Geography past, geography future

Progress in Human Geography 30, 1 (2006) pp. 115–127 Book review symposium Geography past, geography future Johnston, R. and Williams, M., editors 2004: A century of British geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaile, G. and Wilmott, C. 2004: Geography in America at the dawn of the 21st century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. I One century down, another to go? British and US geography’s newest inventories and prospects Some ten years ago, Gillian Rose (1995: 415) argued that the ‘construction of tradition’ (with respect to histories of geography) invariably sees tradition as ‘territorialized’. She had in mind the ways in which the field has been defined by practices of ‘inclusion, exclusion and erasure’ such that some figures (predominantly powerful white males) are rendered as towering, influential and fundamental while other people are written out of its history as if they had never had any presence whatsoever. From a completely different philosophical and political position, Richard Symanski (2002) in his muck-raking history of contemporary American human geography reached much the same conclusion about the importance of exclusion and erasure, except that, rather than seeing the generation of intellectual boundaries in itself as the most potent instrument for territorializing ‘tradition’, he views social influence, intellectual tribalism and the corruption of disciplinary institutions as the main culprits. Both authors will find much grist for their respective mills in these two volumes. Unlike some other recent compendia on the history of geography (eg, Benko and Strohmayer, 2004), encyclopedias of geographic concepts (eg, Lévy and Lussault, 2003), or ‘companions’ (eg, Duncan et al., 2004) and ‘handbooks’ (eg, Anderson et al., 2002) to specific subfields, these two books © 2006 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd attempt to cover the entire range of what goes for geography (from physical to human) adopting a self-consciously disciplinary, institutional and rigorously positive and largely uncritical approach to their subject matter. Though both appear as territorialized endeavors in the most literal sense of the term, the British one is much the more so, reflecting perhaps the greater universalism (‘we are the world’) of the Americans in the current world situation, the longer timeframe adopted in the British volume, and the purpose of the British volume in reporting to the British Academy at its centenary on the history of geography as an academic discipline in Britain. The British volume (CBG) is organized largely with respect to concepts (environment, place and space), applications and key contemporary research areas (such as environmental change, disease distributions, cities and regional problems). With a couple of exceptions, the authors are all luminaries in contemporary British geography. The precise purpose of the US volume (GADC) is less clear; though celebrating the discipline at the turn of the millennium and published in the centennial year of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the chapters are overwhelmingly contemporary in focus with a bibliographical sweep across subfields (economic, urban, remote sensing, American Indian Geography, etc) as the modus operandi. The multiple specialty groups of the AAG were responsible for organizing and writing each of the chapters. As a result, 10.1191/0309132506ph598xx 116 Book review symposium the book ends up with 48 chapters divided into seven sections: environmental dynamics, human/society dynamics, environment/ society dynamics, geographic methods, geographers at work, regional geography, and values, rights and justice. It is telling perhaps of what still gives some unity to an otherwise increasingly fissiparous field that, in my opinion, the illustratively richest and pedagogically most useful chapters in both books are the methods ones, such as those on remote sensing and cartography in GADC and the mapping chapter in CBG. In both books biophysical geographies receive relatively short shrift (merely 60 pages out of 767 in GADC and, taking a catholic view of what goes for ‘environment’ in CBG, only 166 pages out of 643). Given the current state of the world with respect to looming environmental crises and the long history of geography’s attempts to forge a pathway between natural and social sciences this lacuna speaks volumes about the field’s slow abdication of arguably the most important part of its ‘tradition’. Beyond this bias, even massive volumes such as these exhibit various seemingly deep-seated parochialisms (beyond that of the national, already noted): many authors cite themselves and kindred spirits repeatedly, competing conceptions of key terms other than those preferred by authors are largely ignored, the contemporary reliance of much ‘theory’ in human geography on imported ideas that are open to serious critical scrutiny receives little or no commentary, and the charges of faddishness and dilettantism frequently made against the contemporary field receive literally no attention in either volume. That said, these are very different types of inventory. GADC is frankly celebratory. Drawing a word from the vocabulary of statistics, the Introduction refers a number of times to the ‘robustness’ of US geography, suggesting that the days of disciplinary doubt, navelgazing and inferiority complex are finally over. From much of the evidence accumulated in the individual chapters, however, the significance level of the robustness remains open to question, not least because absolute quantity consistently seems to trump quality as the primary basis for making any judgment about the relative intellectual well-being of the various subfields. The other book is much more circumscribed in its claims about the condition of the field within its territory. At the outset its editors note that the very definitions of the field are confusing and that geography has long suffered from ‘poor visibility and legibility’ (p. 3). Noting that a ‘research culture’ has only flourished within field over the past 30 years, the editors think that ‘Academic geography has thrived in the UK (more so than in any other English-speaking country) because of the discipline’s strength in the schools’ (p. 6). This disciplinary self-putdown contrasts starkly with the public-relations triumphalism of GADC’s editors. Beyond