EVERYWHERE? THE GEOGRAPHY OF KNOWLEDGE*

ABSTRACT This paper reviews what we know about the spatial manifestations of knowledge. The knowledge production function addresses the easily measured portion of knowledge produced. Research on learning, particularly interactive and collective learning, in firms and in innovation systems, promises to unveil the human and organizational processes by which knowledge is created, stored, and transmitted to others. Our understanding of innovation and technological change depends on how well we tackle knowledge and its geography.     

SPATIAL METAPHOR AND THE POLITICS OF EMPOWERMENT: MAPPING A PLACE FOR FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNISM IN GEOGRAPHY?*

Spatial language and constructs are deployed systematically in the writing of many contemporary feminists. Disempowerment is couched in negative spatial terms: as “displacement,” having space denied, or as a negative or non-space. Empowerment, on the other hand, is written as an appropriation of the spatial: creating new spaces, occupying existing spaces, or revalorizing negatively labeled spaces. Furthermore, the map emerges as a common trope in this writing. Rather than transparently communicating the totality of what exists, however, their maps become rhetorical guides to possible worlds. The spatial provides a textual tool with which many contemporary feminists contest existing power relations. Space is viewed as liberating, empowering, and political. Their use of the spatial contrasts with the apolitical (and, not inconsequentially, gendered) conceptualization of space in some postmodern writing. This divergent deployment of spatial textual devices in the writing of some contemporary feminists and that of some postmodernists opens up another window on the knotty nexus of feminist and postmodern thought in geography.     

A FINE BALANCE? GEOGRAPHY AT THE MILLENNIUM

Recognizing that post-modernism (broadly defined) has had a significant impact upon contemporary geographical practice, this essay considers the claims of its proponents and seeks to weigh the implications of the postmodernist impulse for the subject as a whole. On balance, recent engagements with the ideas of a broad spectrum of important philosophers and critical theorists are seen to have broadened, enlivened, and in some respects enhanced human geography. The impress upon physical geography has been much less consequential. Yet many post-modernist claims must be met with circumspection. Embraced tout ensemble, they would seem to blinker understanding, limit practical engagement with the world, and imperil the foundations upon which important geographical work has been (and should continue to be) built. In human as well as physical geography, different scales of inquiry favour (even require) different modes of analysis, and a respectful understanding of different scholarly aims and means is essential if Geography is to remain robust well into the new millen nium. Étant donné que le postmodernisme (au sens large) a beaucoup influé sur les pratiques de la géographie contemporaine, cet essai étudie les affirmations de ses partisans et cherche àévaluer les implications du post-modernisme pour la discipline dans sa totalité. En fin de compte, l'utilisation des idées de toute une gamme de philosophes importants et de théoriciens du post-modernisme peut être perçue comme ayant élargi et à certains égards amélioré la géographie humaine. L'impact du postmodernisme sur la géographie physique a été beaucoup moins important. Et pourtant, on doit envisager avec beaucoup de prudence les prétentions des partisans du postmodernisme. Si l'on accepte toutes ces théories dans leur ensemble, on risque de mettre en cause notre compréhension du monde et de nuire aux fondements mêmes sur lesquels la recherche en géographie a été (et continuera àêtre) construite. En géographie humaine aussi bien qu'en géographie physique, l'échelle des recherches entreprises implique (et même nécessite) l'utilisation de différentes méthodes d'analyse. Une compréhension respectueuse des différents objectifs et méthodes des chercheurs en géographie est essentielle, si nous voulons que la géographie en tant que discipline maintienne sa vigueur au-delà du seuil du nouveau millénaire.     

A WORLD CONNECTING? FROM THE UNITY OF HISTORY TO GLOBAL HISTORY

Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill‐reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world‐making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world‐historical process,” a cognitive framework that co‐emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process‐template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world‐historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present‐day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity.”     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS? GENOMIC HISTORY AND THE RETURN OF RACE IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work—a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.     

COMMUNITY AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SOCIAL ORDER ON THE CANADIAN FRONTIER IN THE 1840s AND 1850s: AN ENGLISH IMMIGRANT’S ACCOUNT

Abstract

This article draws on the letters of a young immigrant doctor, Francis Codd, who arrived in British Canada in the I84os. Many of the one million migrants, mainly of British and Irish origin, who arrived in Canada in the mid-I9th century, benefited from the availability of land and absence of social barriers to mobility. This enabled them to think and feel like citizens of the new country,in a way denied them at home. Francis Codd’s account throws light on the part played by the appreciation of nature and ‘wilderness’ in this process, as well as describing the beginnings of a new civil society and the development of ‘community’ institutions. However, at the same time as a ‘Canadian’ identity was being constructed for the white settler population, that of the indigenous population was accorded little recognition or respect.     

