CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY IN PRACTICE

Miles Ogborn, Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, David Pinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134662067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Cultural Geography in Practice provides an innovative and accessible approach to the sources, theories and methods of cultural geography. Written by an international team of prominent cultural geographers, all of whom are experienced researchers, this book is a fully illustrated guide to methodological approaches in cultural geography. In order to demonstrate the practice of cultural geography each chapter combines the following features: ·Practical instruction in using one of the main methods of cultural geography (e.g. interviewing, interpreting texts and visual images, participatory methods) ·An overview of a key area of concern in cultural geography (e.g. the body, national identity, empire, marginality) ·A nuts and bolts description of the actual application of the theories and methods within a piece of research With the addition of boxed definitions of key concepts and descriptions of research projects by students who devised and undertook them, Cultural Geography in Practice is an essential manual of research practice for both undergraduate and graduate geography students.

PART I

Writing cultural geography

1

Knowledge is power

Using archival research to interpret state formation

Miles Ogborn

Cultural geographies of state formation

This chapter is concerned with doing research on the common ground where cultural geography and political geography meet. It is an introduction to undertaking archival research on the cultural geographies of state formation. This research might deal with any of the things that states do or have done over the centuries: fighting wars; gathering taxes; making laws; organising welfare systems; planning cities, economies and environments; or policing, educating and imprisoning their citizens. These are clearly matters for other disciplines as well as geography, but it is significant that recent definitions of the state (which is notoriously hard to define) have stressed that it is a matter of the geographical organisation of power. For example, the sociologist Michael Mann (1984) has argued that the state is ‘a set of centralized institutions (predominantly military, political and administrative) which exercise power over a specific territory’ (Driver, 1991: 272). The historian Michael Braddick (2000: 6 and 9) also defines the state geographically as a ‘coordinated and territorially bounded network of agents exercising political power’, where political power is ‘territorially based, functionally limited and backed by the threat of legitimate physical force’. In other words, the state is a form of the organisation of power which has specific geographical limits (its territory), pursues certain defined functions (although what they may be differs from state to state and over time), and the consequence of not doing what it says is, in the end, the state being able to enforce its rules by using violence (see also Painter, 1995 and Taylor, 1989).

Concept Box

Power

Power is a very important concept in cultural geography and in cultural studies more generally. Understanding culture in terms of relationships of power is what lies behind the argument that questions of meaning, interpretation and identity are political issues, and that we can talk about ‘cultural politics’ or ‘the politics of identity’. Power is often defined in terms of one set of people exerting power over another set of people, or over space, or nature, or the landscape in order to control them and their meanings in various ways. This ‘negative’ definition of power is useful in that it makes it clear that there are different interests and that they can come into conflict (often over cultural issues). It also raises the question of the forms of resistance (again often cultural) which contest the exercise of power. However, we might also understand power as being ‘positive’. This means that power is not just about preventing things from happening, it is also the capacity to make things happen. Here power is part of all sorts of forms of social and cultural construction. Power is involved in constituting identities (including those of the individuals or social groups who are understood to ‘hold’ power), social relations (such as the relationships between men and women), and cultural geographies (such as the definition of national identities, or of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Orientalism). Most analyses of power in cultural geography combine these senses of power to make arguments about how the active cultural construction of places, spaces and landscapes are part of relationships of unequal power between social groups.

Key Reading

• Allen, J. (1999) ‘Spatial assemblages of power: from domination to empowerment’ in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds) Human Geography Today. Cambridge, Polity Pres: 194–218.

• Lukes, S. (ed.) (1986) Power. Oxford, Blackwell.

It is also important to note here that the state is not the same thing as ‘the government’ or ‘the nation’. There are many different elements of any state – such as the army, parliament, the civil service, the state education system – which together are called the ‘state apparatus’ (Clark and Dear, 1984). These institutions are more or less well coordinated in different situations, but might also come into conflict (a military coup, for example). In each situation, what institutions the state consists of and how those institutions work is also a complex question with no simple answer. It is a matter of decisions made over time by state officials, politicians, pressure groups and the public which define and redefine what the state’s role should be. For example, should the state be responsible for health care or education? As a result the state is always an unfinished ‘project’ made up of continual attempts at reorganising its ways of working. Since ‘the state’ is a term that sounds too singular and static to refer to this multiple and changing situation it is often preferable to use the term ‘state formation’ to get at the ways in which state apparatuses operate and change (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985).