their peculiarities and particularities, however, the two volumes do reveal in their own ways three aspects of the state of contemporary geography as a collective enterprise in two countries that between them probably contain the lion’s share of those around the world who call themselves geographers. One is a clear reticence, mentioned by David Livingstone in his chapter on ‘British geography, 1500–1900’ (p. 14) in CBG, about investigating the very geographical ground upon which such labels as ‘British’ and ‘US’ geography rest. In the present day, with all the talk of ‘international’ reputations as the basis for academic promotion and departmental rankings, the internationalizing of journals and other publishing outlets, the transatlantic mobility of academics and graduate students, and the increased devotion of academics to identities other than the national, one might expect somewhat more explicit attention to the very geography of knowledge upon which the books are based. Yet, as these books show, national attribution remains the most prevalent way of understanding the history and geography of geographical knowledge Geography past, geography future when all manner of sites and venues from the field, the laboratory and the battlefield to the archive, the classroom and the university administration building suggest themselves as the more immediately relevant contexts for understanding the making of academic geography (for an excellent example, see Barnes, 2004). Yes, vernacular language and institutional differences are relevant to understanding the development and current character of the field, but are they and national professional organizations absolutely more important than the other types of context? Perhaps the field could be understood less arbitrarily through a geopolitical lens that would highlight both the temporality of the national as the premier context, the ebb and flow of ideas into and out of the field from other ones, the relative exposure or insulation of English-language geography to foreign influences, and the rise and fall of different pet theories and methods because of the rise and fall of distinctive geopolitical orders (such as that of the cold war) (see Agnew, 2002)? From this viewpoint, what matters is that fields should not be regarded as if they are thingsin-themselves that came into ‘existence’ in 1904, or whenever, and have had life since then primarily because of their institutionalization in national university ‘systems’ and through ‘memberships’ in national associations. This view (akin to that of Durkheim on ‘society’) substitutes an organizational geography for the actual people and places that have figured in the making of geographical studies. In other words, in these books (as in so much ‘history of geographic thought’) geography is an academic discipline more than a field of knowledge. These books, particularly GADC, also reveal something of what can be called the ‘politics of knowledge’ within their respective national academic communities. If at one time the discipline could be characterized politically as conservative and imperialist with an emergent left-wing vanguard by the 1980s, today it is organized as much by reference to 117 the theoretical categories of US identity politics, multiculturalism and policy relevance as it is by its historic concepts and methods. Not only are there chapters devoted to sexual difference in both books, but GADC has many chapters that reflect the deep affiliation of many authors to perspectives that not simply mention but celebrate social, sexual and racial differences as the reason for studying ‘geography’ at all. This culturalist/identity uniformity across many of the chapters surprised me. It has several consequences. One is that concern with cultural identities seems to have started to undermine the focus on economic/materialist interpretations that was such a feature of 1980s US geography. I had expected to see much more attention to global socio-economic inequalities, underdevelopment, area-studies debates and metageography (the ways in which the world is divided up by scale, region and ocean). Certainly, the greatest numbers of citations in the AAG volume are still mainly to the publications of advocates of neo-Marxist class-based interpretations of the world’s geography such as David Harvey, Dick Peet and Neil Smith. Yet, if the subjects and content of the chapters serve as any guide, hard-line materialism seems increasingly destined for redundancy within the discipline as a whole. In the second place, given trends in the politics of the larger US society, I also thought that there might be some sign of increased variety across the chapters in the political correlates of theoretical positioning. A conventional geosociology of knowledge might predict such a trend, particularly when geography is more strongly institutionalized in universities in the Republican ‘heartland’ of the USA than it is in the Northeast or on the West Coast and research funding in both the USA and Britain is largely driven by governmental agendas. So, where are the right-wing geographers championing the ‘war on terror’, supporting evolutionary explanations of gender differences, and questioning the exploitation of political asylum by radical 118 Book review symposium religious zealots? Where are the neoliberals endorsing existing globalization and arguing for restrictions on government programs? In short, they are mainly invisible, save for the chapter in the GADC on military geography. But it is well known from attending and listening to presentations at annual AAG meetings, examining patterns in the sales of textbooks of various types, and public discussions of the policies of the AAG over the years that such voices do in fact exist. For whatever reason, however, they are not represented here. Academic geography as portrayed in these two books is almost entirely left wing or progressive in its politics. Increasingly, though, this seems to mean concerned with supporting the practice of identity politics rather than with studying the political economy of geographical difference in itself. Finally, given the national framing adopted by both volumes, little is said about the relationships between geography, on the one hand, and the respective national states, on the other. At one time, as is often reiterated, geography was a handmaiden to the modern expansionist state, be it in colonial