A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.     

Geographical notes

An earlier reference to the term ‘social geography’ than those described by Dunbar (Scot. Geog. Mag., 93 (1977) 15–20) has been identified in a MS. by H. Gougeon dated 1873. The broader circumstances of the movement to reform geography teaching and the secondary school curriculum at the beginning of the IIIrd Republic are described as a necessary context for evaluating the Gougeon MS. An English translation of Gougeon's views of ‘social geography’ is provided, and although his outline provides no more than a sketch of the possible content of social geography several of the traditional topics of this sub‐field are readily recognizable.     

Uneven Developments: From The Grundrisse To Capital

Abstract: Since its publication, Marxists have debated the relation between the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital. This paper offers one entry point into this debate by comparing the way each text frames its “problematic of uneven development”, that is, the way that capitalism's inherently uneven development is thematized as a problem for explanation. In the Grundrisse the uneven nature of capitalism as development is explained by the emergence of capitalism from precapitalist relations. While this analysis is not entirely absent from Capital (cf the discussion of primitive accumulation), precapitalist formations are not treated as systematically in Capital. By contrast, uneven development enters Capital in the final section, particularly where Marx criticizes Wakefield. Reading these two texts together, I argue that the problematic of uneven development shifts from Grundrisse to Capital in a way that underscores Marx's growing stress on capital's imperial character. This shift has its roots in political events of the period when Marx rewrote Grundrisse into Capital.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

Translation as techné: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

Abstract

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation – the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts – through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techné by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techné, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced ‘the social’ as an object of inquiry in colonial India.     

Travelling down the road to postdisciplinarity? Reflections of a tourism geographer

Like many other forms of scholarship in geography, tourism geography has evolved as a distinct subfield of inquiry within the discipline, although the contributions of tourism geographers are perhaps more readily acknowledged in the multidisciplinary realm of tourism studies. I trace the evolving relationship of tourism geography to both the discipline of geography and to the field of tourism studies. In doing so, I reflect on such influences as the role of institutions, paradigm shifts, technology, and other factors that affect the creation and management of geographic knowledge in the twenty‐first century. The intent of this article is two‐fold: first, to appeal to geographers for greater recognition of the importance of tourism as a quintessential component of geographic study that in today's world warrants integration into core aspects of geographic enquiry; second, to use current debates within both tourism studies and geography to reflect on issues of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and even postdisciplinarity.     

Placing Lefebvre

Geographers have extensively used Lefebvre's concept of space as a social product as a framework guiding urban and political critique. Lefebvre articulates social space through a primarily ontological engagement: he describes a complex and multi‐faceted object that exists in three simultaneous but distinct, co‐producing registers. The famous “triad” has become canonical within Anglophone geography, but the implications of this ontology for knowing or researching the object of “(social) space” often remain implicit. This paper suggests that recent scholarship on place‐making helps to address the latent epistemological challenges of operationalizing Lefebvre's triad. We trace linkages and gaps between Lefebvrian space and contemporary theorizations of relational place. Re‐examining social space through the lens of relational place highlights the potential for links between epistemologically diverse recent research and twenty years of Lefebvre‐inspired critique.     

Dimensions of remapping: Heinrich Schiffers and his mental map of Africa

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Athenäum publishing house in Germany planned a revised and extended edition of Heinrich Schiffers’ (1901–1982) successful book Wilder Erdteil Afrika (English translation: The Quest for Africa). The bestselling author had published several monographs about Africa since the 1930s, and authored and edited numerous works after World War II. Nearly all of these works, whose substantial print runs are testament to their popularity, are characterized by an engaging combination of text, images, and cartographic material, creating narratives and mental maps about Africa, its history, and the colonial past. In his later writings, he stressed the importance of “relearning” with regard to Africa and struggled to remap the imaginative geography of Africa. In this paper, I examine the characteristics of Schiffers’ imaginative geography and the change in his writings and maps. I explore whether his concept of “relearning” was an epistemological decolonization or if there were any continuities found in his imaginative geography. In order to grasp the specifics of his thinking, his geography will be briefly compared with that of his contemporary, Frankfurt zoo director Bernhard Grzimek.     

