Geographic Thought

A Praxis Perspective

George Henderson, Marvin Waterstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134029433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Without social movements and wider struggles for progressive social change, the field of Geography would lack much of its contemporary relevance and vibrancy. Moreover, these struggles and the geographical scholarship that engages with them have changed the philosophical underpinnings of the discipline and have inflected the quest for geographical knowledge with a sense not only of urgency but also hope. This reader, intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses in Geographic Thought, is at once an analysis of Geography's theoretical and practical concerns and an encounter with grounded political struggles.

This reader offers a fresh approach to learning about Geographic Thought by showing, through concrete examples and detailed editorial essays, how the discipline has been forever altered by the rise of progressive social struggles. Structured to aid student understanding, the anthology presents substantive main and part introductory essays and features more than two dozen unabridged published works by leading scholars that emphatically articulate geographic thought to progressive social change. Each section is introduced with an explanation of how the following pieces fit into the broader context of geographic work amidst the socially progressive struggles that have altered social relations in various parts of the world over the last half-century or so. Doubly, it places this work in the context of the larger goals of social struggles to frame or reframe rights, justice, and ethics. Geographic Thought provides readers with insights into the encounters between scholarship and practice and aims to prompt debates over how social and geographical knowledges arise from the context of social struggles and how these knowledges might be redirected at those contexts in constructive, evaluative ways.

The reader is unique not only in knowing Geographic Thought through its progressive political attachments, instead of through a series of abstract "isms", but in gathering together salient works by geographers as well as scholars in cognate fields, such as Nancy Fraser, Chantal Mouffe, Iris Marion Young, and Jack Kloppenberg, whose own engagements have proved lasting and influential. For researchers and students interested in the connections between theoretically informed work and the possibilities for bettering people's everyday lives, this book provides an innovative and compelling argument for why Geographic Thought is valuable and necessary.

Section 1

The Politics of Geographic Thought

Introduction

Why is Geographic Thought Always Political?

A Few Words on Thought itself

Before we begin our substantive discussion of geographic thought, it is useful to spend some time on the notion of thought itself, on how we might distinguish scholarly (including geographic) thought from other modes of thinking, and finally, how we might distinguish geographic thought from other types of scholarship.

Is there something that characterizes scholarly thought, and distinguishes it from non-scholarly thought? It is clear that scholarly thought can be distinguished in terms of who produces it (quite circularly, scholars, on which more momentarily), for whom it is produced, and with what intent. The producers of scholarly thought are often conscious of themselves as engaged in producing “scholarship” or intellectual thought, and are usually aware of the likely audience for such products. In addition, such producers (scholars) typically have a purpose in mind when they engage in scholarly work, from such general notions as “advancing knowledge” to more concrete attempts to address specific problems. Usually, though by no means always, societies have authorized some members to produce scholarship, and have developed more or less formal mechanisms for determining who is so authorized. One predominant mechanism is the educational system, and the credentialing that typically accompanies this form of legitimation. Once designated as “scholars” these individuals are often accorded the time necessary for cogent reflection, and their output (at this point often evaluated by their peers) can be designated scholarship. We are also cognizant of, and want to note here, the exclusionary implications of these kinds of credentialing processes. As we examine below, the production of knowledge and its designation and acceptance as legitimate and useful often constitute important sites of struggle.

This kind of orientation to knowledge production then leads to thinking about scholarship (including geographic) in a way that emphasizes its embeddedness (always-already) in a Gordian knot of knowledge, practice, politics, and personnel. Considered in this way, it is clear that knowledge always has a social component and that it is always for something and arising in particular material contexts. One way of looking at the trajectory of scholarship in any field, then, is to trace the shifting struggles over who constitutes an authorized scholarly voice, what counts as scholarship, and what scholarship is for. In accounts that simply describe the leading figures in a field, the major “schools of thought,” the evolution of sub-disciplinary specialties, or the changing constellation of big concepts, these contested aspects of the historiography of a field often remain hidden or under-developed. Here we pay special attention to geography as a formal discipline historically linked to global, national, and regional projects that have both inclusive and exclusive components and regressive and liberatory moments. Thus, we make the point that Geography, including the content of geographic thought, has been contingently related to the rise of a discipline that is in some sense understandable as a kind, or kinds, of “movement politics” (at scales from the body to the globe) that brings into being the (contested) content of its thought. We begin to elaborate the specifics of these matters in the following sections. As we begin to contemplate geographic thought more specifically, we are mindful of the social as irreducibly spatial and power-laden and of individuals as irreducibly social.