administration, wartime planning or empirebuilding. Today, for example, many of the most vaunted technologies of the field, remote sensing and GIS included, have their origins in US national military surveillance programs. As a school subject in Britain, its period of greatest efflorescence was, as Mackinder had hoped in the late nineteenth century, in educating citizens in the ways of empire. As the editors of CBG point out, this has been academic geography’s big advantage in Britain. Its uncertain role as a research subject, however, suggests that this relative invulnerability might not be permanent unless the field can improve its credibility as a problem-solver for a state that increasingly expects fast returns for its educational investments. In the USA, geography’s very neglect in the state schools can be seen geopolitically as a measure of a society so sure of itself and its potential for obliterating geographical difference that it did not require its citizens to know anything much about anywhere in particular. This has made American geography perhaps unduly opportunistic. Lacking a good external base of potential students, other than those recruited once on campus, the discipline’s leaders have been prone to enthusiasms that might expand the popular appeal and reputation of the subject, jumping on whatever funding and methodological bandwagon pulls into town. One consequence has been to vastly increase the scope of the subject without adequately theorizing its expansion. This leaves it open to the charge of a fuzzy interdisciplinarity without any core concepts or subject matter. In different ways in the two countries, therefore, academic geography remains vulnerable to the withdrawal of state sanction and support. The editors of CBG clearly understand this. Maintaining a strong presence in the schools is the sine qua non. Meanwhile, the AAG can only pray that remote sensing and GIS remain under the purview of geography departments. Sadly, the rest of us in US academic geography will probably depend on it. John A. Agnew University of California, Los Angeles References Agnew, J.A. 2002: Making political geography. Arnold. Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. and Thrift, N., editors 2002: Handbook of cultural geography. Sage. Barnes, T.J. 2004: Placing ideas: genius loci, heterotopia and geography’s quantitative revolution. Progress in Human Geography 28, 565–95. Benko, G. and Strohmeyer, U., editors 2004: Horizons géographiques. Bréal. Duncan, J., Johnson, N. and Schein, R., editors 2004: A companion to cultural geography. Blackwell. Lévy, J. and Lussault, M., editors 2003: Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés. Belin. Rose, G. 1995: Tradition and paternity: same difference? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 20, 414–16. Symanski, R. 2002: Geography, inside out. Syracuse University Press. Geography past, geography future II Taking stock The almost simultaneous appearance of these two millennial assessments of geography, in Britain and the United States, offers an opportunity for taking stock. First impressions are monumental: these books are hard to ignore – even to heft. Each makes an effective doorstop. Each, in its own way, offers a substantial account of what its nation’s geographers know, and why this matters. A century of british geography (CBG) includes (only) 20 chapters, by 23 authors, organized into six sections; dealing respectively with the discipline’s history, key concepts (environment, place, space), social import and selected research themes. Geography in America at the dawn of the 21st century (GADC) offers 48 chapters, in twocolumn format, by 133 authors, organized into seven sections: environmental, human/ society, and environment/society dynamics; methods; geographers at work; regions; and morals. The editors are to be congratulated for the sheer effort necessary to bring these to completion. It would be an interesting exercise in the history of (Eurocentric) geographic thought to compare them, along with the accompanying pantheon of companions, readers and handbooks that have absorbed so much of our collective effort in recent years, to the comprehensive assessments of the field that appeared during colonialism: the ‘universal geographies’ of Humboldt, Ritter, Reclús et al. Such a comparison would tell us a great deal about how knowledge production has, or has not, changed over the last century and a half. My aim is more modest: to reflect on contemporary geographies of knowledge production in light of these volumes. First, they remind us that knowledge production remains strongly territorial. Geography is still struggling to escape the national territorial trap that we have been quick to criticize other disciplines, such as international relations, for falling into. (This is true for academia in general, but geographers should be particularly aware of the limitations of this spatiality.) We tell our 119 students to think globally, and jet-set to international conferences, but the nation state remains an even greater arbiter of academic practice than it is in other trajectories of ‘globalization’. Our intellectual landscape is marked by powerful national disciplinary associations, national funding agencies and national educational regulatory systems and cultural norms, which shape how we think and act. Thus each volume can be read in the first instance, as a microcosm of its national academic culture. CBG is a button-down, status-conscious, tightly planned project: commissioned by the British Academy, vetted by the 20 geographers elected to its membership, and (with two exceptions) authored by senior and influential professors. The chapters are uniformly weighty, written by leading global authorities in the field (at least, as seen from the perspective of English-speaking geography), and serious. They offer a summary of achievements in British geography in the topic at hand, a description of shifting trends and fashions, and an opinion on the shape of things to come. They do not look far abroad: there are 16 index entries on the United States; seven, four and one, respectively, for France, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden (‘Fog in Channel. Continent cut off!’); three for India; and none for China or Russia. GADC is ungainly, decentralized and uneven – and similarly insular (10 index entries for Britain). (This volume approximates a second edition of the 1989 