will chart the development of Human Geographers’ thinking on therelationship between society and space withinthe discipline, identifying three main ‘phases’ in the progression from spatial determinationto the co-construction of people and place. The

chapter will then go on to explore a series ofexamples in which we see clearly how space andsociety are inter-dependent and how the waysin which we think about and organize space arefundamental to the experiences of those whooccupy, access and are excluded from certainspaces. The examples selected are not unique oreven unusual. They speak of everyday situationsand lives and are drawn from mainstreamgeographical topics, underlining the centralityof the relationship between society and space tothe whole of Human Geography.

Three phases in thedevelopment ofgeographers’ work on society and spaceThe three phases that will be discussed arespatial order and the mapping of socialcharacteristics; society, space and power; andthe co-construction of society and space.

Spatial order and the mappingof social characteristicsWhile both geographers and sociologists have questioned the ways in which space has

CHAPTER 2SOCIETY–SPACEJo Little

influenced social processes since the latter partof the nineteenth century, more sustainedattempts to conceptualize the interactionbetween society and space are traditionally seenas emerging in the 1960s in the form of urbanecology. A concern with measuring andpredicting the spatial ordering of humanbehaviour dominated Human Geography in what became known as the quantitativerevolution. Much has been written of theinfluence of this phase in the development ofgeography and of the emphasis placed on theidentification of scientific laws to explain the spatial organization of human behaviour(see Johnston, 1991). Here it is important toappreciate the ways in which this scientificapproach resulted in the classification of socialcharacteristics and a belief that understandingsocio-spatial relations emerged through thesystematic and often very detailed mapping ofkey population variables.

Social geography was dominated by the idea of social segregation, showing, through themapping of characteristics such as race, income,housing occupation and how different socialgroups were clustered in, for example, differentresidential areas (see Peach, 1975). This was aform of social area analysis which thrived onthe development of computer mappingtechniques and on the growing availability offorms of population data such as census andlabour market statistics. This kind of geographybecame increasingly criticized, however, forbeing more concerned with the organization ofsocial patterns than with their explanation andfor a view of space that assumed neat, fixed and objective social ordering. In addition, itbecame clear that social area analysis only really included certain social characteristics(those easily mapped and traditionally seen asimportant), neglecting many that were less easyto study (e.g. sexuality).

Society, space and powerThe key criticism levelled at social area analysis– that it failed to take account of powerrelations within society and of the ways inwhich such power relations underpinned theorganization of space – became a centralconcern of Human Geography from the 1980s.Geographers turned to radical approaches, most notably Marxist approaches, to show how space was a product of social forces and to explain the processes whereby identityand difference was reflected in patterns ofspatial inequality. This development in theconceptualization of socio-spatial relations wasparticularly significant in research on economicrestructuring in the UK and the USA in the1980s. It provided a new understanding of thespatial distribution of wealth and jobs acrossregions, countries and even globally, and of thesocial outcomes of the uneven development ofresources. It also showed, as Massey (1994)asserted, the relevance of geography to politicaldebate about inequality. Later, concerns grewabout the assumed dominance of class withinradical approaches to the study of society andspace. Feminist geographers, in particular,argued that they were failing to recognize thediffering experience of men and women andwere thus blind to the gendered nature of therelationship between society and space (Bowlbyet al., 1989; McDowell, 1983). Such concernsgave rise to a number of geographical studies of the varying employment experiences of men and women within regions, communitiesand households (McDowell and Massey, 1984). Work showed how women were oftendisadvantaged within the labour market and,because of different roles and responsibilities,not able to make the same employment choicesas men. Geographers argued, as a result of such work, that the spatial division of labourresulting from economic restructuring reflectednot only class but other social characteristics

JO LITTLE24

such as gender and race and should beunderstood as an often complex interplay ofsocial patterns.

As a result of such studies, recognition of thedifferent ways in which social characteristicsplayed out over space led to a richer and morenuanced geography. It was still a geography,however, in which places were seen to reflect thesocial characteristics of those who occupiedthem. Geographers had got much better atshowing the subtleties and shifts in therelationship between people and places; theyhad demonstrated how different theoreticalpositions gave visibility to particular groups andhighlighted different kinds of inequalities, yetspace, even across these varying perspectives,remained effectively a container for socialdifference. While progress had certainly beenmade in moving away from a kind of spatialdeterminism in which spatial difference causedsocial inequality, there was still, at this time,little recognition of the interaction between thespatial and the social.

The co-construction of society and space

Developments in geography in the 1990s saw major shifts in the ways in which therelationship between society and space wasunderstood. Engagement with postmodernismand the associated ‘cultural turn’ in geographywere highly significant in challenging theconceptualization of both people and place intwo key respects. The first was the newsensitivity to the variations between humanbeings in relation to characteristics such asgender, race, class, age, (dis)ability, etc., and tothe differing experiences people have of space – what is termed ‘spatial differentiation’. Therecognition of difference questioned the ‘takenfor granted’ nature of social groupings and of

peoples’ varying experiences of broad socialcategories such as gender and age. Central tothis recognition was an acceptance of categoriesas socially constructed and not fixed, andconsequently open to contestation, resistanceand negotiation. At this time a major area ofsocial geographical research focusing onidentity became firmly established, notably inrespect to the marginalization of certain groupsand individuals from particular spaces andplaces (this issue is developed further inChapter 42).

The second area of work that emerged from the development of geographical thinkingduring the 1990s related to space and to itsconceptualization as constructed. It becameincreasingly asserted that

just as social identities [were] no longerregarded as fixed categories but . . .understood as multiple, contested and fluid, so too space [was] no longerunderstood as having particular fixedcharacteristics.

(Valentine, 2001: 4)

Critically, space started to be understood not as a simple backdrop against which differenceand inequality played out, but an active partof the construction of society and of theexperiences of people within those places.Space, it was argued, could not be factored out(or in) to the operation of social relations andpractices – it was a central part of how thoserelations were produced and reproduced.Geographers thus began to talk of society andspace as mutually constituted and apparent inways that were never fixed but always in theprocess of becoming.

These three phases in geographers’ study of therelationship between society and space aresummarised in Table 2.1 below.

SOCIETY–SPACE 25

JO LITTLE26

Key phases in theconceptualizationof socio-spatialrelations

The scope anddirection of research

Research content Criticisms

Spatial order and the mappingof socialcharacteristics

Social geography wasdominated by the ideaof social segregation,showing, through themapping ofcharacteristics such asrace, income andhousing occupation,how different socialgroups were clusteredin, for example,different residentialareas

Computer mappingtechniques aided by thegrowing availability offorms of populationdata such as censusand labour marketstatistics (see Johnston,1991; Peach, 1975)

More concerned withthe organization ofsocial patterns thanwith their explanation.Belief that space waspassive and assumedneat, fixed andobjective socialordering

Society, spaceand powerrelations

Radical approaches,most notably Marxist,to show how spacewas a product ofsocial forces and toexplain the processeswhereby identity anddifference wasreflected in patterns ofspatial inequality

Research on economicrestructuring anduneven development,often at the regionalscale (see Massey,1994)

Assumed dominanceof class within radicalapproaches; failed torecognize genderedand racialcharacteristics (Bowlbyet al., 1989;McDowell andMassey, 1984)

The co-construction ofsociety and space

A sensitivity todifference and hybrididentities and to themultiple, fluid andcontested nature ofboth socialcharacteristics andspace

Poststructural andpostmodernapproaches and afocus on performance(see Panelli, 2004)

Mitigates against therecognition of broaderpatterns ofdisadvantage and maybe difficult to mobilizepolitically

Table 2.1 Phases in the study of the relationship between society and space

Will we now discuss in more detail, andthrough the use of examples, how therelationship between society and space hascome to be understood by geographers as co-constructed. That is, how space evolves to reflectand to shape the identities of those who use itand how the imagining of space in particularways can act to exclude some and protectothers.

Place and the socialconstruction of spaceTim Cresswell (1996) used the notion of inplace/out of place to explore how spacebecomes imbued with certain social andcultural values and assumptions. These valuesand assumptions drive ideas about whichidentities and behaviours we might deem to beappropriate and comfortable (in place) in thosespaces and which we might see as inappropriate(out of place). These ideas may shift over time– they may, as we shall see later, be contested,but they are often powerful and hard to resist.They help to show how social and culturalcharacteristics are translated from society morebroadly to the day-to-day experiences of

particular people in particular places. The ideathat space is an active agent in the ways inwhich social relations evolve and play out isnow fundamental to geographical study. Notonly does ‘space matter’ but indeed space is part of the very organization and operation ofsociety. We can turn to research from almostevery area of Human Geography to illustratethe relevance of the construction of space itselfto our experience of place and performance ofidentity.

The rural community

The rural community provides a richillustration of the ways in which our imaginingand understanding of the spaces of the rural plays through the characteristics and organization of rural society and the day-to-day ways in which people live their lives.Geographers researching rural communities andlifestyles have recognized the power of taken-for-granted assumptions about rurality. Inrecent years, they have argued that any attemptto understand the nature of rural society mustacknowledge and incorporate a set of timelessqualities associated with the countryside –

SOCIETY–SPACE 27

• Conventional approaches in the geographical study of the relationship between society andspace were characterized by an initial concern to map the ways in which places weresocially differentiated. Such mapping exercises were seen as useful to policy makers butprovided only a very narrow view of people’s experience of space and place.

• Geographers argued that understandings of society and space needed to take into accountthe inequalities and power relations reflected in social patterns and, in particular, theuneven development of the economy and unequal access to wealth.

• There was a recognition following the cultural turn in geography and the influence ofpostmodernism on the role of space in the construction of social difference. Geographersbecame interested in what was termed the co-construction of society and space.

SUMMARY

qualities such as the strength of the community,the slower pace of life and the closeness tonature. All of these ‘rural imaginaries’ will, it isasserted, underpin and inform the nature ofboth individual identity and the more generaloperation of the rural community.

The idea that rural social spaces arecharacterized by a more authentic and activesense of community is one such imaginary thathas held an important place in academicwriting and popular culture (Cloke, 2003). A uniquely rural way of ‘doing’ community is seen as so key to the formation andreproduction of rural society that it needs to be written into understandings of rural placesand to the histories, attitudes and experiencesof rural people. Constructions of ruralcommunity, as witnessed in many geographicalstudies (see Bell, M., 1994; Halfacree andRivera, 2012) have proved a very strong ‘pull

factor’ in people’s decisions to migrate to ruralareas in the UK and other Western countriesand consequently highly relevant to the processof counter-urbanization (see Figure 2.1). Suchstrong expectations of community can prove apowerful force in mediating behaviour andidentities of those living in rural areas – theymay be more inclined to participate incommunity events to provide help andassistance to fellow villagers – and by doing soto fit in with the expectations of village life.

In my research on rural women in south-westEngland in the 1990s, I talked to many womenwho valued the ‘sense of community’ thatexisted in the village (Little and Austin, 1996).This community spirit, they believed, was notsomething they had experienced in previous(urban) places of residence. It ensured people‘looked out for one another’ and that theelderly and vulnerable, in particular, were

JO LITTLE28

Figure 2.1 A traditional view of ‘rural life’. Credit: www.CartoonStock.com

. .. L U N C H ,Tea , dinner

AUDsupper

W

Homemade j a m

FORBREAKFAST

www.CartoonStock.com

not neglected. This is an example of the co-construction of society and space – the space of the rural community was sociallyconstructed in line with past understandingsand associated contemporary behaviour to be aplace of friendship and cooperation. This, initself, helped to shape behaviour and encouragevillagers in caring and acts of mutual support.The women’s identities as rural people, itseemed, had responded to the ways in whichthey felt village space to be constructed.

In a more negative reading of the notion of therural community, other studies have drawnattention to those who do not fit (see Figure2.2). They illustrate how the social constructionof rurality in the UK in particular, is a very‘white’ construction, appealing often totraditional ideas of Englishness (see Neal and Agyman, 2006). This construction seesblack and ethnic minority rural residents (or

would-be residents) and visitors as ‘out of place’within such communities. This construction ofrural community can support racist behaviour,as has been shown through studies of theexperiences of black people and the attitudes ofwhite residents (see Hubbard, 2004; Jay, 1992).

The night time economyThe urban night time economy provides uswith another example of the relationshipbetween space and society, which again showsthe co-construction of place and identity aswell as its fluid and contested nature.Geographers have been interested in thedevelopment of the entertainment industry, asan element of the night time economy, from anumber of different angles and have looked atits role in regenerating flagging city centres andproviding jobs where previous economies have

SOCIETY–SPACE 29

Figure 2.2 Black and ethnic minority people are sometimes regarded as ‘out of place’ in rural and coastalspaces, even as visitors. Credit: Peter Lomas/Rex Features

declined (Bell, D., 2007; Chatterton andHollands, 2002). They have also beenconcerned with the associated social changes to the city and how we use and feel about these spaces. This has, inevitably, includedcontemporary concerns about the behaviour ofthose using urban entertainment spaces and, in particular, how city centres have becomeconstructed as exclusionary spaces, dominatedby a very strong drinking culture (particularlyin the UK) and in which only certain groupsand identities are comfortable (RoyalGeographical Society, 2012; Jayne et al., 2006).

Displays of aggressive and drunken behaviourhave been identified in both academic andpopular reports as responsible for transformingthe atmosphere of the city centre at night and making it, for some, a place of fear. Thefollowing passage from the Observer newspaperdescribes how the concentration of ‘drinkingspaces’ has led to violence in a particular part ofthe centre of the Welsh city Cardiff.

In the shadow of Cardiff ’s castle, dozens ofbars and clubs have gained the Welsh capitalits reputation as a party city. They line theroads through the city centre to St MaryStreet, a pedestrianised zone lined with pubsof all types and chains. As an ambulanceflashes by, three men are arguing loudly aboutwhere to go next. The level of aggression risesuntil one stomps off swearing loudly at theother two, who throw something at his backwhich smashes into the gutter.

(McVeigh, Observer, 25 March 2012)

The expansion of vertical drinking spaces (as they have become known) in Cardiff andmany other cities means that, for part of theday, these spaces are effectively ‘no go areas’ foranyone but those participating in the nighttime entertainment. Moreover, thenormalization of aggressive and drunkenbehaviour is seen to reinforce the drinkingculture. While clearly space does not cause

violence, the enduring presence of aggressionand the exclusion of other users of the spacehelps to cement the relationship between citycentre space and drinking.

Some studies of this relationship between citycentres and aggressive and alcohol-fuelledbehaviour have argued that it has reinforcedboth spaces and associated identities asmasculine (Figure 2.3).

The laddish culture generated in the drinkingspaces (see Hubbard, 2009) – an element of which is the increasing presence ofentertainment venues that objectify women(such as lap dancing and pole dancing clubs) –creates an atmosphere in which some womenfeel out of place, excluded and even fearful.

