An Everyday Geography of the Global South

Jonathan Rigg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780415376099
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134184903
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Taking a broad perspective of livelihoods, this book draws on more than ninety case studies from thirty-six countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America to examine how people are engaging and living with modernity. This extends from changes in the ways that households operate, to how and why people take on new work and acquire new skills, how migration and mobility have become increasingly common features of existence, and how aspirations and expectations are being reworked under the influence of modernization.

To date, this is the only book which takes such an approach to building an understanding of the global South. By using the experience of the non-Western world to illuminate and inform mainstream debates in geography, and in beginning from the lived experiences of 'ordinary' people, this book provides an alternative insight into a range of geographical debates. The clarity of argument and its use of detailed case studies makes this book an invaluable resource for students.

1
What’s with the everyday?

The everyday, globalisation and the Global South

Mrs Chandaeng: an everyday geography

We met 50-year-old Mrs Chandaeng on a cool December day in 2001 outside her house in the village of Ban Sawai in Laos, one of the world’s 49 ‘least developed’ countries (Illustration 1.1). She had been born and raised in the war-torn province of Xieng Khouang, where she met and married her husband, Udom. They settled in his home village and had six children. In 1988, however, when their youngest daughter was just two, Udom died suddenly and after a dispute with her brother-in-law, Mrs Chandaeng moved to Ban Sawai, settling there with her young family in 1991. As a newcomer, Mrs Chandaeng was unable to secure any land beyond her house plot and, in the context of a village economy based on farming, she struggled to feed and raise her six children. Yet when we interviewed Mrs Chandaeng ten years after she had first settled in Ban Sawai she was in the process of building a new and

Illustration 1.1 Village scene, northern Laos

impressive house. Her ability not only to survive but, ultimately, to prosper as a landless, widowed mother of six was surprising given what we knew of structural patterns of poverty and prosperity in rural Laos. Landless, female-headed households, and particularly those with young families, are usually among the poorest in an already very poor country.

It quickly became clear why Mrs Chandaeng had managed to buck the trend: four of her children were working in neighbouring Thailand, remitting between them around US$25–50 a month. Her son, Kai, was working on a shrimp farm while her three daughters, Wan, Lot and Daeng were employed as housekeepers in Bangkok. She may have explained her children’s sojourns in Thailand in terms of ‘when you are poor, you have to go’, but the outcome was a degree of economic prosperity, at least in village terms.

The experience of Mrs Chandaeng represents in microcosm many of the core issues which this book attempts to confront and illuminate. First of all, to go beyond structures to understand the personal geographies which make ordinary people and their lives extraordinary. Second, to appreciate that beneath the summary data – the averages, means and aggregates – is a degree of difference and variability that challenges whether such summaries can be regarded as representative of the collective experience, and vice versa. And third, to see livelihoods as becoming increasingly implicated in geographies of globalisation but in ways in which people like Mrs Chandaeng become more than mere objects of – and for – development, but subjects with their own volition.

An everyday geography of the Global South

A criticism that has been levelled at geography over recent years is that it would seem to have forgotten the importance of taking a truly global perspective and replaced an interest in place (and places), with a seemingly ever more abstract concern for space. This is a reactionary viewpoint to hold. Place-based geographies are associated with regional geography and, as we all know, regional geography is just so yesterday. Worse still, regional geography smacks of colonial geographies, and colonial geographies of domination, control, and worse. This book is not, I hope, just a throwback to an earlier geography but an attempt to present a different and, to some degree, an alternative geography. It is different and alternative in three main senses.

First of all, the book is explicitly about the ‘Global South’ (see Box 1.1). An alien leafing through recent issues of mainstream English language human geography journals might think that the countries of the non-Western world were a mere adjunct, a small and rather dry annex, to the West. For example, of 362 papers published between 2003 and 2006 in three of the most influential geography journals – Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers – fewer than one in eight had a primary and explicit concern with countries, conditions or processes in the Global South.¹ Part of the reason for this may be that relatively few scholars based outside the rich Anglophone world publish in such journals. Gutiérrez and López-Nieva in a review of the content of 19 English language human geography journals note that 74 per cent of articles were written by scholars based in the United Kingdom or the United States (Gutiérrez and López-Nieva 2001). This dominance of Western/Northern scholarship, and the overriding focus on the geographies of the West/North, is a source of concern in the obvious sense that the Global South is important and, furthermore, is becoming more so as each year passes. In 2005 the output of the Global South exceeded half of total world gross domestic product (GDP); by 2025 this figure will likely be more than 60 per cent (The Economist 2006b: 3–4). For a whole range of political, economic and environmental reasons