book of the same title, constructed in the same way.) The chapters are titled with the names of the specialty groups of the Association of American Geographers; authored by representatives chosen by each specialty group, of widely varying seniority and age; with seemingly modest attempts to edit for content and organization. The principal challenge faced by the editors is to force order onto this grassroots organizational structure of the Association by grouping the chapters into sections – of uneven coherence. Chapters 120 Book review symposium vary in length from 42 to five pages, and in depth from insightful summaries of the subfield, of comparable weight to those in CBG, to lightweight historiographies and quasi-journalistic entries. (It should be pointed out that editors and authors alike were similarly handicapped by the format: the uneven playing field of specialty groups, varying from some with 1000 members and/or a century or more of tradition to others with 50 members and/or only a few years’ existence, inevitably generates unevenness.) CBG resembles middle-class Britain: hierarchical, well-schooled, self-confident but concerned for its own well-being, cognizant of a proud tradition but worried about loss of status, trendy and insular. GADC resembles the United States: supremely self-confident (with no qualms about labeling itself as American, tout court), loosely democratic, bigger, disorganized and a bit chaotic, unevenly groomed, sprawling and diverse, short-termist in its thinking, and with some surprisingly interesting and innovative nooks and crannies. These national differences persist in a variety of ways. To offer one example, just as feminism in Britain is more circumscribed than in the USA, so the treatment of feminist geography in CBG is bracketed into one chapter, with a couple of signal exceptions, whereas in GADC it cuts across a variety of themes – while remaining a bit player. To offer another, only GADC includes chapters on religious and military geography. These national differences, while discernible, belie strong similarities between British and US geography; similarities that shape global geographic knowledge production. A direct comparison of these volumes overestimates the degree to which these national geographies differ, because of their quite distinct purposes. CBG is more similar in intent to the US volume Rediscovering geography (RG: published by the National Research Council in 1997), also written to promote geography under the aegis of an elite national academic institution, and directed toward an external audience including university administrators and funding agencies. These two books share flaws reflecting their desire to reach a non-geography audience. While well received by, and looking definitive to, non-geographers, most geographers will find these representations of the discipline partial and problematic. Distinctive features of the representation of geography in RG (Chapters 3–5) reappear in CBG’s organizational structure: place, space, mapping and GIS, society-environment dynamics, and social relevance (only scale is missing from CBG). Four of the six ‘critical issues’ identified in RG (Chapter 2) also reappear in CBG’s section on ‘Geography moving forwards’. There is no evidence that these similarities are deliberate. GADC’s editors (one, like myself, a co-author of RG) explicitly adopt RG’s organizational structure for geography to define its first five sections. The thematic organization of GADC, in turn, is more appropriately compared with the 23 research groups of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS/IBG). As described on the RGS/IBG website (accessed 10 February 2005), 18 of its 21 thematic research groups also are specialty groups of the AAG (and thereby chapters of GADC), and one other is slightly different in focus (education: restricted to postsecondary education in the RGS/IBG). The RGS/IBG ‘developing areas’ research group is expanded into four specialty group chapters in the regional section of GADC (accompanied there by three North American regional specialty groups). The much stronger regional focus in GADC might be read as a byproduct of US geopolitical hegemony (geography’s historical importance to military, political and economic rule, now a distant echo in Britain), but it is as much a result of everyday geographic practice. USA’s legacy as a land of immigration can be seen in the authors of the regional chapters. The Great and the Good have repeatedly sought to wean geography from its fascination with area studies since the 1960s, particularly in Britain, but the strain of regional synthesis has proven resistant to Geography past, geography future attempts to eradicate it from geography’s practices, lay audience and classrooms. In US geography, with its dearth of basic geographical education and knowledge, regional geography plays a more important role in postsecondary teaching. Second, as geographers we know that nation states are unequally positioned, and empowered, in our globalizing world, including that of knowledge production. Here, Britain and the USA stand shoulder to shoulder in a ‘special relationship,’ embodying (at least to ourselves) the core of global knowledge production in geography. This close relationship is cemented by fluid and informal networking, connecting the two national communities. These networks come to ground in key places (particularly national conferences and departmental speaker series) where knowledge is produced through faceto-face exchange. The AAG national conference comes closer to a global center of calculation in the actor-networks of geography than any other coalescence, now attracting as many British geographers annually as the national RGS/IBG meeting. Deeper collaboration must, however, negotiate persistent dialectical tensions between international networking and place-based, national and local, academic cultures. The nationalist culture of academia throws up many barriers to in-depth international collaboration. It has been my experience that the National Research Council, the (US) National Science Foundation, the (UK) Economic and Social Research Foundation, private foundations, and increasingly competitive local university cultures are reluctant to support the higherrisk long-term projects that would foster deep collaboration, even between two geographic trajectories as similar and interconnected as the USA and the