While the particular problem of today’s citycentre drinking spaces is relatively recent, thewider issue surrounding the ways in whichsome environments are experienced asdangerous or scary is not new. Over many years geographers have noted how public space is frequently viewed as dangerous orunwelcoming by women. Charting thatresearch illustrates the different approaches thatwere introduced at the start of the chapter. So,during the 1980s the study of women’s fear inpublic spaces was widely seen as a failure ofplanning and of the design of buildings andspaces – dangerous spaces were believed to bethe outcome of a development process thatignored the particular needs of women andcreated bleak and functional public spaces(Little, 1994). Later, geographers argued that such ideas were overly environmentallydeterminist and through the adoption of more radical approaches sought to explain fear within public space in relation to broader understandings of women’s feelings of vulnerability within patriarchal or male-dominated societies. More recently,however, with the interest in spaces as sociallyconstructed, fear has been seen as the outcome

JO LITTLE30

of socio-spatial relations and the performanceof identity in place. This emphasis on theinterdependence of identity and place hashelped in understanding the more nuanced andcomplex relationship between the aggressivespaces of the night time economy and theperformance of gender – particularly thedifferent and very fluid circumstances underwhich both men and women experience suchspaces as dangerous and threatening (Pain,1997; Kern, 2005; Wesely and Gaarder, 2004).

ThirdspaceThroughout this chapter, examples from acrossHuman Geography have been used to explorethe interaction between society and space. Theyhave shown how different ways of approachingthe relationship between people and place can

inform the understanding of this interactionand how geography has moved from simplymapping social characteristics in space to seeingspace as bound up in how those characteristicsare distributed and performed. We have seenthat identities may become excluded fromspaces to which they do not belong and alsohow space itself can take on particular qualitiesthrough the presence or absence of differentidentities. What is very important to stressabout these socio-spatial interactions is theirvariability and fluidity. They are not fixed butmade and re-made and while somerelationships between society and space may beacknowledged, like the rural community, to bea product of historic associations, they are stillconstantly being negotiated and performed.

It is this negotiation that needs particularemphasis in this final section of the chapter.

SOCIETY–SPACE 31

Figure 2.3 Evening drinking in city centres may often appear aggressive. Credit: Paul Panayiotou/Alamy

While dominant constructions of space may bepowerful, as the examples have shown, theymay also be contested. Indeed, writing in themid-1990s, Ed Soja (1996: 2) urged scholars to‘think differently’ about the construction andlived experience of space. He argued that bothpractical and theoretical understandings ofspace and spatiality were in danger of beingmuddled by ‘the baggage of tradition [and] by older definitions that no longer fit changing contexts’. Soja’s concerns about the conceptualization of socio-spatial relationsfound momentum in a developing critique ofgeographers’ thinking about space, and inparticular, their use of dualisms such asinside/outside, home/work, belonging/excluded, white/black, public/private, etc. Such dualisms, it was argued, suggest the world can be understood as clear-cut,oppositional categories and that, used bygeographers, these categories appeared to maponto space in straightforward and stable ways.

Challenges to the use of these dichotomiescame in particular from post-colonial andfeminist research in geography. Such researchquestioned the construction of knowledge,arguing the need to contest and destabilizethe privileging of what were seen as western,masculine forms of knowledge, and to developalternative approaches which recognized thevarying and hybrid nature of identity andexperience. Research demonstrated thattraditional forms of identity were increasinglybeing reshaped in response to social, culturaland political change and that any attempt tounderstand people’s lives needed to appreciatethe complex and sometimes contradictoryreworking of identity. Critically, the reworkingof identity was seen to produce an alternativespatiality, ‘a thirdspace’ as Soja puts it, inwhich there was an opportunity to think andact politically and a responsibility to creativelyre-think and re-theorize spatiality inconjunction with multiple forms of identity.

Soja (1996: 6) briefly states what thirdspaceprovides that takes us beyond otherconceptualizations of space as follows:

Thirdspace can be described as a creativerecombination and extension, one thatbuilds on a Firstspace perspective that isfocused on the ‘real’ material world and aSecondspace perspective that interprets thisreality through ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality.

(Soja, 1996: 6)

In exploring the potential of thirdspace, Soja(1996) draws extensively on the work of bellhooks, the American academic and activist, andon her writing about the home and communityas a space of nurture and resistance as well asoppression. hooks, Soja (1996: 13) suggests, is able to illustrate the ‘radical openness’of thirdspace to the creation of alternativespatial imaginaries by those who wish to‘reclaim’ spaces of oppression and make them into something else. Writing as a black,feminist activist, hooks (1990) talks in herbook Yearning of the marginalization of African-American subjectivities and their placeon the periphery of American political andintellectual life. According to hooks, thismarginality can be used to provide a space,simultaneously material and symbolic, fromwhich to challenge the dominant power of themainstream and give voice to the ideas, beliefsand experiences of the silent ‘other’.

The important thing for our discussion here is the notion of thirdspace as the spatializedexpression of oppression and political action. It takes the experience of marginality and turnsit into a space of resistance. Soja notes howthe use of marginality in this sense as a form of resistance evokes the work of Frenchphilosopher Lefebvre, and transformsmarginality into centrality. hooks, in her‘purposeful peripheralness’ thus acquires a‘strategic positioning that disorders, disrupts

JO LITTLE32

and transgresses the center-peripheryrelationship itself ’ (Soja, 1996: 84).

For hooks, her activism and desire to counterthe oppressive nature of the Black experience inthe USA is a ‘politics of location’ which calls:

those of us who would participate in theformation of counter-hegemonic culturalpractice to identify the spaces where we beginthe process of re-vision . . . For many of us,that moment requires pushing againstoppressive boundaries set by race, sex and classdomination . . . For me this space of radicalopenness is a margin – a profound edge.

(hooks, 1990: 149, quoted in Soja, 1996: 85).

As part of the displacing of oppositionalcategories, thirdspace also challenges thedivision between academic theorizing and

political action and does so through the use ofmultiple scales of analysis – from the global tothe local and in between.

Thirdspace is a very useful way of highlightingthe spatialization of resistance and of thebreaking down of oppositional categories ingeographical analysis. There are many exampleswe can draw on where space and place giveexpression to what may be seen as a challengeto conventional dualisms, enabling us to lookbeyond existing categories. Thirdspacerecognizes not only the complex nature ofidentity but also the often contradictory wayssubjectivities play out in space and time. It alsoallows us to think of the changing use of spaceand the ways in which space and identity maybe co-constructed as temporary or transitorysites of resistance – for example, in a politicalmarch or rally or a protest camp.

SOCIETY–SPACE 33

Figure 2.4 Black women and spaces of resistance. Credit: Getty Images

In their edited book, Writing Women and Space:Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, AlisonBlunt and Gillian Rose (1994) introduce acollection of studies which illuminate themultiple and complex position of women inrelation to the politics and processes ofcolonialization. The studies provide a very clear illustration of what might be termedthirdspace in contesting many of the dominantassumptions about not only the lives of theindigenous women but also the spaces ofcolonization. Blunt and Rose argue the need to deconstruct the binary opposition betweencolonizer and colonized and in re-thinking thevarying subject positions of women and thefixity of constructions of otherness. Thechapters in the book show the complicatedrelationship between gender, race and class and how the subject positions of women in

post-colonial settings have been formed by the interaction of patriarchal and colonialdiscourses of difference. They call for a ‘re-mapping of colonization’ to help understandthe multiple subjectivities of the colonized andthe colonial women together with the spaces inwhich they interact.

Blunt and Rose’s book shows how thirdspacecan contribute to the understanding of therelationship between space and subjectivity in the context of the gendered politics of post-colonialism. Many other examples havealso made use of the concept in articulating aresistance to accepted binary subject positionsand to the spatial politics of oppression. Take,for example, the occupation of certain spaces by gay, lesbian and bisexual people in gay pride marches (see Figure 2.5). Such marchesreflect a desire to question and subvert the

JO LITTLE34

Figure 2.5 Gay Pride march in New York. Credit: Getty Images

taken-for-granted heterosexual nature of publicspace. The march temporarily changes therelationship between society and space, creating‘gay space’ – a thirdspace where behaviour andhybrid identities deemed unacceptable at othertimes are dominant. Returning to the issue ofwomen’s fear raised earlier, another example of thirdspace can be seen in the attempts by

women to ‘reclaim the night’ by refusing to be fearful, and contesting the dominantassumptions of masculinity and violence thatsurround public space at night (Koskela, 1997).Space and place are sexualized in that theyreflect an acceptance of or hostility towardsparticular spatial norms and identities – what is known as the sexualization of space.

SOCIETY–SPACE 35

• In the past, Human Geography conceptualized space as a backdrop for social relationsand was concerned with first, the mapping of spatial inequalities and, second, thearticulation of the broad power relations through which those inequalities developed.

• Through time geographers have become more aware of the constructed nature of bothidentity and space, and have recognized that socio-spatial relations are negotiated, createdand reinforced through everyday performance.

• It is clear that the co-construction of identity and space means that some identities areaccepted, where others may be seen as out of place. Notions of belonging, communityand exclusion are all central to the understanding of the relationship between society andspace.

• The exclusion of some identities means that different, hybrid identities may emerge to destabilize and contest the dominant patterns of belonging in space and ensure therelationship of society with space is never fixed but always ongoing and in the process ofbeing renegotiated.

SUMMARY

ConclusionThe study of the relationship between societyand space by geographers has developed overtime through the different phases outlined inthe chapter. This development has beenpresented, perhaps rather misleadingly in thechapter, as a rather neat sequence – primarily toassist understanding. In reality, however, it hasnot been a case of one approach replacinganother but rather there has been a shift overtime from geographical studies that sought to map spatial characteristics and the

differentiation of social and economiccharacteristics to studies that represented socialconstructions of space and, finally, studies that challenged dominant socio-spatialconstructions and focused on space as a form of resistance. Some would suggest that such adevelopment has allowed geographers to thinkof space in a different way. We have movedfrom thinking of space as simply containing orreflecting social difference to being a part ofhow that difference is constructed, performedand contested. Space has moved from beingpassive to more active in the production of

social change and in the experience of place.Understanding space as part of the process ofreproducing and resisting social change allowsus to think in much more hopeful and positive

ways about the strategic role of space inresisting oppression and celebrating diversityand opportunity.

JO LITTLE36

1. Why did geographers become dissatisfied with the mapping of spatial patterns and howdid they seek to address the limitations of such approaches?

2. How have different approaches to understanding social spatial relations been reflected inunderstandings of spaces as frightening or ‘scary’?

3. What is meant by the term thirdspace and why might we associate this concept withfeelings of hope ?

DISCUSSION POINTS

Bell, M.M. (2004) Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

This is a book about a rural community, and provides a detailed examination of how constructions ofrural space are formulated and contested by those living and visiting the countryside. It is helpful inillustrating the idea of the co-construction of space and society as discussed in the chapter.

Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

As Tim Cresswell writes in his book, Place is a form of space – it is space ‘invested with meaning’. Thebook thus takes the ideas surrounding the relationship between society and space as discussed in thischapter and applies them to the notion of ‘place’.

Holloway, L. and Hubbard, P. (2001) People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of EverydayLife. Edinburgh: Prentice Hall.

A series of very accessible chapters that talk about both the way geographers have understood spaceand also how different identities have experienced everyday space at the local level.

Johnston, L. and Longhurst, R. (2010) Space, Place and Sex. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield.

This book explores different spaces of sexual identity, the assumptions and challenges that surround therelationship between sex and space.

Soja, E. (1996) Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell.

A challenging book but one which provides a critical discussion of the concept of thirdspace as first usedby geographers. It situates geographers’ use of thirdspace within intellectual and empirical discussions.

FURTHER READING

Introduction: all the stuffthat we stuff in our mouthsAs sure as eggs are eggs, you’ll have eaten a mealin the last few hours. Right? Thought so. Andwhich one was it? Breakfast, lunch or dinner? Ifyou can stomach it, then pause for a minuteand just remember what you chewed up andswallowed. Whether it was a smorgasbord or asimple snack, review all that matter journeyingthrough your system, the stuff processing itsway down, channelled through digestive tractand gut into bowel, washed over and workedon by gastric juices. And while you go aboutthe work of mental regurgitation, you mightplace your hands over the swell of your stomach– go on now, all the way around – listening outfor the embarrassingly loud noises that yourorgans have a habit of making as they go aboutdoing the necessaries. Mine just gurgled while Iwrote these words. Makes you think, doesn’t it?The experience gets odder still if, onlymomentarily, you re-cast universal humanactions – like eating – as being, well, a little bitout of the ordinary (Bennett, 2007). There’s no room for the squeamish here. Keep themetabolic experiment going by revisiting inmore detail, exactly, what was on that plate.What did you scoop from inside the foil casingor plastic wrap? If the waste bin is nearby, be

brave, flip it open and pick out the discardedfood packaging. Take a close look at theingredients listed. How much does theinformation provided really tell you aboutsource, sort or standard? What geographiesdoes it disclose? Or discretely pull a veil over? Elspeth Probyn (2011) offers a few quick pointers for the more inquisitivegeographer-eater:

The global food crisis has brought a renewedpublic and academic attention to questionsof what we eat, where it comes from, howmuch it costs, and whether it is sustainable. . .

Coinciding, in ways that are more thancoincidental, with a growing awareness andat times panic about global warming and climate change, people are becomingattuned to how what we always deemed asedible (corn, soya) are being turned intonon-edible things like bio-fuels. And, as oneof the most virulent forms of globalization,there is a seemingly endless circulation offood scares about things we had thoughtwere edible – chickens that carry flu, cowsthat turn mad, eggs that are bad.

(Probyn, 2011: 33)

Half a century ago, Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, put all that in a

CHAPTER 3HUMAN–NON-HUMANHayden Lorimer

nutshell, declaring that ‘food is good to thinkwith’ (1969).

Now take a deep breath and back we go to thebelly of the beast. You might well have eatensome choice cuts (or, some not-so-select bits)from part of another animal’s body. Perhapsyou enjoyed the differing tastes of more thanone kind of flesh (quite possibly without evenknowing it). Prior to that, you may have slicedor diced the meat – there’s just a slim chanceyou even gutted or filleted a carcass, or pluckedit clean – as part of the preparations forcooking. Or, maybe you didn’t eat a scrap offlesh, fowl or fish. If so, then this could just bea fairly arbitrary occurrence, explained by yourfailure to get the shopping done yesterday orthe fact that the fridge or cupboard is looking abit bare right now. Perhaps your religiousbeliefs or your family upbringing mean thatyou consider some meat types as unfit forhuman consumption (and, by contrast, othersas palatable because they come from animalsslaughtered in proper observance of recognizedcustom). Or, it could be that the absence ofproducts derived from animals’ bodies in yourdiet is because you’ve actually made a moralchoice, at some stage earlier in your life, toconsciously limit the range of foodstuffs thatyou consume. Like it or not, that decisionplaces you in a minority and confers a badge ofidentity (vegetarian, pescetarian or vegan).Depending on which of these terms fits best,then what you just ate may have contained amycoprotein meat substitute product (such asQuorn). Possibly this is because you find youstill have to suppress strong carnivorous urgesfor a certain taste, tang and texture. For manyamong us, the first bite taken from a bacon rollis hard to beat, whatever the time of day. Andeven having commited to a meat-free lifestyle,it’s not always possible to be entirely sure.Unless you have been an extra-specially carefulconsumer, there might be rendered animal

tissue in the beauty products you apply to yourbody or face, or in those sweets you sometimestreat yourself to between meals, or the shoesthat protect the soles of your feet. And whatabout me? Seeing as I’ve been doing all thequizzing so far, it’s reasonable to expect ananswer. I’m one of those fish-eating sort-of-vegetarians. By some sorts of judgement, thatstance makes me a contradiction in terms.

