The Dictionary of Human Geography (8 page)

anarchism
A political phiLosophY that is anti authoritarian, seeking the elimination of the state and its replacement by a decentral ized social and political self governing social order. Anarchist social order is not the absence of government, but a form of self government that does not demand obedience. It is a mix ture of libertarian, utopian and socialist ideas that counters power and hierarchy through voluntary, and usually local, decentralized communities. Cook (1990) identified five different forms of anarchism individualism, collectivism, anarchist communism, anarcho syndicalism and pacifism. Anarcho feminism and situationiSM are also relevant varieties of anarchism that have been utilized by geographers. Geographers Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus were among the early pro ponents of anarchist communism. Both were active members of the academic geography community in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Kearns, 2004), though their political leanings were ignored as ?baggage? by the geography establishment, which was focused upon im perial and national projects (MacLaughlin, 1986). Kropotkin?s belief that ?the duty of socially concerned scientists lay in articulating the interests of subordinate social classes and combating poverty, underdevelopment and social justice' (quoted in MacLaughlin, 1986, p. 25) lay at the heart of the radical gEographY that emerged in the late 1970s. However, the initial identification of anarchism as a philosophical basis for radical geography was short lived, and in the late 1970s its influence declined (Peet, 1977b; Peet and Thrift, 1989). More recently, Blunt and Wills' (2000) identi fication of radical geography's attention to anarchism as facilitating the ?breakthrough' to marxism echoes Peet?s sentiments, but they also highlight Emma Goldman's contribution to anarcho feminism and its role in stimulating feminist geograpHies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) However, there has been renewed interest in the philosophy and practice of anarchism in explaining contemporary human geography. Sibley (2001) has identified the importance of anarchist theory in promoting the challenge to binary thinking that has developed into the concept of tHird space. Bonnett's (1996) study of situationists (a political force that was particularly active in the 1960s, seeking a ?new human geography' by critiquing contem porary urBanism, pLaNNing and architecture) focuses upon the creation of politicized urban spaces as a way of challenging authority. Eco nomic geographers interested in contemporary resistance to neo liberalist gLoBaLization have identified the creation of autonomous geographies that are underpinned by anarchist principles. Chatterton?s (2005) study of workers? co operatives in Argentina defines three au tonomous geographies: a territorial geography of networked autonomous neigHBourHoods, a material geography of mutual aid, and a sociaL geograpHy of daily practice and inter action. Following the tension in anarchism between individual freedom and social action, Chatterton shows how the groups try to man age their interaction with the rest of the world while simultaneously creating a network of autonomous places. Taylor (2004a) has taken a more structural approach to anarchism in identifying gLoBaL cities as a basis for resist ing state power. Blunt and Wills' claim that anarchist ideas have ?spawned only the out lines of a tradition of geographical scholarship and there is plenty of scope for further elabor ation' (2000, p. 2) is still true, but there are signs that urban, economic and political geog raphers find contemporary changes a catalyst for elaboration. cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Blunt and Wills (2000); Peet (1977). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
androcentricity
Viewing the world from a male perspective. Some feminist theorists view mainstream scholarship or science such as geography as androcentric, in that what is presented as a gender neutral analysis or (NEW PARAGRAPH) method, in practice embodies masculine values and assumptions (e.g. Rose, 1993; see also feminist geograpHies). Eichler (1988) out lines six types of androcentricity: male frame of reference; locating men as agents and women as objects; female invisibility; main taining male over female interests; misogyny; and defending male dominance. She also traces five manifestations of androcentricity in the research process (see mascuLinism). sw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Eichler (1988); Rose (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Anglocentrism
An attitude that unreflex ively assumes the superiority of KnowLedge produced in Anglo American contexts (see also etHnocentrism; eurocentrism). In con temporary geography it refers to a debate in particular, within criticaL Human geograpHy addressing the social and epistemological mechanisms that construct an ?international' writing space imbued with Anglo American Hegemony. The debate mostly has been performed at International Conferences of Critical Geography and in commentaries and editorials in ?international? journals (e.g. Berg and Kearns, 1998; Minca, 2000; Braun, Vaiou, Yiftachel, Sakho, Chaturvedi, Timar and Minca, 2003; Geoforum, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This Anglo American hegemony does not work as an intentional domination of debates, nor is it something to be accepted as inevitable it is the outcome