Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

The Dictionary of Human Geography (215 page)

violence
In her essay on violence, poli tical philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 75) emphasizes its instrumental character. Violence appears whenever power is in jeopardy and ?it always stands in need of guidance and justifi cation through the ends it pursues? (Arendt, 2004 [1969], p. 241). Hence, violence in and of itself stands emptied of strength and purpose: it is part of a larger matrix of socio spatial power struggles (Kaur, 2005). Violence has been defined by the Norwegian peace researcher Johann Galtung (1969, 1990) as tripartite: (1) as direct violence, or personal injury; (2) as structural violence, where struc tures of social injustice violate or endanger the right to life of individuals or groups of people in a society; and (3) as cultural violence, in which any aspect of cuLture, such as Language, religion, ideology, art or cosmology, is used to legitimize direct or structural violence. In comparison to other social sciences, human geography came late to theorizing violence, but Hays Mitchell (2005) has invoked a femi nist analysis that draws on these diverse understandings, specifically as social, political, and economic violence. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In fact, feminist geographers have long ana lysed geographies of violence against women and sexual minorities, both domestic and non domestic, as well as the built environments that engender safer spaces (Valentine, 1998; Domosh and Seager, 2001) (see feminist geographies). Their work has recently extended to the ways in which violence during war is highly gendered (Mayer, 2000; Giles and Hyndman, 2004a). In 1996, for the first time in history, the international tribunal for war crimes in Yugoslavia prosecuted rape as a weapon of war and a crime against humanity, issuing indictments for torture and enslave ment. This charge moved rape from the private realm, where it was an informal aber ration of war, to a public one in which can be formally prosecuted. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modern states not only claim a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; they also routinely use the threat of violence to enforce the rule of law. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben (NEW PARAGRAPH) outlines how the state has the capacity to make and enforce laws, but also the power to suspend them in times of emergency, thereby creating spaces of exception (see exception, space of). Anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen (2005, p. 111) notes that within such spaces ?the law is identical with violence but it is a particular form of violence?. Hansen shows how sovereignty is an unstable and precar ious expression of power that requires con stant repetition and performance, including the threat of violence, to maintain its legitim acy. It follows that political violence can assume many forms, and that terrorism in the sense of mobilizing fear as a weapon to intimidate a civilian population cannot sens ibly be confined to the actions of non state actors. The terrorist attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 produced a stream of work exploring geographies of political vio lence by both state and non state actors (Gregory and Pred, 2007), and it is also clear that violence, in the form of riots or protests, can be a response to state oppression (Kaur, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Economic violence has been a particular concern of marxist geographies, where a primary focus of research is on modes of dispossession and exploitation. The process of capital accumuLation has required repeated rounds of dispossession, in the past and in the present, and is written into the prospectus of neo LiberaLism (Harvey, 2003b; Springer, 2008) (see colonialism; imperiaLism; primitive accumuLation). Exploitation is also written in to the labour process and wreaks its own violence in multiple capitalist and non capitalist forms and their articulations (see, e.g., sLavery). Violence is often inscribed in the Landscape, sometimes deliberately so to intimidate others, while Mitchell (2002b) argues that its aestheticization erases the conflict laden work of its production and thus contributes to a generalized economy of violence. This is part of a wider process of the commodification of space, and Blomley (2003) contends that physical violence is an intrinsic part of the foundation, legitimation and oper ation of Western property regimes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The real challenge is to trace the connections between these and other modes of violence: for violence cannot keep within the artificially produced and policed boundaries of the social, the political and the economic. jh (NEW PARAGRAPH)
virtual geographies
A term describing the geographicaL imaginaries and visuaLiza tions made possible through the use of com puter network technologies such as the internet and virtual reality (VR). Propelled by the extraordinary growth and development of computerized networks such as the Internet since the mid 1990s, virtual geographies have become an increasingly important means of imagining, simulating, visualizing and repre senting geographical worlds. They are (re)pro duced through computerized and animated digital animations, geographic information systems, immersive VR systems, video games and the three dimensional simulation of geo graphical pLaces, and call forth an enormous range of virtual geographical worlds and visual metaphors as means of entertainment, projec tions of fantasy, and instruments for planning and controlling places in new ways. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographical mapping and representation of the technologies of cyberspace has been an important element in the critical analysis of virtual geographies. Here, geographers have sought to explore, first, how geographical metaphors and representations have been widely used as means to structure and make legible the electronic services accessible over the web. Second, they have developed a range of new cartographic techniques to map the complex and unequal geographies that characterize the diffusion and use of com puter network technologies (Dodge and Kitchin, 2001b). This work has helped to undermine the widespread myths that the Internet would lead to the ?end of geography? through the sheer motive force of speed of light interactions (Graham, 1998; see also time space compression). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The proliferation of virtual geographies raises important questions about the relation ships between electronic technologies and rep resentations and contemporary culture. These questions are economic and political as much as they are cultural, and the same can be said of the ways in which virtual geog raphies bring processes of simulation and surveillance into very close interaction as embedded surveillance devices provide con tinuous data feeds to sustain virtual represen tations of the dynamics of geographical change. These developments have been par ticularly significant in late modern war (Graham, 2008a,c). Consider, for example, the way in which the first 1991 Gulf War was represented through TV reportage that used digital video footage from the noses of US ?smart? bombs (Wark, 1994), or the way in which the US military has become deeply invested in computer simulations to recruit ?the digital generation? and to train troops for overseas deployment in Mission Rehearsal Exercises (Graham, 2007, 2008a,c). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Finally, this proliferation of virtual tech nologies blurs the boundary separating ?real? geographical worlds from electronically simu lated and imagined ones. This occurs as participants and observers become less and less able to separate and distinguish between the ?real? and the ?virtual?. As truly immersive systems proliferate, and participants increas ingly adopt digitally simulated avatars and ?bodies? functioning ?within? virtual geograph ical space, this process seems set to intensify (Hillis, 1999). Indeed, virtual geographies are already being further complicated by the transformation of computerized network devices. These are moving from being separ ate artefacts such as networked PCs placed within geographical spaces, with which people interact through interfaces, and are being reinvented as small and even nano scale con structions that blend ubiquitously and invisibly into wider geographical environ ments. Such trends mean that new critical approaches to virtual geographies are becom ing necessary, which abandon any a priori dis tinction of the ?real? and the ?virtual? (see representation). sg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Crang, Crang and May (1999); Dodge and Kitchin (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
virtual reality
Resulting partly from an ongoing challenge to the WIMP (Windows Interface, Mouse Pointer) screen that had emerged in the late 1980s, we might see virtual reality entering geography through four moments. The first moment geography encounters virtual reality is as a metaphor for the digital condition. Virtual reality is seen as expressing a symptomatic cultural desire to escape the messy, inevitable complications of the real world for an infantilized or perfected digital realm (Slouka, 1995). The second more technical moment is through the Virtual Reality Mark up Language (VRML), which enabled three dimensional browsing through screen interfaces. While it has not challenged the ?page? metaphor of the web, it has been refined into technologies to create online worlds in CYbERSPACE. Third, this has been used to produce models and simula tions of geographical locations for academic, marketing and educational purposes. Fourth, it has been part of initiatives to develop immersive environments. Here, using haptic interfaces that sense user motions and head mounted displays, a user can interact with an entirely simulated environment all around them. While the cumbersome and faintly absurd appearance of virtual reality goggles and data gloves has limited their adoption, the technology has branched into other possi bilities such as ?augmented reality?, which attempts to ?overlay physical objects with vir tual objects in real time and allows people to experience the virtual as if it were real? (Galloway, 2004, p. 390). mc (NEW PARAGRAPH)
virus
An entity that replicates itself by inf ecting more complex entities and taking advantage of their reproductive systems. Biological viruses are a key agent of disease in humans and other organisms (see aids; epidemiology; pandemic). Computer viruses are self replicating strands of code that ?infect? information systems (see internet). Usually destructive, viruses can play a creative role through their capacity to initiate connections between unrelated entities. For this reason, viruses are frequently used to figure for a view of relationality variously termed trans versal, rhizomatic or hybrid (see HYbRlDlTY; rhizome) which is presented as an alterna tive to linear genealogies (Ansell Pearson, 1977; Hinchliffe, 2004). nhc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hinchliffe (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
vision and visuality