So, you might reasonably ask, what’s thepurpose of all this prying into personal habitsand mealtime preferences? The answer is simpleenough, and it is central to the materialconditions of our existence here on Earth.Attitudes to meat (and an extraordinary rangeof animal by-products) tell us a great deal abouthow we humans understand and value the livesof other living creatures, or ‘non-humananimals’, to adopt a semi-technical term. Whenwe’re not processing bits of them on the inside,we’re wearing bits of their bodies on theoutside. It’s a scale of intimacy and sort ofimmediacy that’s all too easily, and comfortably,forgotten. For much of modern life, and formany millions of the world’s population, it’sjust seemed better that way. The attitudes wehold about the lives and the deaths of millionsof non-human animals, specifically reared to beeaten, are for most of the time, kept in a mental‘black-box’, along with a range of beliefs,judgements, imaginings, tastes, morals andethics that inform our sense of place as humansamid a greater planetary ecology of relations(Foer, 2009; Baggini, 2005). There arepowerful ideas bundled up in there andemotions that can pack a punch. And, when itcomes to the central concern of this chapter,the edibility of non-human animals might betellingly illustrative, but that doesn’t even coverthe half of it.

HAYDEN LORIMER38

Non-human relations andnon-human agencyAs geographers today are coming to realize, it is important to trace the different forms ofrelation and connection that exist between thehuman and what is referred to increasingly as‘the non-human’. Such a project has thepotential to radically alter the way that youconfigure the everyday world around you, inways reaching far beyond the bounds of ourintroductory exercise about personal patterns of consumption, and that demand new mind-maps to navigate by. Rethinking relationshas real kinds of analytical and materialconsequence, redrawing what we understand asthe very constitution, and the basic boundaries,of a world of ‘humans’, ‘non-humans’ and agreat medley of other ‘things’ that make up thematerial culture of everyday life. If these wordsalready begin to read like a significant challengeto generally accepted values – by decentring ourseparate condition as human beings – then thatis no accident. The direction of travel incurrent geographical thought is away from thecherished idea of sovereign species (or what I’ll later on refer to as ‘human exceptionalism’and ‘ontological separatism’) and towards oneof a world populated by post-human entities,like ‘hybrids’, ‘cyborgs’ and ‘monsters’(Whatmore, 2002; Davies, 2003). Why is that?Well, in truth, these days it’s not easy to saywhere the human ends and the non-humanbegins. As scientific visionaries plan possiblefutures for radically different kinds of life onEarth, with new biotech redesigns based ongenetic sequencing, and contemplate grandplans for the geo-engineering of earth andatmospheric systems, our long-standingappreciation of organisms and physicalphenomena as things with an individualexistence, identifiably separate and sealed, is being buffeted about. The future is no longer the heady stuff of science fiction (as it

undoubtedly was for your parents’ generation).A tumbledown world is widely predicted andprojected, rather than a perfect one. Elementsof it have even arrived early. And what’s still tocome does not promise to be a simple matter.

The trends in post-human geographicalthought that this chapter explores are onesplacing in question generally acceptedorthodoxies about ontology, that is to say thevery nature and reality of existence. Accordingto post-human principles, rather than bodies or matter being conceived in terms of fixed,essential states, their properties are instead to be understood as vital and always in flux. Toacknowledge this restlessness and vitality is alsoto accept that non-human entities have real andsignificant agency. Whether we like it or not,other living things and artificially intelligentsystems have the potential to act up, to biteback, to spread virally or with volatility, toundermine the great certainties of human will,to evade or corrupt original designs, or simplyto move beyond our full control.

Such observations about ontology and agencymight be rooted in questions of existentialphilosophy, but their implications are deeplypolitical. Depending on your view, they holdsignificant promise or pose real threats. Theyre-make us as ‘human becomings’, rather thanhuman beings. They open up new horizons,where genomic data (like DNA profiles) andID biometrics might be the sort of evidenceused to tell us why we are the way we are. They also topple – or just gently nudge – usfrom an elevated and exceptional position,based on an age-old assumption about the all-powerful dominion that humans hold overnature. These are really big considerations totake on. Should some reassurance be necessaryas we delve deeper into the world of humanand non-human relations, it might provehelpful if I elaborate on a new typology of non-humans and hybrid entities. We can

HUMAN–NON-HUMAN 39

figure this as something akin to a contemporaryversion of the medieval bestiary (see Figure 3.1)or compendium of living creatures and fabledbeings.

For a start, this will mean reconfiguring somestandard disciplinary labels and acceptedclassificatory terms – those first enshrined inschool classrooms and still in common usage inuniversity lecture theatres. So, what happens ifwe expand the domain of our given subjectarea, contemporary Human Geography, so thatit becomes a ‘more-than-human geography’(Braun, 2005)? That would be a version of thesubject with its parameters stretched to betteraccommodate the great tangle of spatial andtemporal relations we humans have with otherkinds of living organism, materials, objects and a host of other ‘things’ besides, taking placein a vast array of settings. What would the

‘more-than . . .’ version of Human Geographyinclude? Just to begin, numbered here would bethe entire animal kingdom, all fauna inclusiveof birds, fish and insects. Every kind of floratoo: plants and trees, mosses and algal blooms,fruit and vegetables. But then what of livingthings that are less easily mapped upon, ortracked across a landscape, operating at a microor molecular scale, perhaps internal to bodies?They need accounting for too. So thegeography unfolding is one also inclusive of the bacteria and the bacillus, the germ and thegenetically modified life form. After all, in the twenty-first century, the pervasive presenceof biotechnology has begun to normalize to adegree where public attitudes seem increasinglytolerant (or unquestioning) about the mostfundamental kinds of change. Biotechinnovations range from crops of Canola,engineered to be tolerant of herbicides andpesticides, to ‘Enviropig™’ (see Figure 3.2), anenhanced line of livestock with a capability todigest plant phosphorous more efficiently andless toxically.

HAYDEN LORIMER40

Figure 3.1 An illustrated page from a bestiary: an ancient kind of book containing descriptions intext and image of all sorts of animals, real andimaginary, monstrous and fabulous. Creatures werenot described in scientific terms, but rather inhumorous or imaginative ways, sometimes withmoral judgements cast on aspects of non-humanbehaviour. Credit: British Library

Figure 3.2 Enviropig™ is a genetically enhancedstrain of swine, derived from the Yorkshire pig.Biotechnological intervention has altered thecreature’s digestive process so that the manureproduced from cereal grain consumption has lowerphosphorous content. The manure can then bespread on farmland with less environmental risk of phosphorous leaching into freshwater ponds,streams and rivers, leading to reductions in waterquality or fish populations. Credit: © 2012University of Guelph – All Rights Reserved

And there’s more space required yet. Thecategory of the ‘more-than-human’ must alsoencompass non-human beings that, while notbeing fully sentient or necessarily organic inorigin, are nonetheless active and dynamicforms that significantly shape the conditions of contemporary living. Non-human agencyflourishes, in everything from the yeasts that risein bread to fruit crops that fall from trees, in thetides generating supplies of renewable energy to the pulses that transmit electrical power toindustrial destinations and domestic households(Bennett, 2010). The more-than-human realmmust also take in genetic data and chemicalcompounds, the classic experimental apparatusof pipettes and petri dishes, through to laser-guided neuroscience. Witness the fact thatsome geographers now research in the companyof scientists who are operating on the frontiers of experimental biomedical science wheretrans-species mutants proliferate (Davis, inpress), or developing programmes for animalconservation through species ‘back-breeding’(Lorimer and Driesson, in press). Still morecapacity is necessary for entities from this ‘more-than . . .’ world. It must take in the hostof machines, mechanical and digital (from robotmilking machines for dairy cows to unmanned military drones). It must encompass softwareenvironments (from android apps to iCloudsand online social networks) now so very deeplyprogrammed into the fabrics and rhythms of life as to sometimes seem inseparable from thevery core of existence. As I sit here typing, the smart device nestled snug in my pocketgently vibrated, as if to verify the modernmaxim that ‘you’re never alone with a phone’.

In certain instances, transplanted or implantedbiomedical technologies operate internal tobodies (maintaining stabilities in heart-rate ormood), or they can work as sensory fixes andanatomical add-ons, augmenting the capacitiesand competencies of naturally evolved humanform. To illustrate one such socio-technical

advance, consider the case of Oscar Pistorius,South African track athlete, gold-medallistparalympian and first ever paralympic athlete to qualify for the Olympic Games (see Figure3.3). A double amputee, dubbed ‘TheBladerunner’ and ‘the fastest man on no legs’,Pistorius runs using Cheetah Flex-Foot carbonfibre transtibial artificial limbs, fitted below


Figure 3.3 Oscar Pistorius is an athlete with adifference, who poses interesting questions for theworlds of sport, law and ethics. Hi-tech prosthetics,fitted to his kneecaps, enable him to compete at thehighest levels of international track competition withable-bodied athletes. In 2012, his personal best forrunning 400m stands at 45.07 seconds. Credit:Getty Images

the kneecap. In the process, he troublesinternationally accepted rules, set to ensure that competition takes place on a ‘level playingfield’. Sporting arbitrators and authorities areanxious that the pioneering design of hisprosthetics could actually place Pistorius at a freakish advantage when running against able-bodied athletes. Perhaps the Bladerunner is blazing a trail for other ‘cyborg-athletes’ whoyet might perform superhuman feats, rewritethe record books and win the human race.Hybrid anatomical designs are not always soglamorous or so quick to grab headlines. It isnow standard practice for dentists to offer a patient the option of a cow bone implant as part of a surgical procedure for fusing areplacement denture to a remaining tooth root.Whether cosmetic, commercial or biomedical,this is only one in an increasingly diverse rangeof treatments and interventions available that

depend on trans-species fusions to rebuild,regenerate and replace parts of bodies.

A point could be reached where, quite properly,questions need to be asked about the possibleextent of this experiment in relational thinking.What is to be left out from the category of non-human beings? Is it a case of everythingand the kitchen sink? Where do these complexmaterial assemblages of related stuff stop? Is itactually possible to differentiate between sortsof being? Surely, of necessity, there must besome spatial and temporal limits established,otherwise wouldn’t everything end up beingconnected to everything else? Where and howto place spatial limits around the interactions of human and non-human is an importantconsideration for geographers, and some of themore conceptually driven thinking that canenable this to happen is introduced in the next section.

HAYDEN LORIMER42

• ‘More-than-human geographies’ is a label that invites a full disciplinary rethink about thehybrid forms that life seems increasingly to take, and about how multivariate entities arerelated to one another.

• The agency of non-human animals, objects and entities is a phenomenon being treatedseriously by geographers, based on a growing recognition that we humans are not in solecontrol of social situations.

• Thinking about how environments and situations happen in relational terms can beenlightening, but simultaneously it is worth wondering about the spatial and social reach ofthese relations.

SUMMARY

Into the mangle of post-humanism In recent years, a variety of big ideas has beenutilized by geographers who are thinking aboutdiverse assemblies of human and non-humanentities. Arguably, it is along the threshold of

human–non-human existence that some ofgeography’s most inventive thinking ishappening. Some of this originality draws on the discipline’s own intellectual heritage,though it also reflects a lively traffic in ideaswith other subject areas, like anthropology,sociology and philosophy. To begin with,

encountering these exchanges can be a fairlydaunting business, partly because it meansbecoming reasonably literate in unfamiliar sortsof language. This section will begin that task bymapping out three key conceptual influencesand highlighting some of the new geographiesthat are being produced as a result.

The emergence of ‘new animal geographies’(Emel and Wolch, 1998; Philo and Wilbert,2000) is a good place to turn to first. This field ofstudy reminded many geographers of the needfor a far greater understanding of the spacing of the lives of non-human animals in HumanGeographies, and encouraged a subtlerappreciation of the placing of the lives of humansin animal geographies. The subjects of theserelations range all the way from wolves(Brownlow, 2000) to foxes (Woods, 2000), pet dogs (Howell, 2000) to feral cats (Griffiths et al., 2000). Sometimes concerned with animalsas symbolic representations and sometimes assubstantial lively things, this work ensured that –whatever the nature of the relation encountered –matters of social power and moral–ethicalconcern were kept to the fore. Such studies ofinter-species relations have since extended toinclude other kinds of non-human agencies and biotechnical assemblages. The ‘hybridgeographies’ written about by Lewis Holloway(2007; 2009) and Carol Morris (2009) are thoseemployed in the commercial breeding of farmlivestock. They show how the genetic revolutionhas created entirely new spaces and scales ofknowledge, meaning that cows are verydifferently understood as creatures. They considersuch developments as a powerful expression of‘biopower’, a concept that originates with MichelFoucault, a French philosopher, relocated, so as to include animal lives. Biopower captures the human will to regulate conditions of livingand the nature of life itself.

Second, geographers have learned someimportant lessons from social anthropology

about the ways that the lifeworlds of humans and non-humans are enmeshed or co-constituted. The ‘relational ecology’ of TimIngold (2000; 2011) has had a telling effect.Drawing on ethnographic observations of thelifestyles of non-Western, indigenous peoples,Ingold explains the cosmological beliefs thatinform systems of environmental perception inthese worlds. Here, animals, birds, trees, rivers,weather and humans are all ‘persons’, whomight come to share in each other’s wisdoms,sometimes even shifting identities and bodies asthey do so. This makes indigenous knowledgesystems and languages about the skies, sea andland among the world’s most ancient, but alsoshows how well attuned indigenous ideas are toprevailing environmental theories concernedwith ontological hybridity and fluidity. ‘Oldways’ that originate in the lived experiences and practical skills required for the upkeep of extended communities of humans and non-humans serve to remind us that noteverything is new under the sun. Geographershave taken these ideas on different travels,exploring nearby worlds and familiarlandscapes, the kinds found in fruit orchards(Jones and Cloke, 2002) and among herdanimals (Lorimer, 2006), showing the meshingtogether of agencies into local swirls of life.