Since the state is so active and pervasive in so many arenas of life, questions about how it works and how it has worked in the past are a matter for all sorts of geographers – social, economic and historical geographers as well as political geographers. But why are these issues which should concern cultural geographers? I want to argue that questions of meaning and identity are essential in understanding how states work. First, it is clear that ‘States… state’ (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985: 3). Part of the operation of state apparatuses is the production of statements – in reports, policy documents, speeches, press releases and parliamentary debates – about the situations they are dealing with and about what they are doing. We can use the idea of discourse to interpret what is being said in terms of the construction and contestation of state power (for examples from geopolitics, see Ó Tuathail, 1996 and Sharp, 1999). Indeed, we need to be aware that the meanings that the state produces are not always written or spoken but can take the form of rituals (like the rules of dress in a British law court), ceremonies (like the displays of Soviet military might on May day), or monuments (like the Vietnam war memorial in Washington DC). One important way of interpreting these statements is the state’s need for legitimation, for processes of state formation to be acceptable to people outside the state apparatus. Exactly who is appealed to will depend on the context – for example, taxation increases in medieval France only needed to be legitimated to a relatively small group of powerful nobles, in contemporary France they need the support of a much wider public – but it always means that one part of state formation must be the making and negotiation of meanings about the world and about itself with other social groups (Braddick, 2000). Second, states act. Processes of state formation are about attempts to shape and regulate ways of life and identities. Not only do states attempt to define things discursively, but these statements are a crucial part of policies and programmes which seek to alter people’s ways of life and their identities. One simple example is the way in which statements about the undesirability and dangerousness of ‘New Age Travellers’ were part of the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 which effectively outlawed a particular way of life and an identity (Halfacree, 1996 and Sibley, 1995). A more complex example would be the contemporary British state’s discourses of social exclusion and welfare dependency (or, for the early nineteenth century, of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor) which are part of policies of ‘Welfare to Work’ (or, again, of the workhouse system and the New Poor Law of 1834) with which the state attempts to reshape the lives of those without work (Driver, 1993 and Haylett, 2001). As a result, it is important to understand processes of state formation in terms of the meanings and identities that are being put into place both for those making the rules and those subject to them. It is also important to understand that resistance to state formation is also often conducted in terms of challenging the meanings that the state is trying to make and the identities and ways of life that it is trying to construct (for example, Cresswell, 1994 and Routledge, 1997).

Concept Box

Discourse

Discourse is a way of thinking about the relationship between power, knowledge and language. It is a concept most associated with the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who understood discourses as the frameworks that define the possibilities for knowledge. As such, a discourse exists as a set of ‘rules’ (formal or informal, acknowledged or unacknowledged) which determine the sorts of statements that can be made. These ‘rules’ determine what the criteria for truth are, what sorts of things can be talked about, and what sorts of things can be said about them. One of the most carefully worked through and explicitly geographical examples is Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism where he sets out the discourse (which he calls ‘Orientalism’) through which ‘the West’ has made statements about ‘the East’, defining the sorts of things that get said about ‘the oriental mind’, ‘the oriental landscape’, or ‘oriental despotism’, and defining itself as the opposite in the process. This raises two important points. First, that the aim of the idea of discourse is to suggest that there are many discourses, none of which simply tells the truth about the world. All of these discourses are ways in which our knowledge and language create the world as well as reflecting it (so you can only find a ‘typical oriental landscape’ or a ‘classic oriental city’ if you already have some idea of what you are looking for). The second point is that the discourse that prevails is a matter of power not simply truth. Since discourses define the ways things are understood, even whether things can be understood to exist or not, then part of any struggle for power is a struggle over language and knowledge, over discourse. So Said directly connects the discourse of Orientalism to the power relations of colonialism and imperialism which it justified and which forged the relationships between entities created in the discourse of Orientalism as either ‘West’ (the colonisers) or ‘East’ (the colonised).

Key Reading

• Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Brighton, Harvester Press. Chapter 5: ‘Two Lectures’, and Chapter 6: ‘Truth and Power’.

• Mills, S. (1997) Discourse. London, Routledge.

• Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York, Vintage.

