Biographical details and theoretical context
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| 1 Benedict Anderson BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT Benedict Anderson is the author of one of the most important concepts in political geography, that of nations being ‘imag- ined communities’. Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Anderson was born in Kunming, China in 1936. Brother of pol- itical theorist Perry Anderson and an Irish citizen whose father was an official with Imperial Maritime Customs, he grew up in California and Ireland before attending Cambridge University. Studying briefly under Eric Hobsbawm, Anderson grad- uated with a First Class degree in Classics in 1957. He moved to Cornell University in 1958 to pursue PhD research on In- donesia. At Cornell he was influenced by George Kahin, John Echols and Claire Holt (Anderson, 1999). In 1965 In- donesia’s military leader Suharto foiled an alleged coup attempt by communist sol- diers, purged the army, and killed hun- dreds of thousands of civilians. Working with two other graduate students, Ander- son analysed Suharto’s version of events, questioning their veracity. Their assess- ment reached the Indonesian military who in 1967 and 1968 invited Anderson to the country to persuade him of the errors in this monograph, then known as the ‘Cornell Paper’. Failing to be convinc- ed, Anderson was denounced by the In- donesian regime.
Following formal
publication of the original allegations (An- derson et al., 1971), Indonesian authori- ties refused Anderson’s visa applications, barring him from Indonesia for what became the duration of Suharto’s regime. Anderson returned to Indonesia in 1999 following the dictator’s death. Anderson completed his PhD entitled The Pemuda Revolution: Indonesian Politics, 1945–1946 in 1967 and taught in the Department of Government at Cornell University until retirement in 2002. Edi- tor of the interdisciplinary journal In- donesia between
1966 and
1984, Anderson studied topics as diverse as Indonesia’s government, politics and in- ternational relations (e.g. 1964), human rights (e.g. 1976), and its role in East Timor (e.g. 1980). As an expert on South East Asia, military conflicts between Cam- bodia, Vietnam and China in the late 1970s stimulated him to analyse the im- portance of, and political attraction to, nationalist politics. The result was Imag-
which Anderson proposed the theory of ‘imagined communities’. Major theoreti- cal approaches, Anderson maintained, had largely ignored nationalism, merely accepting it as the way things are: Nation, nationality, nationalism – all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyse.In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre. (Anderson, 1991: 3) Particularly culpable in this respect was Marxism, the relationship between it and nationalism being the subject of debate in New Left Review in the 1970s (e.g. Lo¨wy, 1976; Debray, 1977). In this climate, An- derson (1991: 3; original emphasis) argued Marxist thought had not ignored national- ism; rather, ‘nationalism has proved an
uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that reason, has largely been elided, rather than confronted’. Im-
cile theories of Marxism and nationalism, and counter what Anderson envisaged as a skewed context for the assessment of nationalism, namely an almost wholly European focus to the detriment of examining South American ‘Creole pion- eers’ of modern nationalist politics. This distortion, Anderson maintained, con- tinues both within and outside the acad- emy. From case studies of colonialism in Latin America and Indonesia, Anderson (1991: 6) proposed ‘the following defini- tion of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. SPATIAL CONTRIBUTIONS Anderson’s concept of nations being ‘im- agined communities’ has become stan- dard within books reviewing geographical thought (e.g. Massey and Jess, 1995; Crang, 1998; Cloke et al., 2001). The contention that a nation is ‘imagined’ does not mean that a nation is false, unreal or to be distinguished from ‘true’ (unimagined) communities. Rather Ander- son is proposing that a nation is construc- ted
from popular processes through which residents share nationality in com- mon: It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. (Anderson, 1991: 6; original emphasis) This understanding both shapes and is shaped by political and cultural institu- tions as people ‘imagine’ they share gen- eral beliefs, attitudes and recognize a collective national populace as having similar opinions and sentiments to their own. Secondly, The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. (Anderson, 1991: 7; original emphasis) To have one nation means there must be another nation against which self-defini- tion can be constructed. Anderson is thus arguing for the social construction of nations as political entities that have a limited spatial and demographic extent, rather than organic, eternal entities. Fur- ther,
Anderson argues that the concept of the nation developed in the late eighteenth century as a societal structure to replace previous monarchical or religious orders. In this manner, a nation was a new way of conceptualizing state sovereignty and rule. This rule would be limited to a defined population and territory over which the state, in the name of national- ity, could exercise power.