UK. Situated at the center of this binational partnership, we take it for granted that, taken together, books defining the state of British and American geography also define the cutting edge of geography in toto. Or that is our conceit. We internalize the hegemonic 121 status of Anglo-US geography as natural, and our legacy to the world. The self-image of ourselves as responsible for substantial intellectual progress of social significance is a representation that is important to both our individual subjectivity and our collective subjectivity as geographers. Individually, we can deflect external threats to our discipline by reassuring ourselves that we do good, important and internationally reputable work. Collectively, even if such threats did not exist, we would probably have to invent them in order to unite under one disciplinary flag the considerable and stimulating intellectual diversity that defines, and too often divides, geography. There is always, however, an other side to such constructions; the marginalization of others’ geographies. These are represented, by default, as annexes to the Anglophone project. Of course, Anglo-US geographers interact closely with those from selected other parts of the English-speaking world (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand), sharing intellectual interests, debates, fashions and research questions. In addition, Swedish and Dutch geographers are particularly active in English. Yet asymmetries in exchange between these communities, whereby Anglo-US geographers spend far less of their collective energy visiting the nodes of knowledge production in these other countries than vice versa, indicate where the centers of calculation lie. Indeed, as the lingua franca of international intellectual exchange, it seems only sensible and natural, to us, for all internationally orientated geographers to interact in English, publish in Englishlanguage journals, and gather at Englishlanguage conferences. (Consider, for example, the following remark, by the editors of a recent book on key thinkers in geography: ‘Until the works of key thinkers publishing in other languages is [sic] translated into English, introducing [undergraduate] students to them seems relatively redundant’ (Hubbard et al., 2005: 186). Why does this attitude seem so unproblematic to us situated within 122 Book review symposium Anglophone geography, and yet so bizarre to others situated outside it?) Such asymmetries strengthen, as knowledge production circulates farther afield. It has long been a complaint of the International Geographical Union, for example, that the movers and shakers of Anglophone geography are too often absent from its quadrennial meetings – the one reasonably global node in the circuits producing geographical knowledge. There is a deep irony here, going to the heart of a discipline that has long represented itself as respectful of difference. Critical Anglophone human geographers have recently devoted great effort to highlighting the problematic of postcolonialism. In this view, global capitalism continues the colonial project of constructing a world in which first-world norms and lifestyles are represented as progress, against which ways of life elsewhere are treated as exotic and as incomplete, inadequate and backward. This unidirectional history fuels the west’s self-image as occupying the forefront of progress, simultaneously devalorizing ways of living differently and thus geographical difference more generally. We do not apply this problematic to our own networks of knowledge production, however, in order to interrogate others’ ways of knowing and reflect on what is lost to geography through their absence from our pantheon. We represent British and US American geography as the global research frontier, expecting others to follow our lead to gain respect as reputable geographers (compounding this by continually moving the goalposts, as we lurch from one ‘paradigm’ to another). Instead of looking outwards, the white (largely) male Anglophone establishment grounds our arguments in the philosophies of the European enlightenment (currently, Marx, Spinoza, Foucault, Whitehead and Deleuze are fashionable). Third, then, these books not only celebrate the achievements of geography in Britain and the United States, and the other white former British colonies, but also, and presumably unintentionally, perform the act of representing other national (or subnational) traditions as inadequate. This is not simply an issue of language: there is a remarkable amount of geographic scholarship published in English in the non-white former British colonies, notably India, that most of us do not bother to read. Of course, in many ways the geographic research in other national contexts may well be engaged with approaches and questions, diffusing there from the western universities where their senior geographers were trained, that we feel can legitimately be set aside. Furthermore, inadequate educational or financial resources, lack of access to the English-language literature and international conferences, state restrictions and regulations, hierarchical university cultures, and wages so low that professors are forced to moonlight, make it extraordinarily difficult for geographers in many other national contexts to invest the time and effort necessary to undertake original and rigorous intellectual research. Nevertheless, the presumption that our research frontier should be everyone’s undermines the conditions of possibility under which subaltern geographers from other geographic contexts could speak (on their own terms), and be listened to. We are yet to develop the reflexivity and openness that will enable us to challenge the presumption that our theories (and other modalities of geographic knowledge) travel. It is vital to remember that we do not have to go to distant places to encounter such problems. Thus, the inexcusable relative absence of scholars of color in our national circuits of knowledge production is paralleled by an absence of concern for race, even as our societies become less and less white. Race is discussed explicitly on just 40 of the 1100 pages of text in these two volumes (excluding 107 pages devoted to ‘pure’ physical geography). These two volumes should not only be read in terms of what they include, and how they represent the achievements along the trajectories of Anglophone geography – achievements Geography