The Dictionary of Human Geography (3 page)

adaptation
Derived from Darwinian and evo lutionary theory (cf. darwrnism; lamArckiAn ism), adaptation is an enormously influential metaphor for thinking about the relations be tween populations (human and non human) and their environment (Sayer, 1979). It is a concept with a long and robust life in the biological and social sciences. Adaptation is rooted in the question of survival, and specif ically of populations in relation to the biological environments that they inhabit (Holling, 1973). Adaptation refers to the changes in gene frequencies that confer reproductive advantage to a population in specific environ ments, and to physiological and sociocultural changes that enhance individual fitness and well being. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Adaptation has a currency in the social sci ences through the organic analogy the idea that social systems are forms of living systems in which processes of adaptation inhere (Slo bodkin and Rappaport, 1974). In geography, cultural and hUMAN EcoLogy drew heavily on biological and adaptive thinking by seeing social development in terms of human niches, adaptive radiation and human ecological suc cession (see Watts, 1983b). Some of the more sophisticated work in cultural ecology (Nietschmann, 1973) drew upon the work of Rappaport (1979), Wilden (1972) and Bate son (1972), who employed systems theory (cf. systems analysis), cybernetics and ecosys tems modelling as a way of describing the structure of adaptation in peasant and tribal societies. Here, adaptation refers to the ?processes by which living systems main tain homeostasis in the face of short term environmental fluctuations and by transform ing their own structures through long term non reversing changes in the composition and structure of their environments as well? (Rappaport, 1979, p. 145). There is a structure to adaptive processes by which individuals and populations respond, in the first instance, flexibly with limited deployments of resources and over time deeper more structural (and less reversible) adaptive responses follow. Maladapation in this account refers to pro cesses pathologies by which an orderly pat tern of response is compromised or prevented. In social systems, these pathologies emerge from the complex ordering of societies. Cultural ecology and ecological anthropology focused especially on rural societies in the ThirD world to demonstrate that various as pects of their cultural and religious life fulfilled adaptive functions. Adaptation has also been employed however by sociologists, geographers and Ethnographers in contemporary urban settings as a way of describing how individuals, households and communities respond to and cope with new experiences (Migration, pov erty, violence) and settings (the city, the prison). In the human sciences, the term ?adaptation? has, however, always been saddled with the baggage of structural fUNctionaL ism on the one hand and biological reduction ism on the other (Watts, 1983b). Much of the new work on risk and vulnerability whether to global climate change or the resurgence of infectious diseases often deploys the language or intellectual architecture of adaptation. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
aerotropolis
A term introduced by Kasarda (2000) referring to urban developments fo cused on major airports, which increasingly act as major economic centres and urban development, for both aeronautical and non aeronautical related activities: Kasarda likens them to traditional central bUSiNESS dis tricts, with important retail, hotel, entertain ment and conference facilities, drawing on wider clienteles than those who fly into the air port at the development?s core. Increasingly, land use planning focuses on airports as major economic development cores. rjj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) http://www.aerotropolis.com/aerotropolis.html (NEW PARAGRAPH)
affect
The intensive capacities of a boDY to affect (through an affection) and be affected (as a result of modifications). The concept is used to describe unformed and unstructured intensities that, although not necessarily ex perienced by or possessed by a subjEct, cor respond to the passage from one bodily state to another and are therefore analysable in terms of their effects (McCormack, 2003). In contemporary hUMAN gEographY, there is no single or stable cultural theoretical vocabulary to describe affect. It is possible to identify at least five attempts to engage with affects as diffuse intensities that in their ambiguity lie at the very edge of semantic availability: work animated by ideas of pERforMAncE; the psych ology of Silvan Tomkins; neo Darwinism; Gilles Deleuze?s ethological re workings of Baruch Spinoza; and post Lacanian psychoanalysis (see psychoANALYTic ThEorY) (Thrift, 2004a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within these five versions, the most in depth has been the engagement of non representational thEory with Deleuze?s cre ative encounter with the term affectus in the work of the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (which had been translated as ?emotion? or ?feeling?). This begins from an analytic distinction between affect and other related modalities, including emotion and feeling (Anderson, 2006b), and is organized around two claims. First, affects can be de scribed as impersonal or pre personal, as they do not necessarily belong to a subject or in habit a space between an interpretative subject and an interpreted object. Rather, affects can be understood as autonomous, in that they are composed in and circulate through materially heterogeneous ASSEMbLAgES. This retains the connotation that affects come from elsewhere to effect a subject or self. Second, affect is equivalent to intensity in that it does not func tion like a system of signification, but consti tutes a movement of qualitative difference. The relationship between the circulation and distribution of affects and signification is not, therefore, one of conformity or correspond ence, but one of resonation or interference. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Unlike other versions of what affect is and does, non representational theory's engage ment with the term is based on a distinction between affect and emotion where emotion is understood as the socio linguistic fixing of intensity that thereafter comes to be defined as personal (cf. emotionaL geography). The term ?affect? has thus been central to non representational theory's break with signifying or structuralizing versions of cuLture. The difficulties that affect poses for social analysis how to describe the circulation and distribu tion of intensities have been engaged through the creation of new modes of witness ing that learn to pay attention to the inchoate, processual, life of spaces and places (Dews bury, 2003). Alongside this development of new methodological repertories has been a growing recognition that understanding the circulation and distribution of affect is central to engagements with a contemporary political moment in which affect has emerged as an object of contemporary forms of biopower and biopoLitics (Thrift, 2004a). In response, a range of work has begun to articulate and exemplify the goals and techniques of a spatial politics and/or ethics that aims to inventively respond to and intervene in the ongoing com position of spaces of affect (McCormack, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . ba (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) McCormack (2003); Thrift (2004a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Africa (idea of)
Geography, as an institu tionalized field of knowledge, figures centrally in both the history of informal and formal colonial rule in Africa and in the ways in which Africa came to be represented in the West and in turn how the West has repre sented itself to itself especially from the eighteenth century onwards. In his important and controversial book Orientalism (2003 [1978]), Edward Said reveals how ideas and knowledge, while complex and unstable, are always inseparable from systems of subjection. In his case, orientaLism represents a body of European knowledge, a geography of the Orient, which not only helped construct an imperial vision of particular places and sub jects but displaced other voices, and indeed had material consequences as such ideas be came the basis for forms of rule. In an almost identical fashion, the history of geographical scholarship, and of academic geography, in particular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was closely tied to the European imperial mission in Africa. The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was formed in 1830 as an outgrowth of the Africa Association, and Britain's overseas expansion in the nineteenth century (in which Africa fig ured prominently, especially after 1870) was by and large orchestrated through the RGS. Similarly, the Franco Prussian War (1870 1) directly stimulated an increase in French geo graphical societies, which helped sustain a co herent political doctrine of colonial expansion, not least in Africa. At the Second International Congress of Geographical Sciences held in 1875, and attended by the president of the French Republic, knowledge and conquest of the Earth were seen as an obligation, and geography provided the philosophical justification. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Africa was central to, and to a degree con stitutive of, the troika of geography, race and empire. European geography helped create or, more properly, invent a sort of Africanism, and relatedly a particular set of tropical ima ginaries or visions embodied in the emergent field of tropical geography (see tropicamy). Equally, Africa played its part in the debates within geography over environmentaL deter minism, race and civiLization, and in what Livingstone called the moral economy of cli mate; Africa helped invent geography. The iconography of light and darkness portrayed the European penetration of Africa as simul taneously a process of domination, enlighten ment and liberation. Geography helped make Africa ?dark? in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it simultaneously assisted in the means (military cartography) by which the dark ness was to be lifted by the mission civUisatrice. In a sense, then, the study of Africa lay at the heart of academic geography from its inception. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The idea of Africa and its genealogical prov enance in the West is far too complex to be sketched here. Suffice to say that Stanley Crouch is quite right when he writes that Africa is ?one of the centerpieces of fantasy of our time? (Crouch, 1990). Africa was after all, in the words of Joseph Conrad?s Marlow in Heart of darkness (2007 [1902]), ?like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world'. It is no surprise that one of the most important texts on contemporary Africa Achille Mbembe?s Postcolony (2001) begins with the statement that Africa stands as the ?supreme receptacle? of the West?s obsession with ?absence?, ?non being? in short, ?nothingness? (p. 4). The Hegelian idea that Africa was a space without history has been elaborated so that Africa?s special feature is ?nothing at all?. It is against this sort of dehistoricization that so much intel lectual effort has been put by African intellec tuals in particular to account for another idea of Africa, one that approaches what Bayart (1993) calls ?the true historicity of African societies?