Nations hold such power over imagin- ations, claims Anderson, that patriotic
calls to arms are understood as the duty of all national residents. Further, in war, national citizens are equal and class boundaries are eroded in the communal struggle for national survival and great- ness.
Anderson’s second key aspect of the development of nationalism is what he identifies as the role of ‘Creole pioneers’. In both North and South America, those who fought for national independence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the same ancestries, languages and traditions as the colonizing powers they opposed. Anderson (1991: 50) argues these ‘Creole communities’ developed na- tionalist politics before Europe, because as colonies they were largely self-administra- ting territorial units. Thus residents con- ceived of their belonging to a common and potentially sovereign community, a sentiment enhanced by provincial news- papers raising debate about interconti- nental political and administrative rela- tionships. Anderson stakes much of his thesis on ‘print capitalism.’ Drawing on Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin, Anderson argues that the standardization of national calendars, clocks and language was embodied in books and the publica- tion of daily newspapers. This generated a sense of simultaneous national experi- ences for people as they became aware of events occurring in their own nation and nations abroad. Newspapers ‘made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’ (Anderson, 1991: 36). Dispar- ate occurrences were bound together as national experiences as people felt that everyone was reading the same thing and had equal access to information:
The worldwide impact of Imagined Com- munities across academic disciplines led to a revised edition in 1991. In this enlarged edition Anderson noted that he had ‘[be- come] uneasily aware that what I had believed to be a significantly new contri- bution to thinking about nationalism – changing apprehensions of time – patent- ly lacked its necessary coordinate: chang- ing apprehensions of space’ (1991: xiii– xiv). Utilizing South East Asian examples, Anderson corrected this omission by in- cluding chapters addressing the role of national census, museums, constructions of national memories, biographies and maps. Drawing on a 1988 PhD disserta- tion by Thongchai Winichakul about nineteenth century Siam/Thailand, An- derson (1991: xiv) argued that maps con- tribute to the ‘logoization of political space’ and their myriad reproductions familiarize people with the limitations of national sovereignty and community. Having examined mass communica- tion with his thesis of print capitalism, Anderson subsequently turned to the leg- acy of migration: The two most significant factors generat- ing nationalism and ethnicity are both closely linked to the rise of capitalism. They can be described summarily as mass communication and mass migrations. (Anderson, 1992: 7) Maintaining that nationalist movements were/are often initiated by expatriates, noting again the ‘Creole pioneers’ of Latin America and financial contributions from overseas to the Irish Republican Army and ethno-nationalist factions in the Bal- kan Wars of the early 1990s, Anderson assesses:
seems to attract males more than females]. For while technically a citizen of the state in which he comfortably lives, but to which he may feel little attachment, he finds it tempting to play identity politics by participating (via propaganda, money, weapons, any way but voting) in the con- flicts of his imagined Heimat – now only fax-time away. (Anderson, 1992: 13) Translated into dozens of languages and arguably the most regularly cited scholar on the topic, Anderson has appeared on television, addressed committees of the United Nations and USCongress regard- ing Indonesia and East Timor, and raised questions about human rights abuses in South East Asia (e.g. Anderson, 1976, 1980). He is one of the most influential scholars of his generation. Although not a geographer by training or career, issues of space, territory and place, and his criti- cisms of nationalist politics, have led to Anderson’s work being widely utilized within geographical research. KEY ADVANCES AND CONTROVERSIES Imagined Communities received little atten- tion from geographers upon its publica- tion. Largely without review in major geography journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Anderson’s concepts entered geographical debate through their impact on interdisci- plinary studies of nationalism. Yet engage- ment was typified by comment that nations are ‘imagined communities’ – An- derson being cited accordingly. Indeed, Spencer and Wollman (2002: 37) claim that such is the regularity with which articles about nationalism routinely cite Imagined Communities that Anderson’s conceptualization ‘has become one of the commonest cliche´s of the literature’ the result being that ‘invocation has, in some cases, been a substitute for analysis’. Geographers have not been immune to this (see, inter alia, Jackson and Penrose, 1993; Smith and Jackson, 1999). Prolonged geographical assessments of Anderson’s contentions seem few. For example, Blaut (1987) does not assess Anderson’s work in his review of Marxist theories of nationalism, and Short’s (1991: 226) Imagined Country simply proposes Anderson’s Imagined Communities as addi- tional reading. Arguably the most sus- tained utilization comes from Radcliffe and Westwood (1996: 2), who examine how a national imagined community is ‘generated, sustained and fractured’ in Ecuador. They maintain that Anderson’s ‘geographical imagination . . . permits him to link themes of space, mobility and the nation’, but comment that he fails to fully acknowledge or develop the implications of this within his work (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 118). Primarily it is postcolonial scholars that have questioned Anderson’s argu- ments. Edward Said (1993) contends that Anderson is too linear in his explanation that political structures and institutions change from dynasties, through the stan- dardizing influence of print capitalism, to sovereign nations (see also McClintock, 1995). The most vocal critic has been Partha Chatterjee (1993), who contends that the imagination of political communi- ties has been limited by European colo- nialism.