Finally, when it comes to challenging theprinciples of ‘human exceptionalism’ and‘ontological separatism’, Bruno Latour, aFrench sociologist, has his own ideas. LikeIngold’s, these imports have been highlyinfluential in geography. Latour offers up a powerful argument about the state ofhumankind: ‘we have never been modern’(1993). By this provocation, Latour means toexpose something he believes has been hidingin plain sight for centuries. Namely, that themodel separating ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ is a falseintellectual construct. Instead of imposing thismodel to claim power and making distinctions,we need to apprehend worlds as they actually


are. That is, as a succession of fabricatedenvironments, comprising human and non-human beings, involved in spatiallydistributed interactions, normally throughsocially equivalent conditions. Latour’sparticular way of thinking places greatestemphasis on the practical relations existingbetween actors and agents and intermediaryobjects and technologies. It is attentive to asocial realm made up of networks, circulationsand translations. It has been applied, rather likea helpful tool or template, to all manner ofsocio-technical spaces and ordinary situations.He once used it to explain the operations of anentire public transportation system, affordingagency to its constituent parts (Latour, 1996).Some geographers have taken up his toolkit,using it to explain the ways that water voleconservation happens (Hinchliffe et al., 2005),how the hunting of foxes has been representedin the British countryside (Woods, 2000) andhow elephants were hunted in the BritishEmpire (Lorimer and Whatmore, 2009). As well as scrambling nature and culture,Latourian thinking can break down all mannerof other dualisms: organic/inorganic,inside/outside, architectural/environmental,biological/artificial. What results from thismelding together of social, natural andtechnical environments? Bruno Latour haslikened what results to a ‘parliament of things’.In so doing, he aims to provide the practicalimpetus for a new social ideal, where emergingsciences and technologies can be subject topublic scrutiny, and as a consequence becomemore transparent.

In different ways, the proliferation of big ideashas helped more-than-human geographers tograpple with very tricky questions concerningthe extent to which it is ever possible to claimto fully know animality, and how to writeabout the agency of non-human entities. Todifferent degrees, this work still struggles withconcerns raised about anthropomorphism, or

what is called ‘x-morphism’ in the case of otherobjects (Laurier and Philo, 1999). Anxietiesalso remain about what ultimately is bound to remain unknowable, since for all the inter-species affinities that are detected, there isstill a ‘beastliness of being animal’ that mustalso be respected. In the following section, I want to turn the focus of attention to analternative kind of experiment told as a trueanimal story that will provide some imaginativeresources to work through these ethical andmoral conundrums.

‘One pig’: the animal–art–agriculture–advocacyassemblageHaving decided to buy himself a pig, Matthew Herbert took a trip to market. Well,sort of. Truth be told, this most traditional kind of transaction took place by more modernmeans. Herbert’s own record label ‘Accidental’(a micro-operation run out of the second floorof Unit 11, Block A, Greenwich Quarry,London) agreed to pay £100 to take legalownership of one pig, selected from a litter ofeleven piglets born to a sow on a family-runpiggery in Kent, England. You can see the invoice (No. 1421) (see Figure 3.4),processed in March 2009. Over the next 20months, Herbert amassed an archive of fieldand farm recordings that track the lifecycle ofthe pig, all the way from birth to slaughter to plate. As his purchase steadily put on thepork, Herbert kept a blog, documenting itsdevelopment and describing its health andgeneral welfare. In the process, one pigmorphed into ‘One Pig’: an unlikely centrefoldstar in an experiment combining recordedmusic and live performance, art and appetite,animal-rights activism and animal husbandry,travelling all the way from farm to fork, andthen to places beyond. Clearly, the life and the

HAYDEN LORIMER44

death of this pig is going to require a little moreexplaining . . .

The first thing to clear up about MatthewHerbert is that he is no pig farmer. Nor is he ageographer. He is a musician – criticallyacclaimed among the cognoscenti of a genreknown as ‘electronica’ (see Figures 3.5 and 3.6)– and he’s a meat-eater too. Herbert has ahistory of audio experimentation, especiallywhen it comes to sourcing the sounds that areused in his recordings. Some years ago, hewrote an influential artists’ manifesto entitled

‘Personal Contract for the Composition ofMusic’ (PCCOM), which appeals for recordingartists to avoid using drum machines and pre-existing samples in their work. Herbert suggeststhat sounds should come live-from-life.Sticking to his principles, he uses everyday lifein the twenty-first century as a sound palette:‘With the invention of the sampler, I can nowexplicitly root my work in the literal, criticalpresent. I can describe the real in the frame ofthe imaginary’ (www.matthewherbert.com/biography).


Figure 3.4 Just as there aremany ways ‘to skin a cat’, there are lots of methods forpurchasing a pig. Here isdocumentary evidence ofMatthew Herbert becoming the proud owner of ‘One Pig’.Credit: Matthew Herbert/SolarManagement Ltd

F A 0 D19 FEB 2010

To: Accidental Records Ltd Date: 8th Feb 2010

2nd FloorUnit 11, Block A Invoice No: 1421

Greenwich Quarry

London

SE83EY

INVOICE

Qty Details Total

1.0 Pig 100.00 100.00

You are welcome to settle this invoice by BACS.Please post/fax/email your remittance to the details shown above.

PLEASE MAKE CHEQUES PAYABLE TO

TOTAL TO PAY] £100.00]

www.matthewherbert.com/biography

www.matthewherbert.com/biography

This creative vision for truth-telling has shapedhis recording practice ever since. On TheMechanics of Destruction, Herbert samplesMcDonald’s products and Gap merchandise asa protest against corporate globalism. Plat DuJour, another activist album, contains one trackof compressed sounds that retell ‘TheTruncated Life of a Modern IndustrialisedChicken’. The album One Pig pushed thepolitical–ethical project of human–non-humanrelations further still. It is a musical portrait ofan animal bred, ultimately, for humanconsumption. In the process, Herbert attemptsvarious things: to make more meaningful thelives of animals reared for meat; to force us toask critical questions about the global meatindustry; and to make more transparent thedirect consequences of our appetites andactions. So is it a recording to relish? You can decide for yourself by listening at:www.matthewherbert.com (or search for ‘OnePig’ on YouTube). I should be honest. Sometracks don’t necessarily make for the easiest oflistens. It ranks as the kind of thing musiccritics tend to describe as ‘challenging’. Splicedthrough the crunchy beats and melodic blipsare classic farmyard sounds (hay shufflingunder foot and trotter), darker echoing squeals,distorted grunts, a chorus of competing snortsand oinks, mechanical clunks and clangs, a medley of manipulated scraping, sucking,sipping and slurping sounds, a knife beingsharpened (then cleaned, perhaps?), a hacksawcutting (for legal reasons, Herbert was not able to record actual sounds from the pig’sslaughter), human voices, kitchen clatter,chomping and chewing noises and theappreciative kind of exhalation (‘aaaahhhhhhh’)made by a happy eater whose taste buds are being given an extra special treat. Thebutchering of One Pig was announced plainlyon Herbert’s blog: ‘Wednesday, February 10,2010 at 11:18PM. The pig is now dead.’ Track by track, the affect of listening can be

comfortably appealing, sometimes funny, butalso disorienting and disturbing.

The afterlife of this individual pig keeps onhappening, taking diverse forms of culturalexpression and occupying unexpected spaces.The album artwork (see Figure 3.7) displays arange of lavish dishes cooked with the pig’smeat (‘ballotine of pork shoulder with tomatojelly’, ‘five-spice braised pig’s head with borageand organic summer vegetables’) and a selectionof by-products derived from body parts (pigtrotter candelabra, pig fat candles, a pigskindrum). The drum was one of the percussion

HAYDEN LORIMER46

Figure 3.5/Figure 3.6 Matthew Herbert keepingcompany with pigs during field recordings at apiggery. Such intimacy in relations betweenhumans and livestock is not new; in the pre-modernworld, a swineherd was a person who looked afterpigs. Credit: Matthew Herbert/Solar ManagementLtd

www.matthewherbert.com

instruments used for a string of live datesduring recent European and UK tours. In theseperformances, Herbert’s quintet appeared onstage dressed in traditional butcher’s outfits(shirt-and-tie, knee-length white coat). Hedescribed the shows as an alternative kind ofremembrance service, the music built frommemories of the ghost-pig, and backed by slideprojections from its former life (a bit like afarm-family album). Digital and materialtechnologies were crucial to the spectacle of pigre-presentation. Performances centred on the‘StyHarp’, a custom-built instrument formed ofglowing red wires that mark the perimeter wallsof an otherwise invisible pigpen. It is played byplucking and pulling, actions that activate aseries of sound modules. Part way through theset, a chef joined the musicians on stage. Thesizzling sound of pork frying was amplified.The smell of meat cooking filled the venue.

Audience participation was encouraged. As afinale, taste samples were dished out to themost curious on the dance floor, an actrendering One Pig as an assemblage of animal-art-agriculture-advocacy.


Figure 3.7 Some of the culinary products of OnePig’s life and Herbert’s artistic labours. Credit:Matthew Herbert/Solar Management Ltd

• A range of contrasting theories and concepts currently inform geographical thought abouthow it is possible to reconfigure relations, persons and entities as ‘post-human’.

• When it comes to a world of hybrids, capitalism, compassion and creativity are all motorsof invention, but the formation of new entities can occur as an accidental event too.

• It is possible to identify possibilities and problems in the post-human condition, though itseems highly unlikely that a universal moral–ethical judgement can be cast. Instead there willbe local geographies of reaction, ranging from opposition to enchantment.

SUMMARY

Conclusion: Betweencreaturely wonder andanimal welfareIt is very difficult to say with any degree ofmoral certainty if One Pig was luckier than theanonymous millions that are reared annually inagro-industry and then processed through the

global meat industry. Quite possibly it was, inits short life. But for all the creaturely wonderengendered, ultimately this single animal befell the same fate. Arguably, the creation of ambiguous feeling is precisely the point ofHerbert’s more-than-human project.

It seems only proper that this chapter finds away to end by returning to where it began, with

gut feelings about non-human animals . . . asfoodstuffs (Highmore, 2011). At present,commercially reared pigs really are big businesson the world stage, in spite of recent food scares(Mizelle, 2011; Law and Mol, 2008). Pork is akey foodstuff catering to growing appetites andshifting dietary patterns among the expandingpopulations of Asia. Recently, Tulip (the UK’slargest maker of Danepak Bacon and Spam)signed a £50 million pork export deal withChina, the world’s biggest pork market. TheGuardian newspaper reported that:

Much of the exported pork will be offal,tripe, trotters, ears and other parts of the so-called ‘fifth quarter’ – the parts evenmeat-eating Brits tend to turn their nose up at, but the Chinese savour.

[The Guardian, 2012]

To me, this seems like capitalism in its purest form. As a globalized rationale forslaughterhouse efficiency the visceral concept ofthe ‘fifth quarter’ recalls the earliest days of thepork industry when American meat packersboasted about how they had found a use for‘everything but the squeal’. As well as pork, UKexports of live breeding pigs to China are beingstepped up. Up to 900 at a time travel east by jumbo jet, on a non-stop twelve-hour flight, then ‘once breeding herds have beenestablished, farmers send bottles of semen tokeep the production line going, supplementedby a new batch of sows every year’ (Kollewe,2012). What we have here are sites, flows and things (in the shape of farming practices,health protocols, live animals, trade emissaries,rendered meat, food safety officers and bodilyfluids) all on the move around the globe. ForEmma Roe, this is a situation raising criticalissues around standards of animal welfare andabout the material realities of agri-industrial

production. Her unflinching account of a pig ‘slaughter event’ contains genuinelydiscomforting details:

The pig carcass is put in hot water at 60degrees Celsius to loosen its hairs. The pig iswet and slippery when it comes out of thehot bath. Some smaller pig carcasses sliponto the floor and are dragged back againonto the table. Then the carcass is put in abig tumbler to dry and ‘rub off ’ as manyhairs as possible. A pig has edible skin, so thehairs are meticulously removed, and as littlewater as possible is used to clean the meat(should any faecal matter slip out of therectum as the whole of the digestive systemis removed).

(Roe, 2010: 271)

The graphic journey that Roe takes her readerson, along the brimming gutters of the foodfactory, was one once undertaken by UptonSinclair (1906) in his novel The Jungle, and istoday rehearsed by celebrity chefs and televisionfilm crews.

We might feel like we know that script. Butwhat stuff really matters here? It seems thateven at the same time as the categories ofhuman and non-human blur (or all butdissolve), a sense for what is humane andinhumane must be protected. As sentienthuman-animals we feel the suffering of others.That offers us very good grounds forestablishing a new relational ethics that canencompass more of life that is more-than-human. We must also acknowledge that theserelational ethics will shift in shape andexpression, according to the multiple beingsenrolled into their constitution and the locallyglobal spaces in which they keep on takingplace.

HAYDEN LORIMER48


1. What parts of the post-human condition are you comfortable about, and what bits make youmost concerned? Ask yourself why.

2. What happens to your normal daily round of work and leisure activities if you try to rethinkthem as assemblages of hybrid entities, enrolled together by relations and connections?

3. Discuss whether the concept of more-than-human geographies might have significantimplications for physical geography.

4. Discuss how the experience of listening to Matthew Herbert’s ‘One Pig’ recordings madeyou feel.

5. Read through a daily newspaper (online or hard copy) and try to identify an article orfeature that is concerned with something that poses a challenge to the idea of sealed-inhuman and non-human entities.

DISCUSSION POINTS

Davies, G. (2003) ‘A geography of monsters?’ In: Geoforum 34(4) 409–12.

A short commentary piece that throws open the possibility of thinking about the world as populated bymonsters, old and new.

Lorimer, H. (2006) ‘Herding memories of humans and animals’. In: Environment and Planning D: Societyand Space 24(4) 497–518.

A paper that explores how it is possible to entwine the life stories of the humans and animals that makeup a herd and the place of indigenous knowledge systems in this social arrangement.

Roe, E. (2010) Ethics and the non-human: the matterings of animal sentience in the meat industry. In: B.Anderson and P. Harrison (eds.) Taking-place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. London:Ashgate, 261–83.

A book chapter offering a detailed and insightful consideration of the ethics of the meat industry. It drawson fieldwork findings from inside the slaughterhouse and leaves very little to the imagination.

Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Culture, Spaces. London: Sage.

An excellent, radical and influential book that explains the theoretical conditions for thinking ofgeographies as hybrid.

FURTHER READING

HAYDEN LORIMER50


As well as the full album version, One Pig’s life recordings have been compressed into a three-minute-longmontage track, available on digital format. Alternatively, courtesy of Micachu, you can listen to an EP ofdancefloor-friendly remixes of original One Pig tracks.

WEBSITE


IntroductionThe term modern has been used for manycenturies to distinguish a new social order from previous ones, and ideas of the modernare most commonly defined through theiropposition to the old and the traditional. This ‘oppositional definition’ has taken many forms. In post-Roman Europe the term modernus was used to distinguish aChristian present from a pagan past (Johnstonet al., 2000), while in the late seventeenthcentury the quarrel between the ‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’ spilled out from a debateover literature to embrace ideas of religion and social issues, causing the term ‘modern’ to enter widespread public usage for the firsttime. Towards the end of the eighteenthcentury, the term modern acquired anothermeaning, this time denoting a qualitative and not just a chronological difference frompervious eras. To live in a modern age denotednot just newness but also progress andbetterment. Linked to the Enlightenmentsearch for rational scientific thought, the ideabegan to emerge that humans could changehistory for the better, and that progress couldbe controlled and ordered – rather than history

being done to people in a manner that was preordained

Throughout the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies this notion of modernity as progressheld sway (see also Chapter 32). Rapid changesin economy, technology, culture and societymeant that, in Europe at least, each generationcould claim to be qualitatively different fromprevious ones. Stephen Kern, for instance,summarizes the changes that were taking placeat the end of the nineteenth century:

From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes intechnology and culture created distinctivenew modes of thinking about andexperiencing time and space. Technologicalinnovations including the telephone,wireless, telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle,automobile and airplane established thematerial foundation for this reorientation;independent cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness novel,psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly.The result was a transformation of thedimensions of life and thought.