ON THE CONTENT AND THE TASKS OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY (AS THE HISTORY OF NATURE MANAGEMENT)

A Pleistocene geologist calls for a totally new approach to the study of geography as the basic discipline concerned with the man-nature relationship, or what he terms nature management (Russian, prirodopol'zovaniye). He views the basic study object of an essentially unified geography as natural-technical territorial complexes (biotechnocenoses or geotechnocenoses), requiring investigation in three time dimensions—the past (historical geography), the present (dynamic geography) and the future (predictive geography). In keeping with the proposition that historical geography should be a separate, unified discipline, a distinctive historical-geographic periodization is proposed, differing from the periodizations in use in paleogeography, anthropology, archeology and history.     

Playful spaces? a social geography of children's play in Livingston,Scotland

It is often assumed that ‘play’ is an unproblematic category of children's activity, but consideration should be given to whether it is really an adult construction full of questionable assumptions about enjoyable activities free of stress for the children concerned. This paper offers some empirical materials to begin such a deconstruction of ‘play’ through an inquiry into the social geography of children's play in a Scottish new town. By retrieving what children think about their own play, what it entails and the spaces, places, social encounters and social variations central to it, it is possible to sketch out a social geography of children's play that, if not entirely unexpected, does suggest the ‘nature’ of play to be less certain than might commonly be supposed.     

Identity,contingency and the urban geography of 'race'

Traditional research in urban geography concerned with issues of 'race' has focused on a series of substantively important issues, yet with conceptual foundation inadequate to the task. Specifically, this body of work has employed outdated and theoretically limited conceptions of identity without sufficient consideration to the importance of historical and geographic contingency. I argue in this essay that topics of traditional concern to urban geography gain new relevance and importance when they are reconsidered and reworked from a social constructivist perspective that takes seriously the importance of identity and contingency. I illustrate my argument with discussions of two aspects of my current research agenda. First, I discuss how research on urban residential segregation gains considerably from a more sensitive encounter with multifaceted notions of identity that explicitly address geographic contingency. Second, I review recent empirical research on US mortgage-lending markets that demonstrates the geographic and class contingency of discrimination. The paper ends with a call for research that employs multiple methodologies.     

Rethinking Western Motu Descent Groups

The Motu‐Koitabu are the traditional inhabitants of the site of Papua New Guinea's capital city, Port Moresby, and well represented in a body of literature, from the 1870s on, encompassing oral history, archaeology and social anthropology. A basic unit of Motu‐Koitabu society is the iduhu, a corporate group which is nowadays conventionally glossed locally as a ‘clan’ in English, but represented in anthropological literature as more ambiguous in nature than the gloss implies. Considering the literature in the light of recent fieldwork in a Motu‐Koitabu village, this article takes issue with an argument developed in the 1950s, which has become an accepted wisdom, that the structure of iduhu was threatened by the social consequences of missionisation and colonialism, and that iduhu were saved from collapse by new leaders, church deacons, who replaced traditional leaders. A re‐examination of the nature of iduhu, a partial reinterpretation of notions of leadership and prestige and an account of two recent disputes brought to a village court inform an argument that iduhu have been more resilient than previous researchers have thought. In this regard concepts of leadership among the Motu‐Koitabu need clarification, and it is suggested that the importance of landholding has been underestimated in previous attempts to understand what iduhu are.     

Found in translation

This review considers new work on translation, cultural interpretation, and cross-cultural comparison, all three terms suggesting different but related approaches to the central problem of sociocultural anthropology, that of understanding human meaning-making. Translating Worlds brings together ten authors who take language translation as a paradigmatic example of cultural translation within and across different kinds of linguistic and social boundaries. The Chimera Principle is a historically and ethnographically grounded study of Amerindian pictographies, focusing on cultural translation across media and on the uses of different media in ritual.     