Having had
specifically nationalist institutional forms imposed on them as colonies, upon independence these areas had no option but to follow European paths, with Western powers ready to prevent any seemingly danger- ous deviations. ‘Even our imaginations’, asserts Chatterjee (1993: 5) ‘must remain forever colonized.’ Nationalism and na- tions, Chatterjee maintains, operate only within limits formulated in Europe, and thus they can only be conceptualized within these European strictures. Anti- colonial nationalisms thus typically op- posed colonialism using the same nation- alist
arguments as the colonists. Distinction could not be made through political or economic conceptualization
due to the European dominance of these venues and thus the limited sovereignty and territory of the colony was already imagined for the colonized by the colon- izers. Consequently, anti-colonial nation- alism could only be imagined through cultural processes and practices. Here again Chatterjee challenges Anderson, maintaining that although the processes of print capitalism were important, An- derson’s formulation of them as standar- dizing language, time and territorial extent is too simplistic to impose on the diverse, multilingual and asymmetrical power relations of the colonial situation. A second major critique of Imagined
spective. With a focus on the ‘fraternity’ experienced by members of a nation (An- derson, 1991: 7), the protagonists in An- derson’s conceptions of nationalism are typically assumed to be male. Mayer (2000: 6) argues that Anderson envisions ‘a hetero-male project . . . imagined as a brotherhood’, eliding gender, class and racial structures within and between na- tional communities; and McDowell (1999: 195) demonstrates that although being seemingly neutral, ‘the very term horizon- tal comradeship . . . brings with it conno- tations of
solidarity’. Subsequently, McClintock (1995: 353) la- ments that sustained ‘explorations of the gendering of the national imagination have been conspicuously paltry’. A third challenge comes from Don Mitchell, who argues that as well as
attention to: the practices and exercises of power through which these bonds are produced and reproduced.The questions this raises are ones about who defines the nation, how it is defined, how that definition is reproduced and contested, and, crucially, how the nation has developed and changed over time ...The question is not what common imagination exists, but what common imagination is forged. (Mitchell, 2000: 269; original emphasis) Anderson’s proposal, therefore, is con- strained by its narrowness. What does it matter that a nation is an imagined com- munity? The issue must be to show the work needed to produce and maintain that imagination, how this impacts on people’s lives and how power to enforce the national community that is imagined shapes behaviours across time and space. There is much to commend in the concept of imagined communities, but there is a need to explore power relations inherent in the processes Anderson de- scribes and in their material impacts, whether these are founded on gender, racial, ethnic, class, sexual or other aspect of individual identity. Recent work begins to address such challenges. Angela Martin (1997: 90) maintains that although ‘intel- lectuals have been given the power to ‘‘imagine’’ the nation or national commu- nity . . . the material dimension, or politi- cal economy, of nationalism and the nation have been ignored’. Her assess- ment of late nineteenth-century Irish na- tionalism argues for a ‘corporeal approach to the nation’ to interrogate how gender roles were constructed both in the Irish national imagination and how they re- stricted behaviour in everyday life (Mar- tin, 1997: 91). In turn, Steven Hoelschler’s (1999: 538) study of the construction of a Swiss heritage community in New Glarus, Wisconsin, invokes Anderson to explain that specific ‘forms of imagining’ are util- ized by elites to produce place and com- munity identities, and examines how these elite images are contested by non- elite groups. Thus geographers are mov- ing beyond Anderson’s thesis to under- stand
both imagined
and material communities of nations and nationalisms. Key Thinkers on Space and Place 20 ANDERSON’S MAJOR WORKS Anderson, B., McVey, R. T. and Bunnell, F. P. (1971) A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Publication No. 52. Anderson, B. (1972) Java in a Time of Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, B. (1990) Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised and enlarged edition). London: Verso. Anderson, B. (1998) The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and The World. London: Verso.