Why is Geographic Thought Always Political?

In the most general and ineluctable sense, then, all scholarly thought is always political. This does not necessarily mean political in the narrow sense of partisan (although this can often be the case), but rather in the sense that what such thought is about, and who and what it is for are always the result of the interplay of power within disciplines, and the embeddedness of scholarly work in the material and discursive contexts in which it is produced. As such, scholarly/intellectual thought always either supports the existing status quo (whether this be in terms of internal disciplinary matters, and/or in terms of the various “outsides” to which any discipline is inevitably connected), or works to subvert the status quo for either progressive or regressive purposes.

For much of its modern history (i.e. from the late 19th century until the last third of the 20th), the discipline of geography has been irrefutably, though often tacitly, supportive of the status quo. Although there have been tumultuous struggles within the discipline over how best to accomplish this purpose, geographic practitioners have often looked to the powerful within societies for legitimation of the discipline. Securing that legitimacy (or failing to do so) has been crucial to certain measures of disciplinary (as well as individual, scholarly) success, and has influenced the varying relationship between Geography and society over that period. It should be clear, from comments made thus far, that scholarly work in support of the status quo is, by no means, apolitical. Indeed, intellectual activity that helps to maintain existing conditions and power relations is often a key support and source of credible authority for those who are benefited by such conditions. This situation obtained (with a few notable exceptions, e.g. Reclus, 1876–94; Kropotkin, 1885, 1899, 1902; Vidal de la Blanche, 1926) in geography, as it did in many other disciplines, until the late 1960s (and to a large extent is still the case at present). The major dimensions of intra-disciplinary struggle up until this period (as many of the sources cited above document quite well) concerned questions of what constituted proper objects of geographic inquiry, the primacy of description or explanation as geography’s goal, or the best methods to accomplish either or both of these ends.

At that point (i.e. by the late 1960s), a number of geographers, responding both to conditions within the field and to material and intellectual circumstances in society more generally, grew quite restive with many facets of the discipline. These scholars were becoming more aware of (and more responsive to) a number of important social movements that were beginning to coalesce around key issues of the time, including: (1) rising opposition to the Vietnam War (and its characterization as part of ongoing imperialist and neo-colonialist projects against the global south by the global north); (2) the early stirrings of so-called “second wave” feminism and mounting resistance to the structures and strictures of patriarchy (and, by extension, other forms of traditionally constituted “normativity”); (3) an ongoing struggle for the expansion of civil rights to a variety of minorities who saw themselves excluded from the post-World War II prosperity that had lifted many other segments of the U.S. society; and (4) a newly energized environmental movement given its impetus by overt signs of an environment polluted and overburdened to the point of crisis.

In this first section, we include several readings that represent early articulations of what has come to be called the “normative” turn within the discipline. This phrase has taken on various meaning over time, but here we take it to signify several inter-related dimensions. First, and foremost, it means that (for those who take the critiques of the normative turn seriously), geographical scholarship must be concerned not only with description and explanation of what the world is, but must equally be concerned with questions of what the world should be. Second, it has meant, and continues to mean, coming to grips with such questions as what is scholarship, who is authorized to produce it, under what circumstances, and for what purposes? This normative turn consisted of both a negative critique of existing responses to such questions within geography (and in academia more generally), and a positive critique that offered alternative questions, methods, and purposes. Not surprisingly, these critiques engendered intense struggles and debates within the discipline, and have been quite influential in shaping its subsequent trajectory.

The essays in this first section demonstrate the complex and continuous inter-relationships among the various elements that make up scholarly/intellectual thought, and highlight the then-emerging contentions within geography over knowledge, politics, personnel, and practices and methods. These pieces represent formative statements (some would say early, incendiary salvoes!) in debates that continue to resonate strongly within the discipline to this day, and in each case the pieces have contributed to very productive, multi-directional conversations within the discipline and with cognate fields. The themes raised by these early works have matured and evolved over the past 35 or so years in scholarly terms, and (as we shall explore in later sections of the book) in their ability to inform progressive practices as well.