(Kern, 1983: 1–2)

CHAPTER 4MODERN–POSTMODERN Mark Goodwin

Our experiences of these ‘transformations in lifeand thought’ became labelled as modernity(Berman, 1982). Their artistic, cultural andaesthetic expression was called modernism. So,while ideas of being modern can be traced backseveral centuries, notions of modernity andmodernism coalesced around a very particulartwentieth-century experience – one to beespecially found in the emerging cosmopolitanurban centres of Berlin, Paris and New York.The impacts of modernity and modernismspread out from these cultural heartlands toinfluence us all. Even at the beginning of thetwenty-first century, the built environment thatmost of us inhabit has largely been shaped bymodernism. The houses we live in, the officesand factories we work in, the chairs we sit onand the tables we sit at, and the graphic designwe see around us – on shop fronts and innewspapers and magazines – have all beencreated by the aesthetics and ideology ofmodernist design.

Towards the end of the twentieth century,however, modernism was challenged by a newmovement which significantly did not labelitself as another stage in modernity. Instead itself-consciously proclaimed itself to bepostmodern – to be different from, andmoving beyond modernity. In the arts andliterature, in philosophy and in the socialsciences, postmodernism and postmodernitybegan to flourish. As the geographer MichaelDear put it in 1994 ‘Postmodernity iseverywhere, from literature, design andphilosophy, to MTV, ice cream and underwear’(1994: 3).

What I want to do in the rest of this chapter isto trace the continuities and discontinuitiesbetween the modern and the postmodern andto sketch how geography and geographers havebeen influenced by, and in turn influenced,both movements.

MARK GOODWIN52

Marhall Berman’s description of ModernityThere is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity’. To be modern is to find ourselves in anenvironment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves andthe world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundariesof geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense,modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle andcontradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, asMarx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

(From Berman, 1982: 15)

CASE STUDY

Modernism and post-modernism: continuitiesand discontinuitiesDear (1994: 3-4) identifies three componentsof postmodernism and postmodernity – style, epoch and method. We will use thisclassification to trace and analyse the shift fromthe modern to the postmodern.

StyleWhile we can trace the shift from a modern toa postmodern style across art, literature andmusic, architecture has become paradigmatic

for discussing such a shift. Indeed, it has oftenbeen used as the starting point for discussionsof postmodernity more generally, perhapsbecause it provides a very visible and publicpresence of changes in style. It also provides animmediate link to the concerns of geographersinterested in the changing form and function ofthe built environment. The modern movementcertainly stamped its authority on thearchitecture of the age: at the core of themovement lay the idea that the world had to becompletely rethought and that following thecarnage of the First World War, a more rationaland enlightened society could be built – bothsocially and architecturally. The result was a setof sweeping changes in urban design, both in

MODERN–POSTMODERN 53

Figure 4.1 Villa La Roche, designed by Le Corbusier.

terms of planning whole neighbourhoods anddesigning individual buildings. The latter camefirst, with initial appearances of architecturalmodernism being confined to small-scale infillbuildings. The famous Villa La Roche, forinstance, designed in 1925 by Le Corbusier,perhaps the most famous of all modernistarchitects, for a Swiss banker and art collector,lies at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Parisiandistrict of Auteuil, still surrounded bynineteenth-century housing (see Figure 4.1).

In the 1930s, inspired by the famous Bauhausmovement, this modern style of architecturebegan to be used to design and constructhousing estates, office blocks and wholecommunities. It reached its zenith with thelarge-scale urban renewal schemes of the 1950sand 1960s which can be found in almost everymajor city in the western world. The watchwords of this urban design were rationality,order and efficiency, and the result was atechnocratic and industrialized ordering ofpublic space. Figure 4.2 contrasts an early LeCorbusier vision for the complete reordering ofParis (never built of course!) with the layout of Stuyvesant Town in New York, a privatehousing community which was builtimmediately after the Second World War. The

universalism of modern architecture means thatthe same forms can be found across the globe,the result of new construction techniques andthe mass use of ‘new’ materials such as glass,steel and concrete. Somewhat ironically, by the end of the 1960s, modernist architecturecame to be seen as drab, functional andcommonplace and had lost its early rationale asa revolutionary opposition to the traditionalforms of what the modern movement perceivedas the reactionary nineteenth century.

Reaction to modernist architecture formed part of the anti-modernist movements whichdeveloped towards the end of the 1960s. Theseeventually crystallized around the emergence of a new postmodern style. In opposition to the austerity and formalism of modernarchitecture, postmodernism developed as amore playful alternative, emphasizing pasticheand collage. Rather than emphasizing theuniversalism of functional modernism,postmodern architecture was centred aroundvernacular and traditional styles, often rootedin regional traditions, with the result thatdiversity and pluralism replaced uniformity. Anearly example of such architecture was providedby the AT&T building in New York (now theSony Building), designed by Philip Johnson

MARK GOODWIN54

Figure 4.2 (a) Le Corbusier’s dream for Paris in the 1920s; (b) the achieved design for Stuyvesant Town,New York. Credit: (a) © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013; (b) Alec Jordan (CreativeCommons)

and completed in 1984 (see Figure 4.3). Here the playfulness of postmodernism iscelebrated by a pediment at the top resemblingChippendale furniture and an arched entrysome seven stories high. As constructiontechniques developed, architects began to createeven more distinct building forms. Figure 4.4shows the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles,designed by Frank Gehry; the contrast with thetraditional modernist towers in the backgroundis stark.


Figure 4.3 AT&T building in New York, an earlyexample of postmodern architecture, with moreaustere and functional modernist blocks adjacentand behind. Credit: Getty Images

Figure 4.4 The Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in the foreground, with more traditional and functionalmodernist office towers in the background. Credit: Getty Images

EpochThe surface differences between thearchitectural styles of modernism andpostmodernism are clear to see. They arereinforced by other cultural differences inliterary styles and in photography and design(Harvey, 1989; Huyssen, 1984). The questionis whether these are enough to signal a radicalbreak with past social and cultural trends andthereby form a distinct epoch following that of modernity. One key problem for thoseattempting to chart such a break is thedifficulty of theorizing contemporary trends. As Dear puts it:

any landscape is simultaneously composed ofobsolete, current, and emergent artifacts: buthow do we begin to codify and understandthis variety? And at what point is theaccumulated evidence sufficient to announcea radical break with the past? The idea thatwe are living in ‘new times’ is seductive, butthere are no clear answers to these questions.

(Dear, 1994: 3)

Geographers have played a key role in thesearch for such answers. In particular, twoextremely influential books, both published in1989, placed space, uneven development andurbanism at the centre of these debates. Thefirst, David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity

became a bestseller across the humanities and social sciences. The second, Ed Soja’sPostmodern Geographies consciously set out to reassert the role of space in social theorymore generally. Both emphasized the role ofgeography and uneven development as activemoments in the construction of bothmodernity and postmodernity, rather than assimple reflections of them. Harvey had themore critical take on ideas of postmodernity asa distinct new epoch. His understanding wastraced through the four parts of the book. Part one examines the major themes in thetransition from modernism to postmodernismacross elements as diverse as urban planning,painting, literature and music. But Harveydiffers from many academics that haveidentified similar changes by relating them tounderlying shifts in the capitalist economy. Thesecond part continues this theme, by settingout and analysing a political–economictransition away from Fordism and situating therise of postmodern representations within thistransition. Here again, the cultural practices of postmodernity are related to underlyingeconomic shifts. For Harvey, the shift towardsflexible accumulation helps to explain whypostmodernity often appears as fleeting andephemeral. But for Harvey, while the surfaceappearances of capitalism may have changed, itsunderlying logic, which leads to a constant set

MARK GOODWIN56

• Modernism developed in opposition to the perceived tradition and conservatism ofnineteenth-century art, literature and architecture.

• Modernism developed to encompass a global style, emphasizing universality, functionalismand order.

• Postmodernism developed in opposition to the perceived austerity of modernism andemphasized diversity, playfulness and plurality.

SUMMARY

of crises, remains the same. In Part three of thebook, Harvey examines different conceptions of space and time under modernity andpostmodernity. Again, he tends to highlight thesimilarities between the two rather than thedifferences by emphasizing that both modernand postmodern periods are dominated bywhat Harvey calls ‘time–space compression’.This is not just about ever-quicker forms ofglobal communication and travel, but alsorefers to the ever-accelerated rate at whichcapital has to turnover to make a profit. For Harvey this leads to an accentuation of volatility and ephemerality in fashion,consumer goods and production techniques as well as in ideas, ideologies and values. In this sense, Berman’s idea that modernity ischaracterized by all that is solid meting into air (see Case Study on p. 52) is nowtransferred to postmodernity. In Part fourHarvey merges political, economic and cultural

analyses to produce an understanding which emphasizes the continuing internalcontradictions of capitalism, rather than thecategorical distinction between modernism and postmodernism (see Table 4.1).

Soja stresses the differences of postmodernismfrom modernism, but also refuses to see it as a distinct epoch, preferring instead tocharacterize it ‘as another deep and broadrestructuring of modernity, rather than acomplete break’ (1989: 5). However, Soja usesthe move towards postmodernity to emphasizethe role of space in social thought. This is not just about empirically investigating the new spaces and architectural forms ofpostmodernity, but of building a spatialawareness into the very foundations of socialtheory. According to Soja (1989: 31), thetraditions of the two dominant social theorieswithin modernism – Positivism and Marxism –caused the ‘virtual annihilation of space by time


Ed Soja’s description of postmodernityWith exquisite irony, contemporary Los Angeles has come to resemble more than ever before agigantic agglomeration of theme parks, a lifespace comprised of Disneyworlds. It is a realmdivided into showcases of global village cultures and mimetic American landscapes, all-embracing shopping malls and crafty Main Streets, corporation-sponsored magic kingdoms,high-technology-based experimental prototype communities of tomorrow, attractively packagedplaces for rest and recreation, all cleverly hiding the buzzing workstations and labourprocesses which hold it together. The experience of living here can be extremely diverting andexceptionally enjoyable, especially for those who can afford to remain inside long enough toestablish their own modes of transit and places to rest. And of course, the enterprise has beenenormously profitable over the years. After all, it was built on what began as relatively cheapland, has been sustained by a constantly replenishing army of even cheaper imported labour,is filled with the most modern technological gadgetry, enjoys extraordinary levels of protectionand surveillance, and runs under the smooth aggression of the most efficient managementsystems, almost always capable of delivering what is promised just in time to be useful.

(Soja, 1989: 246)

CASE STUDY

MARK GOODWIN58

Fordist modernity Flexible postmodernity

economies of scale/master code/ hierarchyhomogeneity/detail division of labour

economies of scope/idiolect/anarchy diversity/social division of labour

paranoia/alienation/symptom public housing/monopoly capital

schizophrenia/decentering/desire homelessness/entrepreneurialism

purpose/design/mastery/determinancyproduction capital/universalism

play/chance/exhaustion/indeterminancy fictitious capital/localism

state power/trade unions state welfarism/metropolis

financial power/individualismneo-conservatism/counterurbanization

ethics/money commodityGod the Father/materiality

aesthetics/moneys of accountThe Holy Ghost/immateriality

production/originality/authorityblue collar/avant-gardisminterest group politics/semantics

reproduction/pastiche/eclecticismwhite collar/commercialismcharismatic politics/rhetoric

centralization/totalizationsynthesis/collective bargaining

decentralization/deconstructionantithesis/local contracts

operational management/master codephallic/single task/origin

strategic management/idiolectandrogynous/multiple tasks/trace

metatheory/narrative/depthmass production/class politicstechnical-scientific rationality

language games/image/surfacesmall-batch production/socialmovements/pluralistic otherness

utopia/redemptive art/concentrationspecialized work/collective consumption

heterotopias/spectacle/dispersalflexible worker/symbolic capital

function/representation/signifiedindustry/protestant work ethicmechanical reproduction

fiction/self-reference/signifierservices/temporary contractelectronic reproduction

becoming/epistemology/regulationurban renewal/relative space

being/ontology/deregulationurban revitalization/place

state interventionism/industrializationinternationalism/permanence/time

laissez-faire/deindustrializationgeopolitics/ephemerality/space

Table 4.1 David Harvey’s characterization of modernity and postmodernity – using both political–economic and cultural–ideological relations. (Source: D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1989:340)

in critical social thought’, squeezing geographyout of the picture. But if modernist socialtheory emphasized time, progress and historicaldevelopment, for Soja, postmodernity entailsan analysis of space and uneven development.Like Harvey, Soja makes this manoeuvre byemphasizing the uneven urban and regionaldevelopment entailed in new forms ofeconomic production. He illustrates this in thebook by analysing what he calls ‘the dynamicsof capitalist spatialisation’ (1989: 191) and usesLos Angeles as an exemplary case study of‘postmodern urbanism’. But he does so by

building a new type of urban analysis, afternoting how language and description tends tobe linear and sequential, making it difficult to envisage the simultaneity of past and presentthat is inherent in all landscapes. In his finalchapter on Los Angeles he offers a view fromabove, taking the reader on an imaginary cruisearound the circumference of the sixty-milecircle which encompasses the built-up area ofLA. The Case Study on p. 57 provides anexample of how Soja renders the experience ofpostmodernity especially visible.


• Geographers such as Harvey and Soja have played a key role in seeking to understand thetransition from the modern to the postmodern.

• Both authors conclude that postmodernity is an extension rather than a replacement ofmodernism.

• Both insist on joining political and economic analysis to an understanding of cultural andideological shifts.

• Both use the debate about whether postmodernity is a distinct epoch to reassert theimportance of space in social theory.

SUMMARY

MethodThe third component of modernity andpostmodernity identified by Dear (1994: 3-4) is that of method. Here, Dear is identifyingdifferent ways of viewing and understandingthe world. As we noted earlier, modernism grew out of the enlightenment search for order,rationality and science. Within this search was a concern for uncovering the universal lawswhich underpinned both the physical and the social worlds. In the physical world, such universality is more straightforward, and grand narratives built around a universalunderstanding of gravity or evolution or

relativity or nuclear fusion, are commonplace – if occasionally contested. In matters of thesocial world, things are not so straightforward.The grand social theories of modernism,however, were conducted as if they were.Positivism and Marxism took on the characterof ‘metanarratives’, used by their adherents to explain all kinds of social and economicbehaviour. For the positivists, rational man,acting to optimize his own individual interests,provided the foundation for economics andeconomic development. For Marxists, classstruggle provided the motor for history andhistorical development. The developingdiscipline of geography was also enrolled into

this search for universal laws. For some, likeSoja, it responded too enthusiastically, resultingin what he termed ‘Modern Geography’sfixation on empirical appearances andinvoluted description’ (1989: 51).