THE TINY PAINTINGS OF THE BUDDHIST WORLD——A RECORD OF LIU ENJUN AND HIS TSAKA PAINTINGS

<正>EDITOR'S COMMENTARY This special column consists of devoted fans of Tibetan culture. They have spent their life,their energy and their finances to eagerly collect and preserve unique Tibetan traditional culture while virtually also enjoying the spiritual and material happiness which those treasures bring to them.From now on,this journal is going to invite Chen Dan to contribute her detailed and delicate stories about collectors of Tibetan artifacts one by one,     

THE MEDICALISATION OF A PARISH WORKHOUSE IN GEORGIAN WESTMINSTER: ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS, 1725–1824

Abstract

Any standard account of the history of medicine in eighteenth-century England would include a survey of the proliferation of medical institutions and charities in the nation’s capital. The eighteenth century, it is well known, saw the foundation of large numbers of hospitals, charitable dispensaries, private mad-houses and infirmaries in London. Such institutions, moreover, often served as a blue print for provincial foundations. However, the eighteenth-century also saw the growth of indoor relief, particularly in the metropolis. Few historians have connected the two phenomena. Those interested in the growth of institutional medical provision have tended to neglect the role of parish workhouses. Using evidence from one of London’s biggest workhouses, that of St Martin in the Fields, this article argues that the medical services provided by the parish workhouse became increasingly extensive, and, for this reason, reliance on external medical provision declined over time.     

INSTRUMENTS OF CONVERSION? THE ROLE OF MEGALITHS IN THE MESOLITHIC/NEOLITHIC TRANSITION IN NORTHWEST EUROPE1

This paper discusses the general conditions which have given rise to megalithic construction techniques, and the specific circumstances under which megalithism became important in Neolithic Europe. It argues that the great elaboration of megalithic constructions in western and northern Europe must be related to the survival there of Mesolithic populations, and that monumentality was an essential element of the cultural rhetoric whereby these indigenous groups were converted to a Neolithic way of life.     

THE TIBETAN ANTELOPE——TRAVEILER ACROSS THEROOF OF THE WORLD

<正>We stand on a ridge at 5200m in the Changtang or‘Northern Plain' of the Tibet Autonomous Region.The grey-brown and barren hills around us are alive with thousands of Tibetan antelope or chiru,known also as tsi.     

A HISTORY OF THE SPECIES?1

By rejecting the old divide between prehistory and history, the group of scholars behind Deep History opens a new window on the problem of the unity and diversity of human experience over the very long run. Their use of kinship metaphors suggests not only a link between modern society and the deep past, but also perhaps a way to imagine the common legacy of the human species. But what emerges from Deep History is hardly a sunny story about the distant origins of social justice and ecological harmony. The other central metaphor of the book—the fractal—uncovers the slow prelude to the Anthropocene. Rather than seeing a sharp break in the Industrial Revolution from an “organic” to a fossil fuel‐burning economy, these scholars stress the history of environmental destruction that has accompanied human expansion. My critical reading presents an alternative understanding of deep history as an arena for a new politics of species. Here a cornucopian understanding of human adaptation clashes with a new pessimism about the climatic fragility of Neolithic civilization.     

EXCEPTIONAL HISTORY? THE ORIGINS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES1

This essay examines how and why historiography—defined to mean the study of the history of historical writing—first emerged as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry in the United States during the period from 1890 to the 1930s by focusing on the practice of historiography by three of the most influential American historiographers whose work spans this period: J. Franklin Jameson, John Spencer Bassett, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Whereas the development of historiography as a field of study signified a recognition that historians and historical writing are themselves products of the historical process, American historiographers in this period at the same time used historiography to further a scientific ideal of objectivity that was premised on the belief in the ability of historians to separate themselves from that process. Modern scholars (notably, Peter Novick) have attributed to scientific historians like Jameson and Bassett a simplistic and naive positivism; but the ability of these historiographers to recognize the subjective character of historical writing and yet affirm a belief in objectivity reveals that their understanding of historical truth was more complex than modern scholars have acknowledged. In turn, by questioning the belief that the historical profession was originally founded on a naïve faith in the ideal of objective truth, I demonstrate that New Historians like Barnes were more similar to their predecessors, the scientific historians, than they (or later scholars) acknowledged. Thus, rather than portraying the shift from scientific history to the New History as a linear trajectory of development from objectivity to a more relativist viewpoint, I argue that New Historians like Barnes at once expressed a greater recognition than his scientific predecessors of how historical writing was the product of its context, while still insisting on his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context.     

OVER THE WATER AND ACROSS THE DESERT – TRANS-SAHARAN CONTACTS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE 6TH AND 5TH CENTURY BC

After presenting the picture of Africa in Mediterranean minds of antiquity,this paper seeks by ways of a combined interpretation of the periplus of Hanno and Herodotus’logos on the Nasamones to investigate Carthaginian and Greek knowledge about the trans-Saharan routes und contacts of the 6th and 5th century BC.Further comparison with recent archaeological discoveries from the Iron Age in Senegal,the Niger Bend and Lake Chad illustrate that these sites were the destination of travellers from the North and that universal geographical theses concerning the course of the river Nile provided fundamental patterns of explanation and orientation for ancient explorers.Finally,it is considered why any further explorations both of the Inner African hinterland and the western seaway around the African continent were suspended in Antiquity.