past, geography future that deserve recognition in the discipline and beyond. They should also be read for what, who and which places remain outside our collective project of knowledge production. Such reflections should challenge us to re-evaluate these trajectories in terms of opportunities missed along the paths not taken. In particular, we should agitate to unbound our discipline in favor of more public geographies, geographies that venture outside our northern academies to engage civil society (and not just capital and the state) in the production of geographical knowledge. A hundred years from now, geography should matter so much to people’s livelihoods that innumerable voices can express the achievements of our discipline. Eric Sheppard University of Minnesota Reference Hubbard, P., Kitchen, R. and Valentine, G. 2005: Editors’ reply. Environment and Planning A 37, 184–87. III Geographers on geography Now seems a good time to comment on the future of geography – a subject with everything to play for as the transdisciplinary connections that have vexed internal debates become definitive of how the world works. To this end, these books comprise an appealing pot pourri of stimulating ideas. They also have a systematic logic: a retrospect on a century of British geography; a prospective on geography in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Working through the 68 chapters comprising these rather weighty tomes, I definitely recommend the pick-and-mix option. But I am getting ahead of myself. 1 Diverse geographies? These are, as their titles betray, two very different books. They differ in orientation – the one reflecting on the past, the other anticipating the future. They cover the subject in two 123 world regions: Britain and ‘America’ (though I note, scanning email addresses, that fewer than 10 of over 240 contributors to the ‘America’ volume appear to be located outside the USA and none gives an email address that, to me, suggests a South American affiliation). The books are also conceived and organized rather differently: CBG includes 20 chapters written, usually by single authors, at the invitation of the editors and spread across nearly 650 pages; GADC crams 48 apparently refereed, often multi-authored, chapters from each AAG specialty group into just short of 800 pages. The editors of CBG report a tricky time devising an appropriate structure for the book. They came up with a fair stab at three core themes – environment, place and space – sandwiched between a couple of introductory chapters and two concluding sections containing round-ups of geography ‘in action’ and ‘moving forwards’. Arguably, the editors agonized less over the question of contributors, summing up a century of achievement by having just two whole chapters and two halves written by women. One of the ‘women’s chapters’ covers feminist contributions and accounts for most of the index entries under gender and sexuality. I am not aware that any of the contributors identifies themselves as a person of colour, and the ‘race’ chapter (if that is what it is) strangely invisibilizes some key issues around identity and recognition under the title ‘geographers and the fragmented city’ (more of this later). Notwithstanding the gender of British geography in the twentieth century, and in light of its Eurocentricity, it is breathtaking that there is so little explicit gesture in the structure of this book to the diversity of scholars and scholarship in the discipline. GADC has a different flavour altogether, and a different balance of authorship: for example, a quarter of the authors are women. Again there is the vexed question of how to group the chapters, and here the solution is to adopt seven ‘Parts’ or sections from 124 Book review symposium the National Research Council’s document Rediscovering geography (1997). There is always an arbitrary element which comes into play when organizing encylopaedic accounts like this. But I do worry when I read sentences like ‘we feel that we were able to assign the vast majority of chapters unambiguously to the most appropriate Part, based upon its primary affinity with that Part’ (p. 5). I suspect many readers will want to question this ‘feeling’. Why is it, for example, that ‘Geographic perspectives on women’ together with the ‘Geography of religion and belief systems’ are in Part VII (‘Values, rights and justice’) while ‘American ethnic geography’ and ‘American Indian geography’ are in Part VI (‘Regional geography’)? Meanwhile, ‘Sexuality and space’ is in Part II (‘Human/ society dynamics’), ‘Aging and the aged’ in Part V (‘Geographers at work’) and ‘disabled people’ have just one entry in the subject index (while ableism has none). What ‘primary affinities’ split these chapters and themes into separate Parts when – to my reading – they have a fundamental affinity to one another? This structuring of the book is not, for me, testimony to where chapters ‘best fit’ in some pre-existing world order. Rather it reflects the extent to which the systematic, intersecting and overlapping character of the various modalities of discrimination and exclusion – of the multifaceted struggle for recognition, of the case for redistribution – are fragmented and dispersed across, and in the end invisibilized within, the subject. Indeed the terms discrimination and prejudice are absent from the index, exclusion has just two entries, and the only entries under ‘justice’ refer to the chapter on ‘Values, ethics and justice’. So, on the question of where geography has come from, and where it is going to, in relation to the critical themes of equality and diversity, I am, at best, uneasy. One immediate reaction is to wonder what has happened to social geography. This is the one focal point in the discipline which has at least tried to recognize some of the ways in which the fracturing and fragmentation of human life is structured, managed, experienced, pulled together, prised apart and manipulated, through material conditions as well as in the world of meanings and lived experience. Social geography has formed one starting point for an appreciation of the way exclusions and inequalities come about, are played off against one another, and are routinized and entrenched, or occasionally practised and performed differently. Some of this agenda is addressed in the slim but eloquent ‘Socialist geography’ chapter in GADC. This covers, in a necessarily selective