Indeed, by the 1960s Human Geography hadembraced a so-called ‘scientific’ approach,which had as its rationale the search foruniversally applicable laws of human behaviour.People were reduced to little more than dots ona map or integers in an equation and were allassumed to operate according to the samegeneral laws – indeed, it was the very search forthese controlling laws that drove this entireapproach. This kind of reasoning dominatedHuman Geography in the 1960s and most ofthe 1970s and generated the search for law-likestatements of order and regularity that could be applied to spatial patterns and processes.Hence the succession of models that appearedin geography over this period, for instance,Christaller’s model of settlement hierarchy,Alonso’s land use model, Zipf ’s rank size rule of urban populations and Weber’s model ofindustrial location. All were an attempt to uselaw-like statements in order to explain andpredict the spatial outcomes of human activity.

One such model that Human Geographersused to explain patterns of flow between two ormore centres was the so-called gravity model.This proposed that we can estimate the spatialinteraction between two regions by multiplyingtogether the mass of the two (equatedconveniently with population size) and dividingit by some function of the distance separatingthem. The model was used to ‘explain’ all kindsof flows, from those of migration to passengertraffic, telephone conversations and commodityflows. Noticeable by their absence are anyreferences to the actual motivations for thebehaviour of the individuals who are migratingor commuting or speaking to each other on thephone or purchasing the commodities. The

freedom to choose one’s behaviour is given nospace whatsoever and people’s actions areassumed to conform to a general pattern, whichis itself based on a model derived from a crudeanalogy with Newton’s law of universalgravitation developed in 1687. Thus what wasoriginally conceived as a way of accounting forthe behaviour of distant bodies in the universewas being used to explain a whole host ofsocial, economic and cultural activities byreference to the two variables of population anddistance. These, and the relation between them,were felt to govern, or control, the rate andnature of population movement.

Postmodernity consciously rejected the search for universal truths and insteademphasized that all knowledge is sociallyproduced by those with particular positions and particular interests. This led to a strategy of deconstruction, ‘a mode of criticalinterpretation that seeks to demonstrate howthe (multiple) positioning of an author (orreader) in terms of class, culture, race, gender,etc., has influenced the writing (and reading) of a text’ (Johnston et al., 2000: 621). Theoutcome was a destabilization of meaning,which in turn cast doubt on the authority ofthose who claimed to be privileged interpreters.Local knowledges were prioritized alongsidescientific ones, and postmodernism sought toundermine the modernist belief that theory canmirror and explain reality. As Dear puts it,‘more than most, therefore, postmodernists,learn to contextualise, to tolerate relativism andto be conscious always of difference’ (1994: 4).However, critics of postmodernism seized onsuch relativism to argue that this amounts to akind of ‘anything goes’ academia, where everysingle viewpoint is equally valid. Geographerswere again at the forefront of these debates asthey sought to understand how the meaningsand interpretations of all kinds of texts – frombooks, to maps, to landscapes – were socially

MARK GOODWIN60

derived and mediated. In the end though it isworth remembering a warning from Dear, that‘in our shifting world, postmodern thought has not removed the necessity for political

and moral judgements: what it has done is to question the basis for such judgements’(1994: 4).


• Modernism and postmodernism contain their own ways of viewing and understanding theworld.

• Modernism has tended to search for universal laws, emphasizing rationality and order.

• Postmodernism has tended to emphasize the relative and socially situated basis of allknowledge claims.

SUMMARY

ConclusionsGeography and geographers have inevitablybeen heavily influenced by the social andcultural movements we know as modernismand postmodernism, both in terms of whatthey have studied and how they have studied it.Geographers have also played leading roles in the interpretation of modernity andpostmodernity and especially in analysingwhether we have passed from one to the other.Putting these two elements together, we cannow see the way in which an explicit concernwith modernity and postmodernityrevolutionized geography in the 1980s and1990s. It caused geographers to ask all kinds ofquestions: about the relationship between thepast and the present; about the relationship

between society and space (see Chapter 2);about the role of space in social theory andsocial change; about diversity and difference,and how they should be rendered visible (seeChapters 5 and 6); and about how we representand understand different types of meanings andinterpretations (see Chapter 9). In many waysthen, debates around notions of the modernand the postmodern presaged a flowering ofgeographical enquiry and a seriousreintegration of Human Geography intobroader debates within social science andphilosophy. The encounter has undoubtedlychanged Human Geography, but HumanGeographers have also changed ourunderstandings of what it means to be modernor postmodern.

1. Choose a geography that is well known to you – for instance, your journey to university, the place where you live, places you have worked – and see if you can find elements ofmodern or postmodern architecture in the built environment.

DISCUSSION POINTS

MARK GOODWIN62

2. Examine a contentious social issue and see how many different interpretations of it you canestablish. Think about why these different voices are there and analyse which ones are mostpowerful.

3. Using particular examples, explore the ways in which cultural and economic change arelinked.

4. Do you think modernity has come to an end?

Berman, M. (2010) All That is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso.

A new edition of a wonderful book which examines the experience of modernity by charting the impactof modernism on art, literature and architecture.

Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Blackwell.

Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso.

The two books which opened up geography’s engagement with debates around modernity andpostmodernity – and which brought a geographical sensitivity to subsequent debates on these themes.

Le Corbusier (1927) Towards a New Architecture. London: The Architectural Press.

Try to find a copy in a library of this English translation of Le Corbusier’s 1923 classic French text Versune Architecture. There is also a new 2008 edition (published by Frances Lincoln Ltd, London) with anintroduction which sets the book in its original context. Read this to understand why modernism gainedsuch a hold for those seeking to build a new world after the First World War by sweeping away thedisorder and chaos of the old one.

Jencks, C. (2007) Critical Modernism – Where is Post Modernism Going? London: Wiley Academy.

A book by one of the doyens of the postmodern movement which provides an overview of bothpostmodernism and its relationship with modernism.

FURTHER READING

Introduction: self-centredgeographies?Some people say that you should not judge abook by its cover. However, it is ofteninteresting to pause and reflect on why books,organizations or in this case subjects such asgeography are represented by particular ‘cover’images. Figure 5.1 shows the cover of the 1994Annual Report of the Royal GeographicalSociety, which is the organization representingacademic and non-academic geographers inBritain. The image was designed to showgeography in a positive light, as a subject thatcauses adventurous individuals to embark onexciting expeditions of learning in which theycan discover the secrets of far-flung places andunderstand the lives of exotically differentpeople. It is the ‘us here’ subjecting the ‘themthere’ to serious geographical scrutiny.

This image, however, unintentionally posesother questions about ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘us’might suggest that Human Geographers cansomehow be categorized as a homogeneousgroup of people, studying our geography in asomewhat standardized way – a bizarresupposition on a number of counts, not leastthe ‘maleness’ of the encounter that isrepresented. The ‘them’ seems to have beenselected on the grounds of their exotic

difference to us. They, too, are in danger ofbeing stereotyped. The strangeness of the placealong with differences in skin colour, language,dress and ‘culture’ seem to be sufficient to markout an appropriately ‘other’ subject of study.‘Us’ encountering ‘them’ is on our terms. Exoticdifference is defined by our mapping out ofpeople and places in the world, and ourassumptions about what is, and what is not, anormal view of life.

Perhaps these questions read too much fromone particular image, especially since theRGS/IBG has subsequently sought to rectify inits output any previous perceptions of social orcultural insensitivity. However, these questionsdo reflect some of the most important themesto have arisen in Human Geography overrecent years. The first is a highlighting andquestioning of the geographical self. Not somany years ago, Human Geographers weretaught to be objective in their studies, so thatanyone else tackling the same subject wouldcome up with the same results. They were, in effect, being positioned as some kind ofscientific automaton whose background,identity, experience, personality and worldviewneeded to be subjugated to the need forobjectivity. The ‘I’ was personal pronoun non grata when it came to doing geography.However, the self does matter, and does

CHAPTER 5SELF–OTHER Paul Cloke

PAUL CLOKE64

Figure 5.1 Annual Report of the Royal Geographical Society, 1994. Credit: Royal Geographical Society(with IBG)

influence the geography we practise. We dohave different place- and people-experiences,different political and spiritual worldviews,different aspects to our identity and nature, andall of these factors will influence how we see theworld, why our geographical imaginations arefired up by particular issues and, ultimately,what and how we choose to study.

The danger of not acknowledging and reflectingon the self is not only that we can unknowinglybuy into other people’s orthodoxies, but alsothat we can assume that everyone sees the sameworld as we do. We can, thereby, impose our‘sameness’ on to others. The second set ofquestions, then, concerns recognition of howwe deal with ‘others’. It is extraordinarilydifficult sometimes to do anything but seethings from our own perspective, however hard we try to escape from our self-centredgeographies. Yet as soon as we move beyond the samenesses of self, we immediately begin to stylize and stereotype the differences of ‘theother’. This has been the subject of muchrecent questioning across the range of humansciences, including Human Geography, underthe rubric of debates on ‘Otherness’ and‘Othering’. How do we think about peoplewho are not like us without ‘othering’ them,without prioritizing the self and at best offeringbenign tolerance to others (Shurmer-Smith andHannam, 1994)? Do we categorize others inorder to control them – socially, culturally,politically, economically, spatially (Leeuw et al.,2011)? Do we equate difference withabnormality or deviance?

Dealing with otherness and difference istherefore fraught with difficulty, as these are byno means neutral categories, and any criticalassumptions about them being ‘obvious’ oreven ‘threatening’ require very considerablereflection. For example, we need to challengeany assumptions that appropriate dealings withothers are somehow automatically transacted

through our citizenship – both in terms of ourstatus as ‘citizens’ of Human Geography, whichis somehow already sufficiently attuned toissues of otherness, and in terms of our state-citizenship through which it might be thoughtthat welfare and aid functions already take careof the need to deal with others. The Frenchanthropologist Marc Augé has suggested thatwe need to adopt a two-pronged approach tounderstanding otherness. First, we should seeka sense for the other. In the same way that wehave a sense of direction, or family, or rhythm,he argues that we have a sense of otherness, and he sees this sense both disappearing andbecoming more acute. It is being lost as ourtolerance for others – for difference –disappears. Yet it is becoming more acute asthat very intolerance itself creates and structuresothernesses such as nationalism, regionalismand ‘ethnic cleansing’, which involve ‘a kind ofuncontrolled heating up of the processes thatgenerate otherness’ (Augé, 1998: xv). Second,we should seek a sense of the other, or a sense ofwhat has meaning for others; that which theyelaborate upon. This involves listening to othervoices and looking through other windows onto the world so as to understand some of thesocial meanings that are instituted among andlived out by people within particular social or identity groups. This combination of anintellectual understanding of the other and anemotional, connected and committed sense ofappreciation for the other can perhaps best besummarized in terms of attempting to achievesolidarity with the other by participation andinvolvement in their worlds. Rather thanconverting ‘them’ into ‘our’ world, suchsolidarity involves a conversion of ourselves for the other, hence as I wrote a decade ago:

I believe that any re-radicalized geographywill be measured to some extent by the degree to which radical and criticalgeographers achieve a going beyond the self

SELF–OTHER 65

in order to find a sense for the other inpractices of conversion for the other.

(Cloke, 2004: 101)

As the remainder of this chapter suggests, theattempt to inculcate the curricula and researchof Human Geography with senses of the other,and with reflections on the self, has proved tobe a complex and politicized process. Perhapsthis reflects less the novelty of the ideas beingworked with than the way they speak to andcritique an absolutely central concern ofHuman Geography: developing knowledge of people and places beyond those one alreadyknows. This chapter argues that this critique isworthwhile, and therefore discusses some of thedelights, as well as difficulties, of bringingexplicit reflections of self and other into ourHuman Geographies.

Self-reflectionsIn many ways, ‘reflexivity’ has become one of the most significant passwords in HumanGeography over recent years. To reflect on theself in relation to space and society has beenseen as a key with which to open up new kinds of Human Geographies that relate toindividuals more closely, and that individualscan relate to more closely. In particular,reflexivity has been used by feminist and post-colonial geographers in their respective politicalprojects to persuade Human Geographers toreflect something other than male, whiteorthodoxies. A poem by Clare Madge (see CaseStudy box opposite) urges geography to connect‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’ by becoming asubject ‘on my terms and in my terms’.

Her frustration with the subject is echoed inthe book Feminist Geographies (Women andGeography Study Group, 1997) where thewriting (usually by men) in geography iscritiqued, but the problems of proposing

alternative forms of writing (usually by women)are starkly acknowledged:

Much academic writing . . . is characterizedby a dispassionate, distant, disembodiednarrative voice, one which is devoid ofemotion and dislocated from the personal.In contrast to this, writing which is personal,emotional, angry or explicitly embodied isimplicitly (and often explicitly) portrayed asits antithesis: something which (maybe) hasa place in the world of fiction and/or creativewriting, but which, quite definitely, is out of place in the academic world . . . to bemasculine often means not to be emotionalor passionate, not to be explicit about yourvalues, your background, your own feltexperiences. Feminist academics wishing tochallenge those exclusions from the writtenvoice of Geography find themselves in adilemma, however, for if academicmasculinity is dispassionately rational andneutral, writing which is overly emotional or explicitly coming from a particularpersonalized position is often dismissed asirrational, as too emotional, as too personal– as too feminine, in other words. Thusfeminists who want to assert the importanceof the emotional in their work, or feministswho want to acknowledge the personalparticularities of their analysis, run the risk of being read as incapable of rationalwriting, of merely being emotional womenwhose work cannot be universally relevant.

Women and Geography Study Group, 1997: 23)

It has therefore been important for HumanGeographers not only to theorize the self in newways, but also to position the self appropriatelyin the practising of Human Geography, suchthat knowledge is situated in the conscious and subconscious subjectivities of both theauthor/researcher and the subjects of writingand research. In terms of new ways of

PAUL CLOKE66

SELF–OTHER 67

Clare Madge: An Ode to Geography Geography,What are you?What makes you?Whose knowledge do you represent?Whose ‘reality’ do you reflect?Geography,You are not just space ‘out there’To be explored, mined, colonised.You are also space ‘in here’The space within and betweenThat binds and defines and differentiates us as people.Geography,I want you to become a subjectOn my terms and in my terms,Delighting and exploringThe subtleties and inconsistenciesOf the world in which we live.The world of pale moonlight and swaying trees in a bluebell wood.The world of sand and bone and purple terror.The world of bright lights flying past factory, iron and engine.The world of jasmine scents and delicate breeze.The world of subversion, ambiguity and resistance.The world of head proud, shoulders defiant under the gaze of cold eyes laying bare the

insecurity underlying prejudice.The world of music, laughter and light,Of torment and exploding violenceOf tar and steel strewn with hateWhile the moon gently observes and heals.Geography, could you be my world?Will you ever have the words, concepts and theoriesTo encapsulateThe precarious, exhilarating, exquisite, unequal world in which we live?I believe so.By looking within and without, upside down and inside out,Come alive geography, come alive!