Anderson, B. (1964) ‘Indonesia and Malaysia’, New Left Review 28: 4–32. Anderson, B. (1967) The Pemuda Revolution: Indonesian Politics, 1945–1946, Unpublished PhD dissertation. Ithaca, Cornell University. Anderson, B. (1976) ‘Prepared testimony on human rights in Indonesia’, in Human Rights in Indonesia and the Philippines. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, pp. 72–80. Anderson, B. (1980) ‘Prepared testimony on human rights in Indonesia and East Timor’, in Human Rights in Asia: Noncommunist
Anderson, B. (1992) ‘The new world disorder’, New Left Review 193: 3–13. Anderson, B. (1999) ‘The spectre of comparisons’, Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences Newsletter 20 (2); online: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/newsletr/ spring99/spectre.htm (accessed 2 October 2002). Blaut, J. M. (1987) The National Question: Decolonising The Theory of Nationalism. London: Zed Books. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cloke, P., Crang, P. and Goodwin, M. (eds) (2001) Introducing Human Geographies. London: Arnold. Crang, M. (1998) Cultural Geography. London: Routledge. Debray, R. (1977) ‘Marxism and the national question’, New Left Review 105: 25–41. Hoelscher, S. (1999) ‘From sedition to patriotism: performance, place, and the reinterpretation of American ethnic identity’,
Jackson, P. and Penrose, J. (1993) ‘Introduction: placing ‘‘race’’ and nation’, in P. Jackson and J. Penrose (eds) Constructions of Race, Place and Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–23. Lo¨wy, M. (1976) ‘Marxists and the national question’, New Left Review 96: 81–100. Martin, A. K. (1997) ‘The practice of identity and an Irish sense of place’, Gender, Place and Culture 4: 89–113. Massey, D. and Jess, P. (eds) (1995) A Place in the World? New York: Oxford University Press. Mayer, T. (2000) ‘Gender ironies of nationalism: Setting the stage’, in T. Mayer (ed.) Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing The
McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge. McDowell, L. (1999) Gender, Identity and Place: Introducing Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, D. (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Radcliffe, S. and Westwood, S. (1996) Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America. London: Routledge. Said, E. W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Short, J. R. (1991) Imagined Country: Society, Culture and Environment. London: Routledge. Smith, G. and Jackson, P. (1999) ‘Narrating the nation – the ‘‘imagined community’’ of Ukranians in Bradford’, Journal of Historical Geography 25 (3): 367–387. Spencer, P. and Wollman, H. (2002) Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. Sage: London. Euan Hague Benedict Anderson 21 2 Trevor Barnes BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT Trevor Barnes was born in London, Eng- land in 1956. Having grown up in Cor- nwall,
he studied
economics and
geography at University College London between 1975 and 1978. Barnes com- pleted MA and PhD degrees in Geography at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Eric Sheppard, and from 1983 taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Barnes’ work extends across theories of economic value; analytical political economy; flexi- bility and industrial restructuring; and most recently the ‘theoretical histories’ of Anglo-American economic geography. He also sought to make key statements on the position of economic geography at the end of the millennium through a number of edited volumes (Barnes and Gertler, 1999; Barnes and Sheppard, 2000) as well as reviews of political economy ap- proaches in the journal Progress in Human
Although perhaps giving the appear- ance of a relatively divergent set of them- es, there are strong threads of continuity running through Barnes’ research and writing interests. He has long been cap- tivated by the work of the economist Piero Sraffa, for example. In Barnes’ view, Sraffa’s terse expositions on value in The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (via a set of simultaneous production equations) usefully speak both to rigorous abstract theorists as well as to scholars who are more interested in the contextual and the concrete (Barnes, 1989, 1996, chapter 7). Barnes regards anti-essentialist accounts such as Sraffa’s as a useful means of critiquing both classical Marxist accounts of the labour theory of value (which essentialize the role and nature of labour power) as well as neo-classical utility theory. Together with Eric Sheppard (Shep- pard and Barnes, 1990), Barnes has sought to ground political economy in space and place through the development of analytical approaches. Engaging