fashion, some key themes close to the hearts of Left-leaning geographers. Yet, apart from this, neither the broad sweep of social geography nor its role in reworking (through its links with welfare, care, well-being and justice) a too-stark political spectrum, gains much recognition in these books. Interestingly, all the index entries to social geography in CBG (there are none in GADC) point to the chapter on ‘geography, ethics and social concern’. More fundamentally still, the world is changing radically and rapidly. This is far more evident in GADC than it is in CBG, but the Anglo-American agenda is starting to sound parochial. ‘Class, race, gender’ no longer say it all (not that they ever did); so where is the attention, so urgently needed, to the new geneticization of difference, to questions of discrimination around bodily capacities and capabilities, to the wiring of humanity into technology, to the complete shake-up of an older social order as inequalities around personal prospects – the question of what you can become – compete with ideas about who you are or where you come from as a determinant of life chances in their own right? Not, sadly, in these accounts. 2 Geography and the wringing of hands CBG is one of a series of volumes – described by the editors as a ‘major prestigious showcase’ – collated to mark the centenary of the British Academy. This series apparently offered geographers a chance to rescue what Geography past, geography future the editors characterize as a rather lacklustre discipline, dogged by ‘poor visibility and legibility’, by providing a high-profile account of ‘what their discipline has achieved through a century of effort’ (p. 4). Unfortunately, the editors’ account of that century is rather downbeat: they worry that geography is the butt of so many jokes, they are concerned about its marginal status and they tell how it was only ‘grudgingly accepted’ by the universities. For much of the twentieth century, geography was, it seems, ‘a small, generally poorly regarded discipline’ which still ‘lacks the visibility and associated sense of identity that its general size warrants’ (p. 4). Since then, somewhat ironically, the future King of England has secured an honours degree in just that subject . . . Furthermore, the editors of GADC seem able to convey a completely different impression. They talk of geographers’ enhanced credibility, they report a growing number of degree programmes, they flag high PhD numbers, refer to good job prospects, and identify many other ‘vital signs’ for the discipline. They make doing geography sound amazingly exciting. Like other UK colleagues, I am only too aware that geography here (in UK universities) is at something of a turning point, but I suspect it is the lively US approach rather than the tired British account that will cut most ice with British Vice Chancellors and Principals. In terms of contents and contributors CBG is, overall, solid rather than radical. The pages of the book are filled by the work of people – ‘British geographers’ – who are well established and considerably more experienced than average for a discipline in which, as Ron Johnston himself points out, 60% of academic staff are aged 40 or under. Their work is well known and their contributions have generally been highly respected. In this sense the collection looks promising; many of the contributors are, after all, Fellows of the British Academy. It is, for example, a pleasure to read David Livingstone’s elegant and eloquent ‘imprecise review’ of the 400 years 125 of British geography to 1900. Surely no one else could have written such an engaging piece, covering so much, so crisply, in so short a space. Ron Johnston’s encyclopaedic account of the institutionalization of geography is, well, encyclopaedic, in the best sense of the word. Thereafter, and inevitably, things become more uneven, but even a review essay is not long enough to do justice to the best parts of this curate’s egg. GADC is a bigger project with a much wider range of contributors. Perhaps this is why it contains a vibrancy that CBG, for the most part, does not. Three highlights for me – from quite a long list of possibles, including the chapter on socialist geography mentioned above – are the chapters on economic and political geography, and an essay on hazards. The overview of economic geography is appealing (to someone who is not an economic geographer) because it captures the excitement of the reintegration of economic and social (or conventionally ‘non-economic’) concerns, which marks little short of a paradigm shift. Likewise, the piece on political geography shows just what geographers have to offer – especially with their work on critical geopolitics – that orthodox geopolitics too often skirts around. The chapter on hazards is exciting because it is so attentive to theoretical and conceptual innovation around hazards and risks, signalling a fuller integration of empirical and practical approaches to adverse events into wider debates on vulnerability, human dignity, social harm, resilience and well-being. Despite all this, however, there is also a strange unevenness to GADC. Part IV, for example, is called ‘Geographic methods’. It contains just four chapters: GIS, remote sensing and cartography, mathematical models and quantitative methods. The silence around qualitative research is resounding. CBG barely mentions qualitative methods either. This latter volume has no explicitly methodological chapters, but there are four times as many index entries under ‘quantitative revolution’ as there are under ‘qualitative 126 Book review symposium methods’, and the former includes a ‘see also’ clause flagging models, spatial analysis and statistical methods. The next entry in the list is ‘quantitative skills, shortage’. Now, I have a fair range of quantitative skills, but (like so many other human geographers and social scientists of all kinds) I have chosen to devote a good portion of my career to promoting qualitative research. This is a political decision, and it is not – for me at any rate – a question of either/or. But we have surely by now established that working with lay perspectives and experiences, attending to close dialogue, engaging with performative acts and so on is vital to all aspects of all kinds of – quantitative, practically relevant, policy engaged, participatory – knowledge. Now (some) individual chapters in both these books do clearly