We begin this section with a 1972 article by David Harvey (Chapter 1), appropriately titled (for our, and other, purposes) “Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation.” In this paper, Harvey (currently a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York), who just three years earlier had published one of the landmark monographs in the positivist geographic cannon (Harvey, 1969), enumerates several themes that will become pivotal to changing notions of geographic thought and its internal and external relations of knowledge, and provides anchors for a vivid sense of what the discipline ought to be about. Harvey’s own biographical trajectory in this short period is emblematic of broader changes within geography (and other fields as well), and is worth a slight detour before delving into the specifics of the article.

In a recent interview, Harvey discusses this transition as follows:

Well, my politics at that time were closer to a Fabian progressivism, which is why I was very taken with the ideas of planning, efficiency and rationality … there was no real conflict between a rational scientific approach to geographical issues [which Harvey sought to elucidate in Explanation in Geography], and an efficient application of planning to political issues. But I was so absorbed in writing the book that I didn’t notice how much was collapsing around me. I turned in my magnum opus to the publishers in May 1968, only to find myself acutely embarrassed by the change of political temperature at large … Just at that moment, I got a job in the US, arriving in Baltimore a year after much of the city had burnt down in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the States, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were really fired up; and here was I, having written this neutral tome that seemed somehow or other just not to fit. I realized I had to rethink a lot of things I had taken for granted in the sixties.

(NLR, 2000)

Some of that formative rethinking is reflected in the piece included here, which Harvey begins with the question “How and why would we bring about a revolution in geographic thought?” In answering this rhetorical query over the next 13 pages of the recently inaugurated (1969) radical geographic journal Antipode, Harvey takes up three key, intertwined issues. First he critiques a prevalent argument offered by Kuhn (1962) regarding the ways in which the nature of knowledge production goes through periodic reformulations (or revolutions, as Kuhn argued) within and across disciplines. Second he offers an assessment that places changes within geography over the previous decade (the period of the so-called “quantitative revolution”) within this framework, and concludes that that “revolution” had now run its course, and was itself ripe for overthrow. And finally, Harvey presents both a critique of the ways in which positivism had become irrelevant within geography specifically, and in the academy more generally, as well as pointing a way forward that would allow such a positivist orientation to be both recuperated and made pertinent. In sum, then, this piece articulates the incipient concerns of the “normative” turn, formulates a cogent critique of the then-current state of geographic scholarship from this normative perspective, and describes (by means of both argument and an abbreviated case study) what Harvey is then groping toward as a more engaged, productive and progressive form of such scholarship.

One striking feature of this paper is that only a few years after publication of the status quo Explanation in Geography, Harvey is advocating Marxism as the analytical framework most promising for advancing geographical knowledge and, importantly, social change. As he later explained himself:

In America, I would then [in 1973, when he published Social Justice and the City, his next major monograph after Explanation] have been termed a card-carrying liberal. So I set out along these [i.e. liberal] lines. Then I found out they weren’t working. So I turned to Marxist formulations to see if they yielded better results. The shift from one approach to the other wasn’t premeditated—I stumbled on it … I wasn’t a Marxist at the time, and knew very little of Marx … The [Marx] reading group [composed mostly of graduate students and Harvey at Johns Hopkins University, begun in 1971] was a wonderful experience, but I was in no position to instruct anybody. As a group, we were the blind leading the blind. That made it all the more rewarding.

(NLR, 2000: 80)

As Harvey notes in the “Revolutionary …” piece, his engagement with Marxian thought grew out of a conviction that it provided a useful overlap among approaches that he thought productive: positivism, materialism, and phenomenology. This position is congruent with his notions that paradigm shifts, when they occur, do not wholly displace what came before, but rather incorporate what is useful from previous orientations into formulations that are more relevant to current situations and problems. As Harvey explains in this piece, his turn to Marxism was undertaken as a corrective to what he (and many other younger geographers at the time) saw as a sterile positivism, divorced from material reality, as well as problems that might come from the main alternatives then being proposed (abandoning positivism altogether or moving in the direction of phenomenology). As Harvey argues, either of these latter approaches held the risk of a move away from materialism (a concrete connection to particular times, places, and contexts) toward an abstract idealism. It was just this lack of a materialist basis that critics found so problematic about the discipline’s preoccupation with abstract quantification, model building and law-seeking.

In Harvey’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Section 1: The Politics of Geographic Thought
• Section 2: Staking Claims
• Section 3: Goals and Arenas of Struggle: What is to be Gained and How?
• Bibliography
• Index