(Women and Geography Study Group, 1997)

CASE STUDY

theorizing the self, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift(1995) discuss four interconnected ideas thatmap out the territory of the human subject:

1. The body: orders our access to and mobilityin spaces and places; interfaces withtechnology and machinery; encapsulates ourexperiences of the world around us; harboursunconscious desires, vulnerabilities,alienations and fragmented aspects of self, aswell as expressions of sexuality and gender;and is a site of cultural consumption wherechoices of food and clothing and jewellery,for example, will inscribe meanings aboutthe person.

2. The self: can be understood in a variety ofways, ranging from a personal identityformed by an ongoing series of experiencesand relationships, but where there is nodistinctive characteristic in these experiencesand relationships to suppose an inner, fixedpersonality, to a personal identity in whichself-awareness serves to characterize eachexperience as belonging to a distinct self.

3. The person: a description of the culturalframework of the self and allows for differentselves in different frameworks. For example,if you were born and brought up in Rwanda,Albania or Cuba, your person would reflectthe cultural frameworks of life in thoseplaces.

4. Identity: where the person is located withinsocial structures with which they identify.Traditionally this would have been seen toinvolve rigid structures such as class andfamily, but more recently identities havetended to be constructed reflexively andtherefore often flexibly leading to newidentity issues – for example, focusing onalternative sexualities, ethnicities orresistance to local change.

The subject is therefore ‘in some waysdetachable, reversible and changeable’, while inother ways it is ‘fixed, solid and dependable’. It

is certainly ‘located in, with and by power,knowledge and social relationships’ (1995: 12).

Some of these theoretical distinctions may atfirst be difficult to grasp, but they do serve to emphasize just how difficult it actually is to be reflexive about the self in our HumanGeography. To what extent is it possible toknow and to reflect on our selves, to appreciatefully how, precisely, the self is responsible forhow we think, how our imaginations areprompted, how we interpret places, people andevents, and so on? How much more difficult isit to understand the selves of others whom wemight wish to study? These practices, which I have identified earlier as being importantpolitical and personal projects in HumanGeography, are perhaps more difficult thanthey first appear. The multidimensionality ofthe body, the relationally dependent and oftensubconscious nature of the self, the culturallyframed (and therefore flexible) person and thechangeable and overlapping influences ofidentity render reflexivity a most complex, and some would say impossible, task. Indeed a whole new angle on Human Geography –non-representational theory (see Thrift, 2007;Anderson and Harrison, 2010a) has sprung upin which the focus has switched specifically tonon-reflexive accounts of human being andbecoming in which the instinctive, habitual and performative are emphasized.

Nevertheless, the breaking down of detachedand personally irrelevant orthodoxies inHuman Geography has remained a task thatmany continue to consider sufficientlyworthwhile to warrant attempts to bringreflexivity into a prominent position in thepractice of Human Geography. Threeinterconnected and often overlapping strategiesare briefly outlined here. First, a strategy of positionality can be identified in which‘telling where you are coming from’ can beemployed tactically as a contextualization of

PAUL CLOKE68

the interpretations that are to follow (seeBrowne et al., 2010). Sometimes this involvesthe identification of key political aspects of theself, for example, a feminist positioning, whichwill self-evidently influence what occurssubsequently and which provides us with newpositions from which to speak. On otheroccasions, particular spatial or socialexperiences will be described that are used to claim expertise or insight into particularsituations. Take, for example, George Carney’sautobiographical preface to Baseball, Barns and Bluegrass, his book on the geography ofAmerican folklife. Here, he describes hischildhood in the foothills of the Ozarks, andhow the folk knowledge accumulated duringthat time has been translated into a scholarlypursuit of cultural tactics of American folklifemore generally. Not only does his folk heritageequip him for this work, but it also punctuateswhat he writes and how he writes it.

Second, a more radical strategy ofautoethnography can be pursued involvingdifferent kinds of self-narrative that use theperspective of self-involvement to producewider understandings of different kinds ofsocial contexts. Autoethnography representsone significant way of both presenting the ‘selfto self ’, and presenting the ‘self to others’, andtakes a number of forms (see Butz and Besio,2009), including:

• analysing our own biographies in order to interrogate and illuminate widerphenomena

• reflective narratives on empirical orethnographic encounters

• responses from subaltern groups to theirrepresentation by others

• ‘indigenous’ ethnographies from members ofsubordinated groups who take on academicpositions from which to speak

• other forms of ‘insider’ research, ofteninvolving participant observation, witnessing

and testimony (see Kindon, 2010;Dewsbury, 2009).

Autoethnography opens up intriguingpossibilities for studying, for example, ourgender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, sense of place,and also our work, leisure, tourism and otheractivity geographies through the medium ofour personal involvement. At the same time itis important to recognize the challengesinherent in these approaches, including: thedifficulties of knowing the self well enough,especially given its dynamic and multi-facednature; the risk of self-obsession andconsequent failure to communicate with others;the dangers inherent in presenting what areperhaps sensitive self-narratives to others who may be in positions of power and/orjudgement; and the problematic task of shapingour self-representations to different audiences.Butz and Besio (2009) argue that thesechallenges resonate with the need for what they call autoethnographic sensibility, involvingefforts to:

• perceive ourselves as an inevitable part ofwhat is being researched and signified

• understand research subjects asautoethnographers in their own right

• interconnect self-narratives with thecontexts, narratives and voices of others inany particular network of social relations.

Even with autoethnography, then, there arestrong arguments for including ‘other’ voices inour own stories.

A third strategy therefore is to acknowledgeintertextuality in our practice of HumanGeography, by finding ways of recognizing the significance of our selves as importantinfluences that shape our geographies, while atthe same time seeking to listen to other voices.The texts that result from such encounters arecomplex dialogues. The Human Geographerwill shape the conversation, both by the

SELF–OTHER 69

PAUL CLOKE70

George Carney’s autobiographical prefaceThe first eighteen years of my life were spent on a 320-acre farm in Deer Creek Township,Henry County, Missouri, some six miles south of Calhoun (population 350), ten miles northwestof Tightwad (population 50), and five miles west of Thrush (population 4). My parents, Joshand Aubertine, inherited the acreage and farmstead buildings from my grandpa and grandmaCarney, who retired and moved to Calhoun. The eighty acres to the north of the farmsteadconsisted of hardwood timber (walnut, hickory, and oak), Minor Creek, which flowed in aneasterly direction as a tributary to Tebo Creek, and some patches of grazing land. Theremaining 240 acres, south of the farmstead, were relatively rich farmland where my Dadplanted and harvested a variety of crops ranging from corn and soybeans to alfalfa and oats.Classified as a diversified farmer, he also raised beef and dairy cattle, hogs, sheep, andchickens. Thus, my roots lay in a rural, agrarian way of life in the foothills of the Ozarks.

My early years fit the description that is often used to define the folk – a rural people who livea simple way of life, largely unaffected by changes in society, and who retain traditionalcustoms and beliefs developed within a strong family structure. I was experiencing the folklifeof the Ozarks. Folklife includes objects that we can see and touch (tangible items), such asfood (Mom’s home-made yeast rolls) and buildings (Dad’s smokehouse). It also consists of othertraditions that we cannot see or touch (intangible elements), such as beliefs and customs(Grandpa Whitlow’s chaw of tobacco poultice used to ease the pain of a honeybee sting).Both aspects of folklife, often referred to as material and nonmaterial culture, are learned orallyas they are passed down from one generation to the next – such as Grandpa Carney teachingme to use a broad axe – or they may be learned from a friend or neighbor – for example,Everett Monday, a neighbor, instructing me on the techniques of playing a harmonica.

Through this oral process, I learned many of the traditional ways from the folk who surroundedmy everyday life – parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers, preachers, and merchants.The most vivid memories associated with my early life among the Ozark folk are the six folklifetraits selected for this anthology – architecture, food and drink, religion, music, sports, andmedicine.

Since leaving the Ozarks for the Oklahoma plains some thirty-five years ago, I have developeda greater awareness and deeper appreciation for American folklife and all its spatialmanifestations. My teaching and research interests have been strongly influenced by those folkexperiences of yesteryear. Students in my introductory culture geography classes are annuallygiven a heavy dose of lectures and slides on the folklife traits covered in this reader. Myresearch has increasingly focused on two of these traits – music and architecture. Clearly, myroots have made a lasting impression – one that I have converted into a scholarly pursuit.

(Carney, 1998: xv–xxii)

CASE STUDY

individuality of their own subject-experienceand by the questions that are asked of the‘other’. In turn, other individuals will havedifferent, changing and even competingexperiences and will represent themselvesdifferently to different people. The ‘results’ ofthe encounter will usually be ‘interpreted’ bythe Human Geographer in the light of theirself-positioning. This may involve a process of ‘finding new places to speak from’, andbringing them into the conversation, or it mayinvolve a tactic of ‘letting people speak forthemselves’ and seeking for a plurality of voices(a ‘polyphony’) to emerge. Interpretations arethen usually written down, often using quotedextracts of other voices, but almost always with the author in control, exerting power over what is included and excluded, what iscontextualized and how, and what storylines areused to shape the narrative of the ‘findings’. Inall these processes and practices, the need torecognize the interconnections between the

powerful self and the ‘subjected to’ other isparamount.

The increasing use of ethnographic strategiesand qualitative methods in Human Geography(see Cloke et al., 2004; Crang and Cook, 2007)has certainly helped to provide researchpractices with which we can be more reflexiveabout our selves, and the relationships betweenour selves and others. In the end, however, wehave to realize just how ‘easy’ it can become to think and write about ourselves, and howdifficult it is to know enough about our selvesto be reflexive in our geographies. Delvings into psychoanalysis (Sibley, 1995) have begunto help our understandings here but there still seems to be an inbuilt desire to empowerthe self over the other, however much a many-voiced, polyphonic geography is beingaimed at. In the more general context of theproblems in the world, such preoccupationswith the self might be regarded asinappropriate, if not positively dangerous!

SELF–OTHER 71

• Reflexivity – reflecting on the self in relation to society and space – is an essential process in recognizing how our individualities contribute to all aspects of our practice of HumanGeography. It also gives us grounds on which to challenge seemingly ‘orthodox’geographies and to make our Human Geography more relevant to us and to others.

• The difficulties involved in understanding the self are often underestimated. The humansubject is a complex mix of body, self, person and identity, and for some, spirit and soulwill also be important considerations.

• There is an interconnected range of strategies by which the self can consciously be includedin the practice of Human Geography.

• The dangers of exaggerating the self in our reading, thinking, researching and writing aboutHuman Geography are very real and can divert us from important issues relating to others.

SUMMARY

Sensing the otherJohn Paul Jones (2010, 43) argues that ‘acentral problem in social geography is how tosort out relations between identity, on the onehand, and space on the other, particularly in terms of how their interplay affects the well-being of people and the prospects of theplaces they inhabit and move through.’ It isimportant, therefore, to take serious notice of different kinds of people who are situated indifferent kinds of spaces and places, and whoexperience, mould and negotiate these spacesand places in a different way to ourselves. This interest in the differences of the other has implications for the ways in which weconceptualize and practise our HumanGeographies, and also for the ways in whichthese geographies are politicized. Dealing withthe ‘other’ is of course linked to dealing withthe ‘self ’. To reiterate, the arrogance of the selfis often manifest in an assumption that othersmust see the world in the same way as we do.Alternatively, we will often place ourselves inthe centre of some ‘mainstream’ identity that isdefined not only around our self-characteristicsbut also in opposition to others who are not the same as us. Think, for example, about theway white people often assume that only‘non-white’ people have an ethnicity and find their own whiteness unremarkable. As Chris Philo has suggested, then, we are often ‘locked into the thought-prison of “the same”’ (1997: 22), which makes itimpossible for us to appreciate the workings of the other. Indeed we will often seek either to incorporate the other into our sameness, or to exclude the other from our sameness, inorder to cope with the threat that differenceseems to present to the perceived mainstreamnature of our identity (see Sibley, 1995). Both incorporation and exclusion are highlypolitical acts that trap the other in the logic of the same.

The interest in recognizing ‘other’ HumanGeographies focuses attention not only on that which is remote to us, but also shouldmake us rethink what is close to home. Twoexamples serve here to highlight some of the principal themes in the recognition ofotherness in proximal and remote situations.The first relates to the neglect of ‘other’geographies close to home and focuses on rural geographies (see Chapter 48), although the principles involved relate to a wide range of Human Geography contexts. Philo’s (1992) review of ‘other’ rural geographiesemphasized that most accounts of rural lifehave viewed the mainstream interconnectionsbetween culture and rurality through the lens of typically white, male, middle-classnarratives:

there remains a danger of portraying Britishrural people . . . as all being ‘Mr Averages’, asbeing men in employment, earning enoughto live, white and probably English, straightand somehow without sexuality, able in bodyand sound in mind, and devoid of any otherquirks of (say) religious belief or politicalaffiliation.

(Philo, 1992: 200)

Such a list is important in its highlighting of neglect for others, but also runs the risk ofimmediately producing a formulaic view of what is other. Thus, we can recognize that individuals and groups of people can bemarginalized from a sense of belonging to, andin, the rural on the grounds of their gender,age, class, sexuality, disability, and so on.However, as David Bell and Gill Valentine(1995b) remind us, the mere listing of socio-cultural variables represents neither acommitment to deal seriously with the issuesinvolved nor a complete sense of the range ofother geographies. Indeed, our very recognitionof these others serves to ‘other’ different othersand exclude them from view.

PAUL CLOKE72

A specific illustration within this rural context is offered in Figure 5.2, which presentsa well-known self-portrait by the photographerIngrid Pollard (see Kinsman, 1995). Herautobiographical notes suggest that thephotograph is a self-aware comment on race, representation and the British landscape.She sets herself in the countryside, and through juxtaposing her identity as a ‘blackphotographer’ with the cultural construction oflandscape and rurality as an idyll-ized space of white heartland, she graphically expresses asense of her own unease, dread, non-belonging– of other. The black presence in ‘our’ greenand pleasant land says much about whiteness =sameness in this content. However, as theWomen and Geography Study Group (1997)point out, the otherness in this representation isby no means a unidimensional matter of race.They suggest that:

Pollard is claiming a different position from which to look at and enjoy English

landscapes (albeit an uneasy pleasure); a right to be there and a right to berepresented and make representations. Shechallenges, disrupts and complicates thenotion of a generalisable set of shared ideasabout England and the implicitly white andmasculinised position from which it isusually viewed.

(1997: 185–6)

Ingrid Pollard the ‘black woman photographer’,then, exposes another critical edge of otherness in this content and clearly the multidimensional nature of identity is by no means exhausted by these labels. In ourseemingly known worlds, therefore, we makeassumptions about the nature of people andplaces; about who belongs where, and whodoesn’t fit into the sameness of our mainstream;about who, what, where and when is other.