The distinction between vision a biologically determined structure of seeing and visuality a culturally constructed way of seeing has not been challenged in geographical work, despite sustained interest in embodied knowledges (see body; situated knowLedge). Vision has been paid little atten tion, and questions of visuality have been most fully engaged with by cultural geographers. The starting point for much of their work is that, like any other cultural text, an iMAge draws on particular culturally constituted signs, symbols and discourses in order to make its meaning. Images are thus understood as ensembles of visual practices that structure what is visible and invisible in specific ways. Such practices are at work in both the visual content of an image what it shows as well as in its visual and spatial organization how it shows what it shows, and what position it invites its audience to take in relation to it. Much attention has been paid to how images thus constitute and reconstitute social iden tities and social relations by visualising space, pLace, nature, Landscape, the nation, the urban and the rural in particular ways. This significant body of work has now been joined by efforts to approach images from somewhere other than entirely within the field of culture. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is now a large body of work by cultural geographers that explores the specific visualities that have contributed to a range of geographical knowledges, both popular and academic. Much attention has been paid to the emergence of the idea of ?landscape? in the west during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example (Cosgrove, 1984; Olwig, 2002). This work understands land scape as a means of organizing the visual field through a specific, territorializing spatiaLity and a single viewpoint. Such landscapes have been associated with bourgeois and masculine ways of seeing the world as property to be owned and known (Cosgrove, 1985; Rose, 1993). The association of some landscapes with national identities has also been traced (Daniels, 1993; Matless, 1998; Olwig, 2002), and the use of certain mapping techniques and photographic practices in the creation of colonial and imperial geographical knowledges has been explored (Harley, 1989; Ryan, 1997; see also cartography, history of; coLoniaL ism; mascuLinism; post coLoniaLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Indeed, Gregory (1994) has asserted the com plicity of geography as an emergent academic discipline with a modern Western visuality dependent on the possibility of a ?world pic ture?. Images produced by newer visual media, such as fiLm, geographic information sys tems, and tourist and family photography have also been examined as powerful means through which more recent places and spaces are constituted (see fiLm; tourism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) While much of this work depends on claims that particular images are given their meaning by their historically and geographically specific context, or by their embeddedness in contem porary discourses (see visuaL methods), Marxist strands of work also continue. Some pursue Harvey?s (1989b) claim that many vis ual objects reflect changes in the time space organization of contemporary capitaLism, and others pursue Deutsche?s (1996b) somewhat less reductionist account of the importance of design, art and spectacLe to the capital?s redevelopment of cities (see gentrification). It is, however, possible to suggest that most geographers concerned with visuality have been concerned to place specific images into their ?context?, whether that context be a culture, discourse or the demands of capitaL. However, two other approaches to visuality are now also evident in geographical work. (NEW PARAGRAPH) First, some geographers are arguing that while certain sorts of images participate in the cultural or discursive, they can also on occasion exceed it. This claim refers to photo graphs quite specifically, because of the way something of what photographic technologies do is to describe the world mimetically, beyond cultural signification (see mimesis). Geographers such as Goin (2003) and Edensor (2005) thus insert photographs of a desert and of industrial ruins into their written text, in order to enact the intrusion of those places? non human, non cultural agencies into the making of geographical knowledge. Second, others are suggesting that the effects of images can only be understood as they are encountered by viewers in particular places in quite specific ways (Rose, 2004a). This argu ment understands images as performed in encounters with people, and is less concerned with what images mean than with what they do and what is done with them (see perfor mativity). Hence geographers and others have explored how images are put to work in different places, and the various spaces and places that such work produces (Pinney, 2003; Rose, 2004a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These moves (back?) towards understand ing images not as texts to be read but as objects to be put to use has also begun to (NEW PARAGRAPH) change the way geographers discuss their own visualities. The complicity of academic geog raphy with colonial ways of seeing has been clearly traced. But recent accounts of the messy process of fieLdwork have emphasized the work needed to produce such authoritative ways of seeing: effort that does not always achieve its intended end (Driver, 2001b). Things in the world may remain obscure and out of focus. And even if they are visible, some theorizations of the visuality offer reminders that being visible does not always make things noticeable or knowable; both ethnomethod ology and Foucauldian work suggest that noticing what is in full view can often be extremely difficult (Laurier and Philo, 2004). Thus, as several geographers have agreed, much about the relationship between visuali ties and geographical knowledges still requires attention (Antipode, 2003). gcr (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Antipode, (2003); Cosgrove (1985); Rose (2004); Ryan (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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