Making Histories And Constructing Human Geographies

The Local Transformation Of Practice, Power Relations, And Consciousness

Allan Pred

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367014780
• eBook ISBN: 9780429722301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is intended to acquaint American historians, anthropologists, and sociologists with a discourse that questions the prioritizing of the temporal over the spatial-the historical over the geographical. Allan Pred argues that neither the study of history nor the execution of social or cultural analysis can be divorced from human-geographical

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Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies

Fragments from a Discourse in the Making

"All the social sciences must make room 'for an increasingly geographical conception of mankind.' "

— Fernand Braudel (1980), p. 52

"Every action is situated in space and time and for its immediate outcome dependent on what is present and absent as help or hindrance where events take place."

— Torsten Hägerstrand (1984), p. 377

"Most forms of social theory have failed to take seriously enough not only the temporality of social conduct but also its spatial attributes. At first sight nothing seems more banal and uninstructive than to assert that social activity occurs in time and space. But neither time nor space have been incorporated into the centre of social theory: rather they are ordinarily treated more as 'environments' in which social conduct is enacted."

— Anthony Giddens (1979), p. 202

"With the exception of the recent works of geographers . . . social scientists have failed to construct their thinking around the modes in which social systems are constituted across time-space. I want to argue that investigation of this issue ... is not a specific type or 'area' of social science, which can be pursued or discarded at will. It is at the heart of social theory, and should hence be regarded as of very considerable importance for the conduct of empirical research in the social sciences."

— Anthony Giddens (1985b), p. 265

"All social interaction is both contextual — 'situated' in time and space —and yet stretches across time-space 'distances.' In social theory we have to try to grasp how it comes about that the situated action which is the 'materiality' of all social life intersects with the form of institutions which span large 'stretches' of time-space."

— Anthony Giddens (1984a), p. 127

"Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. ... I think it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other."

— Michel Foucault (1984), pp. 252, 246

"Space is not, contrary to what others may say, a reflection of society but one of society's fundamental material dimensions and to consider it independently from social relationships, even with the intention of studying their interaction, is to separate nature from culture, and thus to destroy the first principle of any social science: that matter and consciousness are interrelated, and that this fusion is the essence of history and science."

— Manuel Castells (1983), p. 311

"Most theorists prefer abstract notions of social structure, so they ignore geographical and sociospatial aspects of societies. If we keep in mind that 'societies' are networks, with definite spatial contours, we can remedy this."

— Michael Mann (1986), p. 9

"The dialectic is back on the agenda. But it is no longer Marx's dialectic, just as Marx's was no longer Hegel's. ...The dialectic today no longer clings to historicity and historical time, or to a temporal mechanism such as 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis.' ... To recognise space, to recognise what 'takes place' there and what it is used for, is to resume the dialectic; analysis will reveal the contradictions of space."

— Henri Lefebvre (as quoted in Soja [1985], p. 110)

"Time and space are central to the constitution of all social interaction and, therefore, to the constitution of social theory. This does not just mean that social theory must be historically and geographically specific. More importantly, social theory must be about the time-space constitution of social structure right from the start."

— Nigel Thrift (1983a) p. 31

"In the 1980s, the hoary traditions of a space-blinkered historicism are being challenged with unprecedented explicitness by convergent calls for a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination. Geography may not yet have displaced history at the heart of contemporary theory and criticism, but there is a new animating polemic on the theoretical and political agenda, one which rings with significantly different ways of seeing time and space together, the interplay of history and geography, the 'vertical' and 'horizontal' dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege."

— Edward W. Soja (1989), p. 11

"[With respect to current debates over modernism and postmodernism] human geography is not a spectator at some intellectual carnival. On the contrary, it is vitally implicated in the transformation of a much wider intellectual landscape."

— Derek Gregory (1989b), p. 349

The construction of human geographies,

the social production of space and place,

the locationally bound intervention of humans into nature,

the place-specific and on-the-ground nature of everyday life,

have long been taken for granted, long relegated to the secondary, long unexamined in the discourse of social theory, long made irrelevant by compositional approaches to social analysis, by approaches that group people and human phenomena according to abstract or logical criteria of alikeness, by approaches that focus on conceptually constructed observables and ignore material actualities. In so doing, compositional approaches

de-locate social action,

de-place the execution of activities,

detach life

from the constraining and enabling contexts in which it flows,

divorce women and men from the geographically concrete circumstances in which they live (and in which social relations are necessarily grounded),¹

disconnect history from the particular places and local sites at which it is made,

separate history from the very sites at which so many of its contingencies and instabilities arise.