BOX 1.1 Defining terms Term Usage/definition and appropriateness/weaknesses Core/periphery The terms core and periphery (and semi-periphery) have a long history, coming into widespread use in academic circles following the publication of Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974, 1980, 1989) three volume work on the modern world system. Core and periphery are also used in terms of the loci of academic and political power. Developed/less developed These terms refer to the level of economic development of countries and to the rich/poor world binary. They highlight continuing global inequalities but categorise countries as either ‘developed’ or ‘less developed’ when these two categories are internally highly differentiated. They also gloss over the degree of mobility at the margins where some fast-growing economies have made the transition from de facto less developed countries to developed countries, sometimes in less than a generation. First World/Third World These two terms – and also the linked ‘Second World’ and ‘Fourth World’ terms – are a legacy of the Cold War and refer to a geopolitical divide between the capitalist/liberal democratic First World and a Communist Second World. The Third World was the residual but became quickly redefined as the poor world. The term Fourth World emerged rather later and variously refers to the tribal peoples of the world, (stateless) refugees or the world’s least developed countries (or LLDCs). Most scholars avoid using the terms because they are historically obsolete and because of the perceived pejorative connotations associated with the terms ‘First’ (‘best’) and ‘Third’ (‘worst’) worlds. (See Berger 2004 for a discussion of the fate of Third Worldism.) Global North/Global South This is a derivation of the North–South divide noted below in this box. Some scholars prefer to add ‘Global’ to make it clear that this is not a strict geographical categorisation of the world but one based on economic inequalities which happens to have some cartographic continuity. In addition it emphasises that both North and South are, together, drawn into global processes. Majority world/minority world This turns the usual ordering of the binary (N–S, Rich–Poor, First–Third) on its head to make it clear that the South/Poor/ Third World is the majority world supporting some 80 per cent of the globe’s population and 136 of the 192 recognised states. North–South The North–South distinction is associated with the Brandt report of 1980 (North–South: a programme for survival) which argued that ‘in general terms, and although neither is a uniform or permanent grouping, “North” and “South” are broadly synonymous with “rich” and “poor”, “developed” and “developing”’ (Brandt 1980:

North–South continued 31). The obvious deviations from the geographical categorisation of North/rich and South/poor are Australia and New Zealand. In addition, over the years since the report was published the internal coherence of a ‘South’ has become even more problematic (see Slater 1997). Western world/non-Western world This Western/non-Western duality refers to a perceived cultural divide between, essentially, ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’. This is not synonymous with North/South or rich/poor for the reason that some countries of the non-Western world, notably Japan, are Northern and rich. The term Eurocentric or Eurocentrism is used to highlight the dominance of Western viewpoints in many areas of life and thought.

we need to know more about each other, and the North–South balance of academic knowledge and (apparently) interest is out of kilter. But it is also of concern in another sense: the papers betray a channelling and domination of Northern knowledge to, and over, the South. Conceptual and theoretical approaches and frameworks that have their roots in the North are used to frame and explain the South. Rarely does the flow of knowledge run counter to this stream and even more rarely is it seriously considered that the South might have something to teach the North. The assumption is that Northern geographies are relevant and appropriate for understanding the South:

Seldom do those [geographers] who work in the core [countries of the North] recognise the particularities of their own geographies; that their theories do not travel, that their global geographies are partial and that developments in the core are interdependent with the periphery.

(Bradshaw in Olds 2001:133; see also Yeung and Lim 2003)

This issue has been most vigorously pursued in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) book Provincialising Europe. Charkrabarty argues that Europe, for historians, acts as a silent referent: all Third World historians are required to touch their forelock and comment on European history and scholarship, but not vice versa. His book is not, however, a call to reject European scholarship as an act of ‘postcolonial revenge’. Western scholarship is both ‘indisp...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Case studies
• 1 What’s with the everyday?
• 2 Structures and agencies
• 3 Lifestyles and life courses
• 4 Making a living in the Global South
• 5 Living with modernity
• 6 Living on the move
• 7 Governing the everyday
• 8 Alternatives
• 9 The structures of the everyday
• Notes
• References
• Index