of a series of power constitut ing practices. One of these is Language. To an increasing extent, English has become the lingua franca of ?international' academic (and other) discourses, a practice giving precedence to some while putting ?others' in a position where they have to cope with the burden of translation and struggle to communicate thoughts and concepts in an idiom that to them is a secondary skill. This is not only about translation in a literal sense, because no language is a neutral medium; the adoption of any language has a range of cultural and con ceptual consequences. The question of lan guage therefore folds into a much broader power knowledge system, which constitutes geographical writing spaces including Anglo phone journals, books, conferences, seminars and so on. In these writing spaces, power and knowledge connect, through the media of lan guage, institutional arrangements and social practices of inclusion/exclusion and through the political economy of international publish ing, to produce a ?centre periphery' imaginary with regard to the relationship between (NEW PARAGRAPH) Anglo American and non Anglo American writers. Notwithstanding an increased sensitiv ity to situated knowLedge in contemporary geography, these practices, connected to an im plicitly supposed neutrality of concepts and cat egories, tend to conceal the partiality and local character of Anglo American theoretical pro duction and reproduce it as ?unlimited?, ?univer sal? or at least ?transferable?. The ?master subject? of geographical theory is constructed as Anglo American, with more inferior subject positions left open to writers from ?other? places. Contributions from outside the Anglo phone world are at one level welcome, but the authors tend to be seen, not as theory producing subjects, but rather as providers of ?case studies from another place?. The non Anglo American writer is constructed as a me diator or translator, often in a double sense; on the one hand ?translating? travelling Anglo American theory and putting it into use in ?other? contexts, and on the other one ?translat ing? the unknown and exotic ?other? and making it accessible to the powerful knower in the centre. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographical writings based in feminism and post C0L0NIALism have in many ways identified and challenged this power knowledge system. Even they, however, are not immune from the charges made in the debate. Like any dominant discourse, they have difficulties destabilizing their own power position. But the very existence of the debate can be seen as a promising opening; in particular, to the extent that it is based on common recognition and works against the hegemony from ?inside? and ?outside? alike. ks (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gregson, Simonsen and Vaiou (2003); Paasi (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
animals
Once of marginal concern to geog raphy, animals, their places, welfare, relation ships and spatialities have recently become areas of debate and innovation. Attention has been buoyed by growing social concerns for animals and the, albeit problematic, growth in animal rights literature. Moreover, develop ments in sociaL theory that have (a) decon structed the human, exposing the indistinct character of the divides between humans and animals (Agamben, 2002), and (b) recon structed animals, affording them active roles in constituting their environments, bodies and relationships (see actor network theory, non representationaL theory), have started to unsettle the human of human geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While antecedents of this new animal geog raphy certainly existed in cuLturaL ecoLogy and studies of domestication (Tuan, 1984), the most important shift in the place of animals in geography occurred in the 1990s, through a series of innovative papers that aimed to bring the animals back in (Wolch and Emel, 1995, 1998; Philo and Wilbert, 2000). This work covered a range of topics focusing on spaces of exclusion of, and human cohabitation with, animals. One difficulty in this work was to devise means oftalking about animals them selves, rather than reducing non human ani mals to having bit parts in human history (and thereby inadvertently reproducing the Cartesian and Kantian notions of non human animals as automata, and as means to human ends). It is here that the work of a whole range of approaches that share something with post structuraLism has been most productive in affording animals their own histories and geographies. The work of anthropologists, par ticularly that of Tim Ingold, highlighted the similarities between human and non human animals? dwelling practices (Ingold, 2000). de construction of the terms ?human? and ?ani mal? afforded insights into the role that the singular noun ?the animal? has played in what Jacques Derrida has called the sacrificial struc ture of human supremacy (Derrida, 2003). Finally, work informed by understandings and tracings of the material and cultural associ ations of human and non human animals has demonstrated complex histories and geograph ies of sharing (molecules, viruses, flesh), ac commodating, adapting, hostilities and hospitalities (Haraway, 2003). The resulting hybrid forms are multiple, leading not to some undifferentiated human/non human amalgam, but to worlds wherein non human and human animals differentiate themselves at the same time as they form close relationships (Whatmore, 2002a). sjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wolch and Emel (1998); Wolfe (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Annales School