The second illustration is even better knownwithin Human Geography, having achieved

SELF–OTHER 73

Figure 5.2 ‘PastoralInterlude’ (1988) ‘. . .it’s as if the Blackexperience is only everlived within the urbanenvironment. I thought Iliked the Lake District;where I wanderedlonely as a Black facein a sea of white. Avisit to the countrysideis always accompaniedby a feeling of unease;dread . . . feeling Idon’t belong. Walksthrough leafy gladeswith a baseball bat bymy side . . .’ Credit:Ingrid Pollard. Courtesyof the artist.

almost cult status in attempts to formulatepost-colonial approaches to the subject. EdwardSaid is Professor of English and ComparativeLiterature at Columbia University in the USA.He is a Palestinian, born in Jerusalem andeducated in Egypt and America, who is mostfamous for his analysis of the way the Westimagines the Orient or East (including theArabic Middle East) as different to itself (for a review of these and other ‘imaginativegeographies’ see Chapter 16). In his classicbook Orientalism (1978; 1995) Said traces howthe Arab world has come to be imagined,represented and constructed in terms of itsotherness to Europe:

the French and the British – less so theGermans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese,Italians and Swiss – have had a longtradition of what I shall be callingOrientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Westernexperience. The Orient is not only adjacentto Europe; it is also the place of Europe’sgreatest and richest and oldest colonies, thesource of its civilization and languages, itscultural contestant, and one of its deepestand most recurring images of the other.

(1995: 1)

Representations of the romantic, mysticalOrient, he argues, act as a container for western desires and fantasies that cannot beaccommodated within the boundaries of whatis normal in the West. Yet at the same time,representations of the cruel, detached andmoney-grabbing nature of the Oriental Arabserve to underline the assumed hegemony of the West over political–economic and socio-cultural norms:

Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is anaffront to real civilisation. Always there lurksthe assumption that although the Westernconsumer belongs to a numerical minority,he is entitled either to own or to expend (orboth) the majority of the world’s resources. . . a white middle-class westerner believes ithis human prerogative not only to managethe non-white world but also to own it, justbecause by definition ‘it’ is not quite ashuman as ‘we’ are.

(Said, 1995: 108)

Through the process of Orientalism, thesocieties and cultures concerned aremarginalized, devalued and insulted, while theimperialism and moral superiority of the West

PAUL CLOKE74

Figure 5.3 A guard with a zither player in aninterior, by Ludwig Deutsch (1855–1935). Theillustration was used on the cover of Edward Said’sOrientalism, 1995. Credit: Christie’s Images/TheBridgeman Art Library

are legitimized. Said’s contestation of theothering of Orientalism points the way forwide-ranging inquiry by Human Geographersinto how different people and places aresimilarly othered. It also shows us that at theheart of what we take to be familiar, natural, athome, actually lurk all kinds of relations andpositionings to that which is unfamiliar, strangeand uncanny (Bernstein, 1992).

From these illustrations it becomes clear that whether otherness is close to home orpositioned in some far-off exotic space, it isoften difficult to detach ourselves, bothconceptually and empirically from a frame ofstudy that validates the self, the same and thefamiliar as waymarkers for the understanding of others. Two sets of issues arise from thisconclusion. First, there is a need to thinkthrough much more deeply about whatconstitutes otherness in Human Geographicalstudy, otherwise our main contribution mayonly be to further emphasize the othernessesthat are reinforced by such study. At one level,this requires a grasp of the multidimensionalnature of identity. As Mike Crang (1998a) puts it:

very few people are the ‘same’ as others –everyone is different in some respects. Themost we could say is that certain groupsshare certain things in common, so who iscounted as part of a group or excluded fromit will depend on which things are chosen asbeing significant . . . Belonging in a groupdepends on which of all the possiblecharacteristics are chosen as ‘defining’membership. The characteristics that havebeen treated as definitive vary over space andtime with significant political consequencesattached to deciding what defines belonging.

(1998a: 60)

We need to recognize, therefore, that ‘same’ and‘other’ identities are:

• Contingent – in that differences whichdefine them are a part of an open andongoing series of social processes.

• Differentiated – in that individuals andgroups of people will occupy positions alongmany separate lines of difference at the sametime

• Relational – in that the social constructionof difference is always in terms of thepresence of some opposing movement.

(Jones and Moss, 1995)

Even with greater sensitivity for otheridentities, we are usually still trapped in aconcern for what Marcus Doel (1994) calls ‘the Other of the Same’ – that is, we translateothernesses into our language, our conceptualframeworks, our categories of thought, andthereby effectively obscure the other with thefamiliarities of the samenesses of our self. Thereal difficulty, then, is to find ways of accessing‘the Other of the Other’ – that is, theunfamiliar, unexpected, unexplainable otherthat defies our predictive, analytical andinterpretative powers and our socio-culturalpositionings.

The second set of issues relates to the methodswe employ in order to encounter ‘others’. As with our self-reflections, the increasing use of ethnographic and qualitative methods is important to this project. However,researching the other through ethnographytakes a long time. Drawing lessons fromanthropology, we would have to conclude thatto carry out appropriate studies of unknownpeoples and worlds can take several years.Consider, for example, the account of Frenchanthropologist Pierre Clastres (1998), whospent two years with so-called ‘savage’ tribes of Indians in Paraguay in the 1960s. Heacknowledges that even ‘being there’ with hisresearch subjects did not break down the veryconsiderable barriers of communication andcross-referenced understanding, until

SELF–OTHER 75

circumstances changed many months into hisresearch. Even over this timescale it proveddifficult to form a bridge between himself (and here we might wonder whether hisconcept of ‘savages’ got in the way of effective

communication) and the mythologies,embodiments and social practices that lay at the heart of the very existence of the GuayakiIndians (see Case Study box).

PAUL CLOKE76

Pierre Clastres: Chronicle of the Guayaki IndiansThey really were savages, especially the Iroiangi. They had only been in contact with the whiteman’s world for a few months, and that contact had for the most part been limited to dealingswith one Paraguayan. What made them seem like savages? It was not the strangeness of theirappearance – their nudity, the length of their hair, their necklaces of teeth – nor the chanting ofthe men at night, for I was charmed by all this; it was just what I had come for. What madethem seem like savages was the difficulty I had in getting through to them: my timid andundoubtedly naive efforts to bridge the enormous gap I felt to exist between us were met by theAtchei with total, discouraging indifference, which made it seem impossible for us ever tounderstand one another. For example, I offered a machete to a man sitting under his shelter ofpalm leaves sharpening an arrow. He hardly raised his eyes; he took it calmly without showingthe least surprise, examined the blade, felt the edge, which was rather dull since the tool wasbrand-new, and then laid it down beside him and went on with his work. There were other

Indians nearby; no one said a word.Disappointed, almost irritated, I went away,and only then did I hear some briefmurmuring: no doubt they were commentingon the present. It would certainly have beenpresumptuous of me to expect a bow inexchange, the recitation of a myth, or statusas a relative! Several times I tried out the littleGuayaki I knew on the Iroiangi. I had noticedthat, although their language was the sameas that of the Atchei Gatu, they spoke itdifferently: their delivery seemed much faster,and their consonants tended to disappear inthe flow of the vowels, so that I could notrecognize even the words I knew – I therefore did not understand much of whatthey said.

But it also seemed to me that they wereintentionally disagreeable. For example, I

CASE STUDY

Figure 5.4 Jyvukugi, chief of the Atchei Gatu.Credit: Pierre Clastres

SELF–OTHER 77

asked a young man a question that I knew was not indiscreet, since the Atchei Gatu hadalready answered it freely: ‘Ava ro nde apa? Who is your father?’ He looked at me. He couldnot have been amazed by the absurdity of the question, and he must have understood me (Ihad been careful to articulate clearly and slowly). He simply looked at me with a slightly boredexpression and did not answer. I wanted to be sure I had pronounced everything correctly. I ran off to look for an Atchei Gatu and asked him to repeat the question; he formulated itexactly the way I had a few minutes earlier, and yet the Iroiangi answered him. What could Ido? Then I remembered what Alfred Métraux had said to me not long before: ‘For us to beable to study a primitive society, it must already be starting to disintegrate.’

I was faced with a society that was still green, so to speak, at least in the case of the Iroiangi,even though circumstances had obliged the tribe to live in a ‘Western’ area (but in somesense, wasn’t their recent move to Arroyo Moroti more a result of a voluntary collectivedecision than a reaction to intolerable outside pressure?). Hardly touched, hardly contaminatedby the breezes of our civilization – which were fatal for them – the Atchei could keep thefreshness and tranquillity of their life in the forest intact: this freedom was temporary anddoomed not to last much longer, but it was quite sufficient for the moment; it had not beendamaged, and so the Atchei’s culture would not insidiously and rapidly decompose. Thesociety of the Atchei Iroiangi was so healthy that it could not enter into a dialogue with me,with another world. And for this reason the Atchei accepted gifts that they had not asked forand rejected my attempts at conversation because they were strong enough not to need it: wewould begin to talk only when they became sick.

Old Paivagi died in June 1963; he certainly believed that he had no more reason to remain inthe world of the living. In any case, he was the oldest of the Atchei Gatu, and because of hisage (he must have been over seventy) I was often eager to ask him about the past. He wasusually quite willing to engage in these conversations but only for short periods, after which hewould grow tired and shut himself up in his thoughts again. One evening when he was gettingready to go to sleep beside his fire, I went and sat down next to him. Evidently he did notwelcome my visit at all, because he murmured softly and unanswerably: ‘Cho ro tuja praru.Nde ro mita kyri wyte. I am a weak old man. You are still a soft head, you are still a baby.’He had said enough; I left Paivagi to poke his fire and went back to my own, somewhatupset, as one always is when faced with the truth.

This was what made the Atchei savages: their savagery was formed of silence; it was adistressing sign of their last freedom, and I too wanted to deprive them of it. I had to bargainwith death; with patience and cunning, using a little bribery (offers of presents and food, allsorts of friendly gestures, and gentle, even unctuous language), I had to break through theStrangers’ passive resistance, interfere with their freedom, and make them talk. It took me aboutfive months to do it, with the help of the Atchei Gatu.

We need to acknowledge just how difficult it isto form a bridge between ourselves and thecomplicated essential existences of others,whether far off or close to home. It can beargued that the pressure to publish in thecontemporary academy has run the risk of toomany ‘quickie’ ethnographies of otheredsubjects. As with the Guayaki, an appreciationof the other geographies and experiences of, say,

homeless people in a city like Bristol requirelong-term commitment rather than briefencounters. Only by reconceptualizingotherness, and reviewing the quality of ourencounters with it, are Human Geographerslikely to become any more attuned to a sensefor the other and a sense of the other assuggested by Augé at the beginning of thischapter.

PAUL CLOKE78

• Sensing the other is inextricably linked with understanding the self. By assuming that othersare somehow the same as us, we can be locked into the ‘thought prison’ of the same,which makes it impossible to sense the other appropriately.

• Geographies of other people and places can be close to home or in far-off exotic worlds. In either case, Human Geographers should see themselves as observers who are situatedwithin the objects and worlds of their observation.

• At the heart of what we take to be familiar, natural and belonging lurk all kinds of relationsand positionings with that other that is unfamiliar, strange and uncanny.

• There is a need to think through much more deeply what constitutes otherness in HumanGeography. It is usually very difficult to bridge over between self and other.

• There is also a need to avoid methodological shortcuts in encounters with others.

SUMMARY

ConclusionThis discussion of the interconnections of selfand other raises a number of important issuesabout our Human Geographies. First, there isthe risk that in acknowledging our selves in ourwork, we become too self-centred and too littleconcerned with political and other priorities inthe world around us. Second, there is thepotential for losing our sense of otherness.Third, there is the conceptual andmethodological complexity involved inencountering the other of the same, let alonethe other of the other. Finally, there a concernover the way in which we can sometimes

privilege certain kinds of otherness withoutgiving due attention to the need for sustained,empathetic and contextualized research underappropriate ethical conditions. There can be atendency to ‘flit in and flit out’ of intellectuallygroovy subjects, with the danger that researchbecomes mere tourism or voyeurism of thesubjects concerned.

When we have negotiated these trickyquestions, there is one further important issueof self–other interrelations to resolve. In thewords of Derek Gregory, ‘By what right and onwhose authority does one claim to speak forthose “others”? On whose terms is a space

created in which “they” are called upon tospeak? How are they (and we) interpellated?’(1994: 205).

In seeking to encounter the stories of otherpeople and worlds, is it inevitable that webecome mere tourists, burdened by theauthority of our selves and the power of ourauthorship? Or are there ways in which we canbe sufficiently sensitive about the positionalityand intertextuality of our authorship that wecan legitimately seek to understand and writeabout the stories of others, without pollutingthem with our voyeuristic or touristictendencies, the exclusionary power of which areso graphically illustrated in Figure 5.5? I believethat in this we can learn much from Gregory’semphatic and optimistic answer:

Most of us have not been very good atlistening to others and learning from them,

but the present challenge is surely to findways of comprehending those other worlds –including our relations with them and ourresponsibilities toward them – without beinginvasive, colonizing and violent . . . we needto learn how to reach beyond particularities,to speak of larger questions withoutdiminishing the significance of the placesand the people to which they areaccountable. In so doing, in enlarging andexamining our geographical imaginations,we might come to realise not only that ourlives are ‘radically entwined with the lives ofdistant strangers’ but also that we bear acontinuing and unavoidable responsibilityfor their needs in times of distress more.

(Gregory, 1994: 205)

In this agenda lies a pathway towards moresensitive and meaningful engagements of selfand other in Human Geography.

SELF–OTHER 79

Figure 5.5The power to excludewhen engaging intouristic or voyeuristicgeographies. Credit:Mikkel Ostergaard/Panos Pictures

PAUL CLOKE80

Butz, D. and Besio, K. (2009) Autoethnography. Geography Compass, 3, 1660–74

Ellis, C. and Bochner, A. (2000) Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject.In: N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, London: Sage.

Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (1995) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation.London: Routledge.

These offer comprehensive discussions of subjectivity and self and ethnography and self.

Cloke, P. (2004) Deliver us from evil? Prospects for living ethically and acting politically in HumanGeography. In: P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds.), Envisioning Human Geographies. London:Arnold, 210–28.

Ruddick, S. (2004) Activist geographies: building possible worlds. In: P. Cloke, P. Crang and M.Goodwin (eds.), Envisioning Human Geographies. London: Arnold, 229–41.

Smith, D. (2004) Morality ethics and social justice. In: P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds.),Envisioning Human Geographies. London: Arnold, 195–209.

These present a series of manifestos on how to develop ethical Human Geographies.

Cloke, P., Cook, I., Crang, P., Goodwin, M., Painter, J. and Philo, C. (2004) Practising HumanGeography. London: Sage.

Crang, M. and Cook, I. (2007) Doing Ethnographies. London: Sage.

Further commentary on ethnography and qualitative methodologies in Human Geography.

FURTHER READING

1. What aspects of your self are significant in shaping your Human Geography? How do youknow?

2. To what extent does non-representational theory involve a complete rethink of the self?

3. How is it possible for researchers to represent the other when they are ‘so thoroughlysaturated with the ideological baggage of their own culture’ (Ley and Mountz, 2001)?

4. To what extent is the distinction between the self and the other crude and oversimplified,given that identity is ‘always stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join withanother to see together without claiming to be another’ (Haraway, 1996)?

5. What evidence do you see in contemporary Human Geography of an emotional,connected and committed sense of the other?

DISCUSSION POINTS

introducing human geographies

Documents