Twentieth-century social scientists — whether of positivistic, interpretive, or Marxist persuasion — have for the most part preferred to re-present the world in vertical, aspatial, and sequential terms, in terms of historical depth and duration, rather than in terms of horizontality, proximity, and simultaneity, rather than in terms of geographical configuration and extent. Theoretical and empirical writings concerned with social action, social transformation, and an understanding of the world have long been dominated by a vocabulary of temporal processes, of antecedent causes and subsequent effects, of comparative statics, have long been marked by a preoccupation with the historical that often borders on the blindly obsessive. Conventional social science texts have long been characterized by a privileging of history that either peripheralizes, subordinates, submerges, or devalues all that is spatial, or totally neglects any manifestation of humanly transformed nature and human geography, completely ignores the sit(e)-uated dimension of all social life.² And yet, the prioritizing of history and the temporal is not universal. Increasingly the categories of space and time are being seen in a new light by social theorists, are no longer being unreflectingly separated from one another and social being. And, consequently, human geography has been assigned a new centrality by some. A deKanting deconstruction, a Kant-rejecting reconstitution, of the discourses of social theory and the social sciences at large has been in the making over the past decade, and it is this conceptual reorientation that informs the subsequent chapters of this book.

In writings that were far from consistently lucid, Kant depicted time and space as mental constructs, as intuitively linked modes of thinking, as "subjective schemata which coordinated and integrated all sensed phenomena,"³ as necessary but empty categories with no objective reality of their own. He accordingly drew a line between a chorological science focusing on the spatial juxtaposition of things and a chronological science preoccupied with the sequential development of phenomena. What dissimilar figures such as Lefebvre, Foucault, Giddens, and Mann have helped demonstrate, what human geographers such as Harvey, Gregory, Soja, Thrift, and myself have argued in various ways, is that the intellectual division of labor sustained by the Kantian split will no longer stand up, that the demolition of ossified and culturally arbitrary disciplinary distinctions between the temporal, the spatial, and the societal is critically necessary. At the heart of this discourse in the making is the recognition that the long-standing barriers between the study of history, the conduct of human-geographical inquiry, the execution of social analysis, and the (re)formulation of social theory must be completely torn down in order to better understand human and soci(et)al phenomena.⁴

Unlike adherents to the modern mainstream, those contributing to this new discourse do not accept an explicit or implicit ontology that removes life and the occurrence of collective activities from time and space. They do not accept a view of the world that separates either the biography formation of actual people and the conduct of institutionally embedded practices, or the constitution of the subject and the constitution of society, from the construction of human geographies and the making of histories. Moreover, participants in this discourse reject prevailing academic modes that, without examination, categorize space as static, neutral, passive, or "fixed, dead, undialectical; [but depict] time as richness, life, dialectic, the [lone] revealing context for critical social theorization."⁵ They do not regard space either as simply a container for social life and its artifacts, a backdrop for the drama and drudgery of existence, a theater for the enactment of history, an unproblematic and unchanging set of surroundings within which practices and events occur, a fixed field for the play of social action, or as nothing more than a mirror reflective of society. Nor do they view the built environment and transformed nature as things to be explained solely in terms of their surface features. And yet, they do not consider humanly created "space as [merely] another phenomenon that can be derived from the explanatory powers of social theory generally."⁶ What then are the differences set up in opposition, the key arguments of those thusly turning their backs on long-standing academic convention, the schema of thought that has informed the empirical interpretations of the making of histories and construction of human geographies contained in the remainder of this book?

I have no intention of burdening you, the reader, with a thorough rendering of the ongoing integration of the historical, the geographical, and the social within critical social theory. I do not choose to subject you to an account of the genealogy of this discourse, to the full range of conceptual emphases, differences, and nuances produced by its authors. Such an effort would in some measure duplicate the recent work of Soja whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Pretext
• 1 Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies
• 2 Biography Formation, Knowledge Acquisition, and the Growth and Transformation of Cities During the Late Mercantile Period: The Case of Boston, 1783-1812
• 3 Production, Family, and "Free-Time" Projects: A Time-Geographic Perspective on Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Cities
• 4 Local and Regional Agricultural Transformation: The Case of Enclosures in Southern Sweden, 1750-1850
• 5 Popular Geography, Ideological Resistance, and the Transformation of Stockholm, 1880-1900
• 6 After Words on Then and There, Here and Now, and Afterwards
• Index
• About the Book and Author