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity‐based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use‐values.     

Suzanne MacKenzie Memorial LectureConceptually unclad: feminist geography and Aboriginal peoples*

This paper argues that feminist geography can provide some useful lessons in an attempt to increase Aboriginal peoples' representation in geography. It asks the question: How can we use the example of feminist geography to think about a geography that is more inclusive of Aboriginal people? The paper focuses on the issues of content in teaching, drawing on examples from urban and social geography, and on methodological challenges, especially the issue of reflexivity. Feminist geographer Suzanne Mackenzie argued that an emerging feminist geography left the discipline ‘conceptually unclad’, challenging scholars to consider new theoretical frameworks and new perspectives. I argue that emphasising the geographies of Aboriginal people also enriches geography, including feminist geography.     

Searching for feminist geographies: mappings outside the discipline in Poland

Abstract

Feminist geography in Poland does not exist as a sub-discipline of geography. While there are individual Polish geographers pushing for feminist perspectives, most feminist analyses of issues relating to place, space and politics of location can be found within gender studies or feminist sociology. In this sense, feminist geography in Poland cannot compare to Anglophone feminist geography and attempts to incorporate it within such an established field risks being reductive. Instead, in this report, we shift the focus to the scholarship and activism that does exist in Poland, outside of geography. This contribution focuses on shedding light on geographical questions such as the body, the city and gendered geopolitics that have been recurring themes in gender studies, feminist sociology and feminist activism in Poland. We conclude by pointing to the need to mobilise broadly, and internationally, between disciplines with the intention of de-centering dominant knowledges. For feminist scholarship this is particularly important in the context of recent political successes of right-wing forces.     

The character of English geographyc. 1660–1800: a textual approach

This article re-evaluates the character of geography in England in the 150 years after the Restoration. Most historians have focused either on exceptional geography books or on texts of geographical knowledge, rather than on geography booksper se. Drawing on cultural–historical approaches to the book, this article looks at the character of geography as a textual tradition. This requires an analysis of geography books from three points of view: the texts themselves and the definition of their function and audience; the readership and their sites of reading; and authorship and the milieu of book production. This analysis shows that geography was consistently related to two social and intellectual traditions: a commercial and practical tradition, and a humanistic and scholarly tradition. Such a position allies geography as a textual tradition with recent characterizations of the English Enlightenment.     

The Spatial Organisation of Women's Soccer in Adelaide: Another Tale of Spatial Inequality?

Although sport is considered an important component of Australian society and a precious vehicle of social interaction, sports geography remains in many ways a neglected field of investigation. Nevertheless, geographical studies of sports can add valuable insights to more acknowledged geographical discourses. They can also contribute to regional sporting success. This paper analyses the current spatial organisation of women's soccer in Adelaide and outlines the unequal spatial expression of its recent professionally‐oriented approach, the achievement phase. A significant proportion of Adelaide's female population experiences limited opportunity to participate fully in the sport. The sport therefore fails to maximise its human resources and its spatial organisation constitutes a limit to the competitiveness of South Australian women's soccer as a system. The paper uses the concept of social capital to explore the unequal engagement of four sub‐regions in women's soccer. Many of the areas experiencing relative exclusion from women's soccer are the same ones that suffer the most from disengagement from the global economy. In those areas, socio‐economic disadvantage is matched by limited opportunities for self‐fulfilment through sport, and the effectiveness of social networks is weaker. This work aims to provide information for South Australian women's soccer institutions to foster enhanced equity in terms of access to the sport in metropolitan Adelaide. It also provides a base from which to investigate the reasons behind sub‐regional differences in the ability to produce quality players, knowledge that, if applied to these less productive areas, may contribute to the general enhancement of overall sporting outcomes.     

Hegel's critique of the enlightenment

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.