Using these sorts of ideas geographers have been concerned to understand a whole range of questions about state practices and state formation in a wide variety of different periods and places. There are questions of how states attempt to deal with the organisation of power over space (for example, Harvey, 2000 and Jones, 1999 on the medieval state; Driver, 1993, Chapter 3 and Ogborn, 1991 on the nineteenth-century state; Blomley, 1994 and Blomley, Delaney and Ford, 2001 on the geographies of law), and the ways in which states try to separate and deal with different sorts of people through the organisation of space (for example, Philo, 1989 on the ‘mad’; Ogborn, 1995 and Ploszajska, 1994 on the ‘criminal’; and Robinson, 1990 on ‘race’ in South Africa). There are questions of the role states play in the symbolic organisation of places and landscapes, which often relates state formation to processes of nation-building (for example, Johnson, 1995 on monuments; Pred, 1992 on street names; and Daniels, 1993 and Matless, 1998 on the English landscape). There are questions of state interventions in nature, and the particular interests that that supports (for example, McCannon, 1995 and Neumann, 1995; Scott, 1998 chapters 1 and 8;). Finally, there are questions of the construction and use of geographical knowledge, and the discipline of Geography itself, by and against the state in both domestic and imperial politics (for example, Clayton, 2000 part 3 on cartography; Edney, 1997; and Harley, 2001; Bell, Butlin and Heffernan, 1995 and Driver, 2001 on geography and empire; and Nash, 1996 and Sparke, 1998 on geographical knowledge as resistance). In each case the research has involved interpreting the archival sources collected by the state in question.

Reading the archive

The record of all this discursive and practical cultural activity for and against state formation is the archive. There are, of course, many different kinds of archive – they are, after all, simply collections of material kept for later ‘study’ – personal archives, company archives, the archives of non-governmental organisations, or archives of specific types of material: film, television, photographs or sound recordings (Ogborn, 2003). Geographers have made use of all of them (for example, Black, 1995 and 2000; Daniels, 1999; Davies, 2000; Gleeson, 2001; Ryan, 1997). However, it is the state’s concern for gathering, using and storing information that has constructed the largest and most systematic collections at all levels of government, central and local. In Britain, for example, there are city and county record offices as well as the Public Record Office (PRO) in London. These hold material from across the centuries and recent material archived from working government departments.

There are three questions to ask when considering what these archival collections contain:

i What has been gathered and why?

This relates to the documents as working records. It is important to ask what records of its own activities the state needed to construct, and what records of other states, people and organisations did it want to collect. This is the main question that will interest us here, and it will be considered further below. Suffice to say that what is in the archive relates to the priorities of the state at the time (or at least the part of the state apparatus that dealt with the issue in question). This means that it may not be precisely the information that you seek to answer your questions. It is worth remembering that, despite what the conspiracy theorists might have us believe, the state does not know or record everything.

ii What has been kept and archived?

Prior to the development of a system of archives the safekeeping of past records could not be ensured. However, archiving also causes problems. This is set out nicely by J. Talboys Wheeler (1861, iii) discussing the establishment of the Public Record Office as an introduction to his reorganisation of the Madras Records under the British Empire in India:

Diplomatic correspondence of the utmost value had been sold for waste paper, and was subsequently purchased by the British Museum at a fabulous price. Income tax returns, which had been entrusted to the Commissioners to ensure secrecy, were found in grocers shops wrapped around soap and sugar. The very papers which a zealous official, absorbed in the current business of the day, would regard with contempt, – turned out to be the very papers which historians and antiquaries would regard with superstitious reverence. The great difficulty was to know what to keep and what to throw away.

The price of keeping some material has been the destruction of other records. Indeed, this has become more and more of a problem because as the state’s functions have expanded the amount of information in all formats that is produced has also expanded. Not all of what is produced by the state is archived, just as you might not want to preserve for posterity all your photographs, letters or e-mails. There is, therefore, a process of selection and destruction (usually called ‘weeding’). What is kept and what is destroyed depends upon the priorities of the time it was done and the people doing it, and their projections of what might be wanted in the future. Much of the systems of archiving that are now current (in places like Chennai – formerly Madras – as well as Washington and London) are inherited from the nineteenth century (and men like J. Talboys Wheeler) which was when European and American states, in their imperial and domestic forms, became much more interested in the production, collection and storage of systematic information on all sorts of subjects (Hannah, 2001 and Richards, 1993).

iii What is open for consultation?

Not everything that is in the archive is available for consultation. The most common restrictions relate to information that is still regarded as current. This is kept closed for a certain period of time. For example, material deposited in the British Public Record Office is routinely closed for 30 years, but this can be extended to 50 or even 100 years in certain cases. The most well-known 100-year closure is the personal information from each census.

Taken together the answers to these questions help to define the archival material there is and what can be done with it. What I want to concentrate on here is one important aspect of the state’s gathering and use of information. It is apparent, as hinted above, that changes over time in the information gathered relate to the changing nature of the state. While care needs to be exercised with long-term trajectories of state development – for example, it is not clear that the modern secular state is any more intrusive in its subjects private lives than the early modern confessional (or religious) state was (Braddick, 2000) – it is possible to understand changes in the sorts of knowledge that th...