An interdisciplinary school of French historians established by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, co founders in 1929 of the journal Annales d?histoire ?conomique et sociale (now Annales. Economies. Societes. Civilisations). The Annalistes, originally based in Strasbourg (a German city from 1871 to 1918) developed an integrative, synthe sizing and distinctively French style of ?total history?, in opposition to German historical methods. Drawing ideas from sociology, (NEW PARAGRAPH) anthropology and hUMAN gEographY, the Annalistes insisted that short term political events must be understood in relation to long term structural economic, social and en vironmental change. The writings of Fernand Braudel (1902 85) exemplify this approach, which continues to be significant in both French social science and in the (stylistically very different) transatlantic development of world systems analysis. Mjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Baker (1984); Clark (1999b); Friedman (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
anthropogeography
A school of hUMan gEographY closely associated with the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844 1904: see Bassin, 1987b). Ratzel had trained in the natural sciences and, like many of his contemporaries, was taken by the ideas of dar winism (see also LAMArck(ian)iSM). Following an extended visit to the USA, however, it was clear that his imagination had also been captured by anthropology. On the marchlands between the natural sciences and anthro pology, he now ?sought to lay out the concep tual foundations of a new discipline human geography' (Livingstone, 1992, p. 198). Its central statement was in the two volumes of his Anthropogeographie, published in 1882 and 1891, the first subtitled ?Geography?s applica tion to history' and the second ?The geograph ical distribution of mankind'. These volumes have to be placed in the context of the contemporary debates within the German intellectual community over the place of the cultural sciences and their relation to the nat ural sciences (Smith, 1991). Ratzel's achieve ment was to put ?the human' back into gEographY: in his view, the discipline could not be assimilated to the natural sciences but, on the contrary, had to explore the reciprocal relations between ?culture? and ?nature?. It also had to set those relations in motion by recognizing the dynamics of spatial formations (notably diffusion and Migration). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ratzel?s project was thus not environmen tal determinism, as some commentators have suggested, but it was distinguished by the attempt to elaborate a series of nominally scientific concepts whose significance extended beyond the formalization of an aca demic discipline. For Ratzel, writing in the middle of what Bassin (1987c) describes as an ?imperialist frenzy', the development of a state could not be separated from its spatial growth. Natter (2005) is thus surely right to say that Ratzel's Anthropogeographie ?bleeds into? his Politische Geographie, published in 1897. Indeed, Ratzel himself saw Anthropogeo graphie as only a preliminary stage in the foundation of ?the science of poLmcaL geog raphy?. In his Politische Geographie, Ratzel ac cordingly described the state as ?a living body which has extended itself over a part of the Earth and has differentiated itself from other bodies which have similarly expanded?. The object of these extensions and expansions was always ?the conquest of space?, and it was this that became formalized in the concept of lEbEnsRaum (?living space?): ?the geograph ical area within which living organisms de velop?. Ratzel was keenly aware of the dangers of organicism, but even so insisted that: ?Just as the struggle for existence in the plant and animal world always centres about a matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are in great part only struggles for tERRitORy? (see also geopolitics). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wanklyn (1961) treats Lebensraum as ?a fun damental geographical concept', and in her eyes Ratzel's writings were directed primarily towards ?thinking out the scope and content of biogeography'. This is to understand bio geography in a highly particular way, but there is a more general tradition of biogeographical reflection within human geography that sug gests affinities between Ratzel's Lebensraum, Paul Vidal de la Blache?s genre de vie and the concept of rum (?room?) developed in Torsten Hagerstrand?s tiMe geography. If these affin ities are recognized, then Dickinson?s (1969) view of Ratzel's original formulation, stripped of its subsequent distortions by the Third Reich, as ?one of the most original and fruitful of all concepts in modern geography', becomes peculiarly prescient. But such a purely ?scientific' reading does scant justice to the context in which Ratzel was working and, in particular, ignores the fact that his vision of human geography not only had political implications but also rested on and indeed was made possible by a series of pol itical assumptions (Bassin, 1987b). Crucially, Farinelli (2000, p. 951) insists that through Ratzel's reformulations ?the state takes posses sion of geography, and becomes its supreme object'. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Farinelli (2000); Natter (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)