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A history of geographers and geographical practice in the service of colonial rule in Africa has yet to be written, but it is quite clear that geographical ideas, most obviously land use and agrarian change, population growth and mobility, and environmental conservation, run through the period from the imperial partition ing of Africa in the 1870s to the first wave of independence in 1960. Richard Grove (1993) has traced, for example, early conservation thinking in the Cape in southern Africa to the 1811 44 period, which had produced a conservation structure of government inter vention by 1888, driven by a triad of interests: scientific botany, the white settler community and government concerns for security. This tradition of land use and conservation was inherited by various colonial officials in Africa, and reappeared across much of west ern and southern Africa in the 1930s in a debate over population growth, deforestation and the threat of soil erosion. In colonial British West Africa, the rise of a populist sentiment in agricultural policy singing the praises of the smallholder and the African peasant is very much part of the historiog raphy of cultural ecological thinking in geog raphy as a whole (see cuLturaL ecoLogy). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The relevance of geography?s concern with land use and human ecoLogy for colonial planning in Africa (and elsewhere) was vastly enhanced by what one might call the ?invention of development ? in the late colonial period. While the word ?development? came into the English language in the eighteenth century with its root sense of unfolding, and was sub sequently shaped by the Darwinian revolution a century later, development understood as a preoccupation of public and international policy to improve welfare and to produce gov ernable subjects is of much more recent prov enance. Development as a set of ideas and practices was, in short, the product of the transformation of the colonial world into the independent developing world in the postwar period. Africa, for example, only became an object of planned development after the Depression of the 1930s. The British Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940) and the French Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development (1946) promoted mod ernization in Africa through enhanced imper ial investment against the backdrop of growing nationalist sentiments. After 1945, the imper ial desire to address development and welfare had a strong agrarian focus, specifically prod uctivity through mechanization, settlement schemes and various sorts of state interven tions (marketing reform, co operatives), all of which attracted a good deal of geographical attention. Growing commercialization in the peasant sector and new patterns of population mobility and demographic growth (expressed largely in a concern with the disruptive conse quences of urbanization and rural urban migration) pointed to land use as a central pivot of geographical study. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geography was a central practical field in the mapping of the continent. At the Treaty of Berlin (1895) when Africa was partitioned, the maps produced by geographers were for the most part incomplete and inadequate. But the harnessing of cartography to the colonial project was an indispensable component of colonial rule and the exercise of power. Cadas tral surveys were the ground on which Native Authorities and tax collection were to be based, but fully cadastral mapping proved ei ther too expensive or too political. New critical studies in cartography have provided import ant accounts of the institutionalized role of mapping in colonial (and post colonial) rule and its use as an exercise of power (see cartographic reason; cartography). The mapping of Africa is still ongoing and the delimitation of new territories (whether states, local government areas or chieftaincies) remains a complex process, wrapped up with state power and forms of representation that are not captured by the purported objective qualities of scientific map production. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Colonial rule in Africa proved to be rela tively short, little more than one lifetime long, and produced neither mature capitalism nor a standard grid of imperial rule. Whether settler colonies (Kenya), peasant based trade economies (Senegal) or mine labour reserves (Zaire), in the 1960s virtually all the emerging independent African states shared a common imperial legacy: the single commodity econ omy. African economies were one horse towns, hitched to the world market through primary export commodities such as cotton, copper and cocoa. However distorted or neo colonial their national economies, African hopes and expectations at independence were high indeed, in some sense almost euphoric. The heady vision of Kwame Nkrumah of a black Africa utilizing the central planning experience of the Soviet Union to industrialize rapidly and overcome poverty, ignorance and disease captured the popular imagination. Indeed, among the first generation of African leaders, irrespective of their political stripe, there was an infatuation with national plans and ambitious long term planning. Health, education and infrastructure were heavily funded (typically aided and abetted by tech nical foreign assistance), and government activities were centralized and expanded to facilitate state led modernization. In spite of the fact that state agencies extracted surpluses from the agrarian sector peasant production remained the bedrock of most independent states to sustain import substitution and industrialization (as well as a good deal of rent seeking and corruption by elites), African economies performed quite well in the 1960s, buoyed by soaring commodity prices (espe cially after 1967). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Not surprisingly, much of the geographical scholarship of the 1960s was framed by some variant of modernization theory, or at the very least by the presumption that the processes of modernity (commercialization, urbanization and transportation) were shaping indigenous institutions and practices. From the onset of the 1970s, the complacency and optimism of the 1960s appeared decidedly on the wane. Mounting US deficits, the devaluation of the dollar and the emergence of floating exchange rates marked the demise of the postwar Bretton Woods financial order. The restruc turing of the financial system coincided with the crisis of the three F?s (price increases in fuel, fertilizer and food) in 1972 3, which marked a serious deterioration in Africa?s terms of trade. Ironically, the oil crisis also contained a solution. Between 1974 and 1979, the balance of payments problems of many African states (which faced not only a quadrupling of oil prices but a general price inflation for imported goods and a sluggish demand for primary commodities) was dealt with through expansionary adjustment: in other words, through borrowing from banks eager to recycle petrodollars or from the spe cial facilities established by the international monetary fUND (iMf) and the World Bank. Expansionary adjustment, however, deepened two already problematic tendencies in African political economies. The first was to enhance the politics of public sector expansion, con tributing to waste, inefficiency and the grow ing privatization of the public purse. The second was to further lubricate the political machinery, which produced uneconomic investments with cheaply borrowed funds. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The crisis of the 1970s helped to precipitate two major changes in the institutional and the oretical climate of Africanist geography. On the one hand, the spectre of fAMiNE in the Sahel and the Horn drew increased foreign assistance to sub Saharan Africa as a whole and to rural de velopment in particular. To the extent that this support translated into research and pro gramming activities in the donor countries, academics and consultants were drawn into de velopment and applied work, in the USA through USAID, in the UK through the Minis try of Overseas Development, and in France through the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique d?Outre Mer (ORSTOM). In the USA in particular, USAID funded projects per mitted some campuses to expand their African ist activities and encouraged some geographers to systematically explore a number of questions relating to drought, food security and rural re source use. On the other, the bleak prospects for Africa in the face of a world recession and deteriorating terms of trade, prospects that con tributed to the call for a new international eco nomic order in the first part of the 1970s, were not unrelated to the growing critique of market oriented modernization theory and the early growth theorists, and to the gradual emergence, beginning in the late 1960s, of radical depend ency theory, and subsequently of Marxist inspired development theory (Watts, 1983a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The precipitous collapse in the 1980s brought on by drought, famine, AIDS, bank ruptcy, civil strife, corruption, the conflation of troubles, was matched by an equally dramatic rise of neo liberal theory (see neo LibERALiSM) what John Toye (1987) has called the counterrevolution in development theory. Championing the powers of free and competitive MARkETS and by extension the assault on the state led post colonial develop ment strategies of most African states while popular in the halls and offices of the World Bank and various development agencies, was an object of considerable theoretical debate. Some geographical scholarship had certainly been critical of state initiated development schemes, but the myopic prescriptions for free markets were properly criticized for their impact on the poor, for their dismissal of the institutional prerequisites for market capital ism and as a basis for sustained accumulation. At the same time, the adjustment had devas tating consequences on university education in Africa, with the result that research by African geographers was seriously comprom ised. African scholarship generally withered to the point of collapse as faculties faced the drying up of research monies, compounded by declining real wages. Many academics were compelled to engage in second occupations. The most active African geographers were those who were based outside of the continent or who acted as consultants to international development agencies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the new millennium two other issues had, in a curious way, come back to haunt Africa, raising difficult and profound ques tions about the way Africa is, and has been, inscribed through Western discourse. One is rooted in debates that stretch back to the end of the eighteenth century and the other is relatively new. The Malthusian spectre (see maLthusian modeL) hangs over the continent and has pride of place in the major policy documents of global development agencies. Some geographers, working largely within a Boserupian problematic (see boserup thesis), had explored the relations between demo graphic pressure and land use during the 1980s, but the new demographic debate is driven increasingly by the presumption of persistently high