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”.     

《人文地理》100期刊用文章统计分析

截至2008年4月,《人文地理》出版满100期,在出版100期之际对该刊22年来刊发的2102篇论文、论文第一作者和引文进行了统计分析,以揭示载文量的时空分布特点,展示该刊作者群的基本特点,确定该刊活跃作者群的数量和比例,归纳出人文地理科学工作者利用文献的基本特点和规律,掌握我国人文地理研究队伍的变化及发展状况,并对《人文地理》期刊的发展提供有益的参考。     

Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum: Environment and Archaeology

This article focuses on the presence of humans in Siberia and the Russian Far East at the coldest time of the Late Pleistocene, called the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and dated to c. 20,000–18,000 rcbp. Reconstruction of the LGM environment of Siberia, based on the latest models and compilations, provides a background for human existence in this region. Most of Siberia and the Russian Far East at c. 20,000–18,000 rcbp was covered by tundra and cool steppe, with some forest formations in the river valleys. Climate was much colder and drier than it is today. Eighteen Upper Paleolithic sites in Siberia are radiocarbon dated strictly to the LGM, and at least six of them, located in southern parts of western and eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, have solid evidence of occupation during that time span. It seems clear that southern Siberia was populated by humans even at the height of the LGM, and that there was no dramatic decline or complete disappearance of humans in Siberia at that time. The degree of human adaptation to periglacial landscapes in the mid-Upper Paleolithic of northern Eurasia was quite high; humans coped with the cold and dry environmental conditions using microblade technology, artificial shelters, tailored clothes, and megafaunal bones as fuel. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Ethnogeography: towards liberatory geography education

In the context of education in England, an argument is put forward that Geography, as it is conceptualised in the National Curriculum, does not connect to either primary school pupils or their teachers. Reasons for this are explored and a proposal is made for a new paradigm for primary geography: ethnogeography. This proposal parallels work on ethnomathematics, which provides a political agenda to the study of maths and itself draws from Paulo Freire's politicization and consciousness raising through adult literacy. This pattern is applied to learning in geographical education. Drawing on the findings of a recent research project, a case is argued for ethnogeography and the implications for primary Initial Teacher Education courses, learners and the curriculum in primary schools and are considered.     

Eruvim: Talmudic places in a postmodern world

Lodged in the heart of Western urban space, eruvim are religious enclaves important to Orthodox Jewish culture. Eruvim enable acceptable behaviours on the Sabbath as defined by Talmudic theological dogma. Work, and the carrying of all objects associated with work, is prohibited in public spaces on the Sabbath by the Talmud, yet within the boundaries of the eruv, many such restrictions are relaxed, facilitating social interaction and community cohesion. This paper examines the religious and spatial dimensions of eruvim, including the obsessive detail paid to the demarcation of their boundaries, which serve as metaphorical walls and doorways. It also explicates the local politics through which private space is effectively extended into public space. Conceptually, the paper situates the topic within broader concerns about diasporic Jewish identity, which is threatened by assimilationism, slow demographic growth and secularization. It invokes recent theories concerning the spatialization of consciousness and subjectivity, noting the recent growth of eruvim as part of the global surge in ethnic identity that has emerged as a backlash to postmodern capitalism.     

Development Imperative,Terrae Incognitae: a Pioneer Soil Scientist 1912–1951

James Arthur Prescott was a prominent soil scientist whose career responded to an increasingly complex, recognisably Australian web of interpenetrating spatial scales, served to promote revolutionary global advances in his chosen field, and in the process negotiated the blurred boundaries between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research. Encounters with this instructive life suggest that, while resolutions of pivotal anxieties might turn on ineluctably personal qualities, they also reflect a dynamic interplay between international, imperial, national and state contexts. Prescott's innovative contributions to soil science, fruits of a tenaciously consolidated career, influenced resource appraisal and environmental management across a prodigious continental expanse. A sustained focus on local and regional development brought him into contact with a wide range of contemporaries, including pioneering geographers, and culminated in his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.     

Water, technology, and the courtroom: negotiating reclamation policy in territorial New Mexico

Historical investigation of arid landscapes and communities in the American West has long focused on the pivotal influence of federal reclamation policy, typically characterizing its implementation as the application of scientific and technological methods to a variety of water resource management issues. This paper departs from traditional views of reclamation by highlighting the highly variable and contingent ways in which new science-based forms of water management were proposed and negotiated in specific local places with particular cultural, legal, and historical geographies. Drawing theoretically from literature on the ‘geography of science,’ the paper probes the ways in which authority for a scientific approach to water management was created, negotiated, and expressed in local and regional contexts in the Territory of New Mexico, where authoritative systems of practical resource use and administration had been in long use before the U.S. government initiated its federal water reclamation program in 1902. Specifically, the paper examines two disputes entered and argued in front of northern New Mexico’s Rio Arriba District Dourt between 1903 and 1905. By departing from the geographical and scalar perspectives typically applied to environmental histories of the West and its reclamation landscapes, this ‘microgeographical’ approach promises a fresh perspective that emphasizes the highly contingent ways in which science-based water policy was implemented in multiple and complex environments.