PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: EUROCENTRISM IN GEOGRAPHY -THE CASE OF ASIAN URBANIZATION*

This address is in the nature of a series of reflections on underlying intellectual premises that characterize the relationship between Western geographers (defined as those practitioners who generally reside in Anglo-America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and the part of the world called Asia. The argument presented is that this relationship is essentially one-sided, in which the Western geographers have defined Asia in their Eurocentric terms. This is part of a broader discourse that may be labelled ‘Orientalism.’ The author, who has spent more than 30 years carrying out research on Asia, analyses these intellectual assumptions in terms of his own experience and suggests how a realization of the Eurocentric premises have enabled him largely to discard them and develop a new model of Asian urbanization. Finally, these trends are related to geography's increasing engagement in the main discourse of social theory. Dans ce discours, il s'agit d'une série de considérations sur les prémisses intellectuelles qui caractérisent les relations entre les géographes occidentaux (soit ceux qui habitent en Amérique anglophone, en Europe de l'ouest, en Australie, et à Nouvelle-Zélande) et les geographes de l'Asie. L'argument est presenté du point de vue des geographes occidentaux, qui decrivent l'Asie en termes eurocentriques. Ceci fait partie d'un sujet plus large, qu'on pourrait nommer ‘l'Orientalisme.’ L'auteur, qui a fait plus de trente ans de recherches sur l'Asie, fait I'analyse de ces premisses dans le cadre de sa propre expérience, et il suggère que la mise en évidence des prémisses eurocentriques lui a permis de les reletter en gros et de développer un nouveau modèle pour décrire l'urbanisation asiatique. Finalernent, l'auteur fait le lien entre ces tendances et le rôle de plus en plus important joué par les geographes dans la dornaine de la théorie sociale en général. From this vantage point, a question somewhat different from that of most historical sociologists arises. Almost all Western writing has been both Eurocentric and written from the hindsight of the 19th and 20th centuries. It has posed the question, crudely paraphrased: What was so special about the West that made it, rather than some other region, the “master” of the world system? Put this way, the question has a self-congratulatory ring. It looks into the special qualities of the West to account for its success. By contrast, then, it judges the other contenders as deficient insofar as they lacked the characteristics of the West. (Janet Abu-Lughod 1978–1979, 6)     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

A MOST MODERN SUBJECT: THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY AND THE FASHIONING OF NATIONALIST AND OTHER MODERN SUBJECTIVITIES

This book takes an ethnographic approach to its topic by endeavoring to observe how social and disciplinary subjects shaped by modernity go on to constitute modern worlds. Specifically, it attempts to “explore modernity as a contradictory and checkered historical-cultural entity and category as well as a contingent and contended process and condition” (1). Most of the subjects considered are intellectuals and academic disciplines (specifically history and anthropology), although the argument occasionally focuses on artists as well. The book particularly recognizes and analyzes the ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions generated within modernity not as mistakes or gaps like so many potholes to be fixed over time, but as constitutive of the modern landscape itself. This accepting acknowledgment, in turn, stands central to the book's endeavor to resist the teleological paradigms inherent in many modern metaphors regarding roads that must be traveled to move from what is backward to what is forward, from a superseded past to a promising future. Central to the volume—and its most original contribution—are various deliberations on the productions of time and space by various subjects. To be clear, by “time” the book means history and temporality whereas “space” suggests tradition and culture. It resists the naturalization of modern constructs such as secularized time and cultural traditions, and forces them under an analytic lens. Critical to these investigations is Saurabh Dube's appropriately insistent claim that these temporal and spatial regimes can exist in tandem and coevally, even when they are seemingly in contradiction. Among other outcomes, the volume prompts further reflection on the manner in which historiography plays a role in the formation of nationalist and modern subjectivities among nonhistorians. This essay seeks to think through the history of history as a discipline emerging during the coalescence of a hegemonic European episteme and the emergence of a popularly embraced scientism. Despite its roots in Europe long preceding modernity and its parallels in South Asia preceding British rule, history underwent a transformation when inflected through European modernity, especially the influence of empirical science paradigms. Although its emergence as a discipline promoted and employed by both the empire and the nation-state created professional historians, an expanding public sphere has meant that research into its role in fashioning modern subjectivities (including nationalist ones) must consider its reshaping and redeployment by those resisting European-originated modernity and promoting alternative modernities.     

GEOGRAPHY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE CASE OF THE 1984 GULF OF MAINE BOUNDARY DISPUTE

The October 1984 judgment of the International Court of justice delimiting the maritime boundary in the Gulf of Maine has important implications for geography as well as for Canada and the United States. Geography played an important role throughout the dispute, with each party adopting widely differing approaches to depicting the relevant geographical relationships. In its final judgment, the court declared that geography was the single most important factor in its determination of the boundary. An analysis of this judgment shows that it is a potential watershed for geography, creating the necessity for a more dynamic and realistic geographical analysis than has hitherto been applied to such disputes .     

THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF CHILD CARE: THE CASE OF THE CITY OF WATERLOO, ONTARIO*

The intention of this paper is to stimulate research on the demand and supply of child care services, an issue that has been largely neglected by geographers, although many of the problems involved lend themselves to geographical analysis. In addition, as the female labour force participation rate, the divorce rate, and the incidence of lone-parent families increase, so do the need for and importance of child care. We review the types of child care available in North America and provide statistics to demonstrate that the supply of child care falls short of demand. Furthermore, for the city of Waterloo, Ontario, through the use of 1981 and 1986 Census data we demonstrate that not only is the supply of licensed day care spaces insufficient to meet the demand, but also it is spatially arranged in a suboptimal way. Through population projections and net migration analyses we demonstrate that the demand for child care spaces in the near future is more likely to intensify in the periphery of the city, where the current supply is nonexistent. We thus argue that locational criteria should play a prominent role in the practice of licensing new day care centres. Cet article vise à encourager la recherche sur I'offre et la demande de services de garderie. Ce sujet a été largement négligé par les géographes měme si beaucoup des pro-blèmes rencontrés sont liés à des facteurs géographiques. De plus, la participation des femmes au marché du travail augmentant ainsi que le taux de divorce et le nombre de families monoparentales, les garderies deviennent de plus en plus nécessaires et importantes. Nous passons en revue les différents types de garderies qu'il est possible de trouver en Amérique du Nord et nous présentons des statistiques démontrant que le nombre actuel de garderies ne satisfait pas la demande. D'autre part, à I'aide des données du recensement canadien de 1981 et 1986 pour la ville de Waterloo, Ontario, nous prouvons que non seulement le nombre de places dans les garderies licenciées est insuffisant mais aussi que leur location géographique n'est pas optimale. À I'aide des études sur la population future et la migration nette, nous démontrons que la demande de garderies augmentera vraisemblablement à la périphérie de la ville où les garderies sont actuellement inexistantes. Par conséquent, nous estimons que le critère de localisation doit jouer un rǒle prédominant dans I'octroi des permis d'établissement de nouvelles garderies.