The genealogy of personal names: towards a more productive method in historical onomastics

It is essential to combine genealogical and collective biographical approaches with network analysis if one wants to take full advantage of the evidence provided by (hereditary) personal names in historical and linguistic onomastic research. The naming practices of rural families and clans from the 18th to the 20th century can bring us much fresh information about their enduring attitudes and values, as well as about other mentalities of everyday life. Personal names were cultural symbols that contained socially shared meanings. With the help of genealogical method it is possible to obtain a more nuanced understanding of these past naming practices, for example by comparing the conventions of different communities. A long-term and systematic empirical research also enables us to dispute certain earlier assumptions that have been taken for granted in historical onomastics. Therefore, the genealogical method is crucial in studying the criteria for the choices of personal names in the past.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

Cultural evolution: a basic concept for human and historical geography

The concept of cultural evolution profoundly affected the objectives and methods employed in the social sciences in the earlier part of this century but it has largely been ignored by geographers. In recent years a number of American cultural anthropologists have re-examined the concept of cultural evolution, including Sahlins and Service, who consider that cultural evolution is analogous to biological evolution involving the diversification of cultural forms through adaptive modification and the progress of culture through successive levels of development. They have called these two processes specific evolution and general evolution respectively and from these two perspectives on cultural evolution they have developed the Law of Cultural Dominance. Certain operational problems exist in the application of the concept of cultural evolution, but once they have been surmounted it promises to constitute a valuable mode of explanation in the analysis of cultures and cultural change.     

The discourse of the past: phenomenology,structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.     

In search of negativism: Phenomenology and historical geography

The paper aims to investigate the nature and origin of the “phenomenological movement” in historical geography, by comparing and contrasting the fundamental principles of phenomenology as philosophy on the one hand, and the character of the so-called behavioural and perceptual approaches to historical reconstruction on the other. Questions are raised as to the methodological purity of the particular strand of non-positivist ideology which has entered into the annals of geographical literature; and, finally, the adoption of behavioural explanatory modes in historical geography is seen as a pragmatic response to substantive problems rather than a conscious or even strategic change in underlying philosophy.     

Situationally Sherpa: race,ethnicity, and the labour geography of the Everest industry

Following Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, western mythmaking transformed Sherpa ethnicity into a signifier for a labour category, a place, and a set of cultural characteristics. Westerners have come to link Sherpa-ness with stereotypes of superhuman strength, mountain skill, and loyalty. However, most labourers in the Everest industry are not Sherpas; they are upland ethnic minorities who migrate seasonally from the lower hills to the high Khumbu. Many of these ethnic minority labourers also pass as Sherpa. Becoming “situationally Sherpa” is a common practice, but little is known about how, why, and with what effects claims to Sherpa-ness are formed and deployed. This paper explores how and why this identity practice emerged alongside new labour geographies in the Everest region. The case of “situational Sherpas” reveals how racial, ethnic, and labour hierarchies intersect and blur to produce new experiences of oppression, and new possibilities for resistance.     

Landscapes without the car: a counterfactual historical geography of twentieth-century Britain

Despite increased concern about environmental damage and resource depletion, the private motor car, and associated automobility, are taken-for-granted aspects of twenty-first-century life. This paper makes the counterfactual assumption that private ownership of cars was severely restricted at the start of the twentieth century, and uses a range of historical data to examine the ways in which such a scenario might have impacted on transport infrastructure, personal mobility and urban life. It is argued that, even without the wholesale adoption of the motor car as a means of personal transport, patterns of everyday mobility would not have differed significantly from today so long as other forms of transport had remained or expanded to cope with this demand. However, such a scenario would probably have required journeys to be planned in different ways, may have been qualitatively different from travel today, and could have disadvantaged particular groups of the population, including some women. A landscape without cars would probably also have altered the form of cities, with services provided closer to where people live, and levels of air pollution substantially lower. The counterfactual historical analysis is used to argue that, although there is little likelihood of cars being banned in Britain, greater restrictions on private motor vehicles would not necessarily lead to the fundamental changes in everyday mobility that some might predict.     

The place of immigration in studies of geography and race

This paper argues that geographical research on immigration and geographical research on race and racism in the USA must be explicitly connected. Geographic processes such as globalization and urban development already link immigration with race and racism and suggest a need to conceptualize research agendas around immigration and race in relation to each other. Not only are racialized groups spatially connected in many neighbourhoods, cities and regions of the USA, but they are also linked through policies structured by the state at various scales and narratives produced about subordinated and racialized groups. In making this argument, I attempt to highlight work in geography, in related social sciences and in ethnic studies that demonstrates the necessity and usefulness of this approach. Geographers are uniquely positioned to illuminate how the construction of space, place and scale overlaps with the construction of racial-ethnic and immigrant identities and with racism itself. The paper argues that these and other research questions also benefit from linking race and immigration to gender, as some feminist geography and feminist studies have done. Likewise, ethnic studies offer a wealth of theoretical, methodological and empirical insight into linking immigration, race and racism in geographical work.     

Embodying violence: critical geographies of gender,race, and culture

The papers in this themed section collectively explore the intertwined geographies of corporeality and violence; to explore the ways in which narrow representations of race and culture are imbricated in the mis/understanding of gender based violence. This introductory essay draws out linkages across these papers, and to several themes in feminist geography. Combined, the four papers in the themed section offer new pathways for feminist geographers to consider. The authors connect the intimate and the global, the personal and the geopolitical, and offer critical insights into how feminist geographers might unpack entangled inequalities that give rise to distinct experiences of violence. Through their disparate studies, the authors also destabilize the assumptions mapped onto gendered bodies, particularly those that rely on racist, sexist, and classist representations of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to describe gendered vulnerability. Subsequently, their analyses reveal how these assumptions simultaneously work to erase or ignore structural inequalities of capitalism or the state, which frame, contribute to and perpetuate violence against vulnerable bodies and geographies. They collectively underscore the epistemological, methodological and ontological possibilities of corporeal geographies particularly when tasked with intellectually analyzing both exceptional and everyday experiences of violence.     

历史地理学:学科调整、学科性质与学科发展

国务院学位委员会公布的《学位授予和人才培养学科目录》是学科建设的重要依据。1983年以来的历次学科调整,历史地理学经历了一个由既作为地理学,也作为历史学的二级学科,到一律列入历史学的过程,而现在又是作为中国史的一个二级学科了。这样的学科归属现状显然不利于历史地理学的发展,本文在回顾历次学科调整对历史地理学所产生影响的基础上,通过对历史地理学学科性质的重新审视,探讨了在最新一次学科调整背景下历史地理学如何获得发展的问题。     

An historical geography of liberty: Lancashire and the Inebriates Acts

This paper examines the Inebriates Acts of 1879 and 1898 which facilitated the formal provision of institutional care for inebriates. The Acts' permissive character produced an uneven geography of provision of institutions that meant that inebriate treatment varied markedly across the counties and county boroughs of England and Wales. The vast majority of those committed under the Acts were women. Using two exemplary case studies from Lancashire, a private retreat created under the 1879 Act and a council run reformatory created under the 1898 Act, the paper considers how debates about liberty and control shaped the regulation of problem drunkards. It shows that geography was as important as class, religion, and gender in determining who was subjected to regulation. The paper argues that the failure to reform inebriates helped the recoding of inebriety within a broader discourse of mental deficiency that encouraged the permanent segregation of problem populations.