DOMESTICATING POSTMODERNISM

This paper proceeds in three steps. First, it gives more focus and rigor to the geographic reception of "postmodernism," through an investigation of the problem of representation as it has evolved from Kant through de Saussure and Wittgenstein to Derrida. Second, it arranges historical materialist encounters with the problem of representation along a spectrum of increasing seriousness leading from Palmer through Jameson to Adorno. Third, the various geographic responses to and avoidances of the key issues involved in postmodernism are read against the backdrop of possible seriousness opened up by the first two sections of the paper. The essay concludes by considering implications, for both social science and politics, not limited to questions about the possibility of disciplinary legitimacy.     

Migration,Human Resource Transfers,and Development Contexts: A Logit Analysis of Venezuelan Data

This paper is concerned with the reciprocal relationship between migration and development in Third World settings. Using individual-level data for Venezuela, migration behavior is related to a person's age, educational attainment, gender, and characteristics of his/her place(s) of residence as an out-migrant, in-migrant, or stayer. Place characteristics are in terms of four groups based on employment patterns: the core, regional centers, resource frontiers, and traditional rural areas. Four questions are of concern. First, does development influence migration? All analyses indicate this is so. Second, does migration influence development? Findings are ambiguous in that places experiencing improvement in their mix of human capital lagged in the net number of persons obtained through migration whereas a gain in numbers was accompanied by deterioriation in human capital profiles. Third, was incipient polarization reversal occurring in Venezuela in the late 1960s, early 1970s? This paper departs from the usual approach by addressing this question in terms of human capital attributes instead of population aggregates. On this basis, polarization reversal is in evidence, particularly in regional centers. Finally, this study answers in the affirmative that places with different development characteristics generate migration streams differing in type, magnitude, explanation, and impact.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.