recognize this, but it is astounding that neither volume – neither set of keynote commentaries on the state of the art of geography – is structured in a way that recognizes this. Then there is the whole set of ideas around policy relevance and applicable, practical geography. Unfortunately, for me, these discussions tend to be the wrong way up (as they say). Of course, I am not expecting Robert Bennett and Alan Wilson to stop fitting the world to mathematical models just because I am wary of (some of) their stylized facts. But a lot of interesting modellers these days are prepared to meet halfway, and they will go further still for psychologists. I am not averse to recognizing that one challenge for policy-orientated geography is a question of how far the discipline can go to ‘replace its expertise in quantitatively and economically skilled scholars’ (p. 487). But it is not ‘the’ (only) challenge and it may not even be the primary concern. Another challenge might be to invest effort in dialogue – in building collaborations – with those skilled in tapping into lay knowledges; to work with those committed to excavating the normative practices embedded in everyday life – practices on which policy outcomes so often depend, but which policy-making and (economic) theory-driven modelling so often overlooks. Maybe with this slightly more open engagement, more geographers would be interested in working with numbers. Maybe a wider range of scholars would connect more readily with this kind of applied geography if the models concerned were built from the bottom up, rather than being defined by a system in which ‘the onus’ – when reality does not fit the maths – is, as so aptly put by Danny Miller, ‘not on changing the model . . . but on changing the world’ (1998: 196). 3 A (sort of) aside Both of these volumes are more orientated to human than to physical geography, as am I. There is, though, running through both sets of essays, a welcome sense of the extent to which this dualism has collapsed. CBG was put together under the auspices of the humanities-orientated British Academy, so a strong physical geography strand is not perhaps to be expected. Nevertheless, it does have four or five chapters on physical geography and environmental change which make interesting reading. In less than 30 pages, for example, Ian Simmons tackles the domestication of the earth, in a tightly drawn vignette, bursting with ideas caught in the twinkle of his eye. Ken Gregory calls his chapter ‘Physical geography and environmental science’ (perhaps he knows something other British geographers do not about the organization of submissions for the upcoming RAE?). He provides an informative, fairly descriptive overview, which is packed with information though it perhaps covers too much ground. As far as the ideas content of physical geography is concerned, it did not capture my imagination in the same way as some of the themes which, say, Stuart Lane or Mike Summerfield have explored in recent years. Sally Eden’s essay on ‘People and the contemporary environment’ worked better for me as a ‘think piece’, perhaps because it so elegantly engages with subjects around environmental ideologies, meanings and histories. Geography past, geography future The physical geography in GADC is clustered into two parts, covering environmental dynamics, on the one hand, and ‘environment/society’ dynamics, on the other. A quick read through does remind me how interesting geomorphology can be! But overall my reading of the physical and environmental geographies in both these books confirms just how worthwhile it has been, and will increasingly be, to keep the discipline together in order to nurture those sparky, hybrid ideas that arise when science and its Other are so closely juxtaposed. 4 Looking forward? The largest section of CBG and the whole enterprise of GADC is taken up with the idea of momentum: with the spirit of ‘moving forwards’. CBG, contains seven chapters on this topic, ranging from environmental change to social concern, from the urban century to the fragmented city. I do, however, wonder whether the authors of these chapters realized their essays would be assigned to this section. A fine chapter on disease distributions is definitely a retrospective and is very squarely devoted to mapping techniques and spatial statistics. It is not until the last two pages (and really the very last sentence) that the reorientation of medical geography around questions of health and well-being is squarely addressed. This same emphasis on retrospect rather than prospect characterizes two chapters on the city. An intriguing account of the fragmented city, for example, is quite engaging, but, being somewhat nostalgic, tends to neglect the cutting edge of urban change and cultural economy. And is it really testimony to ‘moving forwards’ that nearly everything on feminism is View publication stats 127 left to the chapter by Linda McDowell, while the majority of commentary on ethics is given over to David Smith. These are – for me at any rate – two of the three more stimulating, and yet also most lonely, contributions to the volume. The ‘forward look’ in GADC is not segregated into its own section but scattered through various chapters. As the whole book is essentially an update of the previous systematic account of ‘Geography in America’ (Gaille and Willmott, 1989), there is inevitably an emphasis on what has been achieved in a decade of working; history again gets more attention than prospect (there is, after all, more to go on). There is also a rosiness to those comments on prospect which are made, which is at once welcome (because it is so upbeat) yet also mildly worrying (a hint of complacency?). What I would have liked to see in either book is a chapter or two explicitly devoted to ‘futures’. I am not just thinking here about ideas about where geography and geographers might go. Rather I am hungry for hot topics: for some considered speculation on future scenarios from all areas and approaches to the discipline. Something less safe, maybe. This might be one way in which two big ambitious books, packed with ideas which promise a lot, could deliver still more than they do. Susan J. Smith Durham University References Gaille, G.L. and Wilmott, C.J., editors 1989: Geography in America. Merrill. Miller, D. 1998: Conclusion: a theory of virtualism. In Carrier, J.G. and Miller, D., editors, Virtualism, Berg, 187–215.