with, but also developing a substantial critique of analytical Marxism, such approaches use ‘both mathematical reasoning and rigorous, formal statistical testing to de- termine logically how space and place make a difference both to the definition of social processes and to their relation to the economy’ (Barnes and Sheppard, 2000: 5). Although cursory readings (par- ticularly if solely focused upon the use of formal mathematical language) might dis- cern a preference for the abstract over the concrete and contextual, Barnes would refute such a contention. For example, Barnes’ engagement with debates sur- rounding flexible production has drawn upon research on the forestry industry in British Columbia conducted with Roger Hayter (Barnes and Hayter, 1992; Hayter and Barnes 1992). Whereas many ac- counts of flexibility through the 1980s and 1990s centred on developments in ‘new industrial spaces’, Barnes and Hayter sought to extend conceputalizations of flexibility through a consideration of ‘in situ’ restructuring in the context of a marginal resource economy. The theoreti- cal and the political are also closely con- nected in Barnes’ recent use of the work of Canadian economic historian Harold Innis to understand ‘the dependency and disruptions’ that have emerged in British
Columbia (Barnes, 2001a: 4; see Barnes et al., 2001). Barnes’ explicit concern has been to confront the profound devastation of lives and communities wrought by the decline of the forest products sector in British Columbia (Barnes, 2001a). Over the course of his career, Barnes (1992, 1996, 2002a) has become increas- ingly interested in tracing the social and political connections that produced the spatial scientific narratives that came to dominate geography – and particularly economic geography – during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing in part upon studies in the sociology of scientific knowledge (including the work of Bruno Latour), Barnes has been keen to read changes in the nature of Anglo-American economic geography as transformations in attitudes towards theory itself. Ironically, the most significant aspect of geography’s quanti- tative revolution was not that it ushered in a set of new methodologies – in fact ‘geography had been quantitative from the time of its formal institutionalization as a discipline in the nineteenth century’ (Barnes, 2001c: 552) – but rather that it involved a shift in theoretical sensibilities. This is not to say that the practices of geography remained static: computeriz- ation and ‘even more complex statistical methods’ (Barnes, 2001c: 553) became increasingly dominant. New ‘scientific’ vocabularies were important in the valor- ization of new technical competencies, but most significantly the quantitative revolution sought to produce foundational understandings of the world in which the truthfulness of representation was guaranteed (Barnes, 2001c: 553). In researching the connections be- tween and among spatial scientists in North America, Barnes (2001b, 2001c) has been concerned to reflect upon the so- cially embedded nature of geography’s quantitative revolution. Crucially, trans- formations in geographical thinking emerged as ‘local affairs’ within particu- lar institutional sites (Barnes, 2001c: 552). Again, his perspective is informed by philosophy of science literatures and par- ticularly by the notion of externalism, or ‘the belief that . . . knowledge is intimate- ly related to the local context in which it develops’ (Barnes, 2003: 70). This con- trasts sharply from an internalist perspec- tive, which presumes that ‘there is a deep-seated, autonomous and universal principle that guides theoretical develop- ment’ (Barnes, 2003: 70). Barnes’ interest in understanding the production of knowledge derives at least in part from a desire to be conscious of the social power and interests that shape such knowledge. In Barnes’ (1996: 250) view, ‘from the moment we enter the academy, we are socialized into pre-existing net- works of knowledge and power that, whether we are conscious of them or not, come with various sets of interests’. Shifti- ng and changing interests are thus inex- tricably bound up with transformations in knowledge itself. Writing about the use of locational analysis in geography, for example, Barnes reflects upon ‘the dur- ation of . . . principles, that is, how long people were willing to continue using and elaborating them, to pass them on and to defend them’ (Barnes, 2003: 91). He sug- gests that the persistence of particular knowledges ‘is a social (and geographical) process, and has as much to do with local context as any inherent quality of the principles themselves’ (Barnes, 2003: 91). SPATIAL CONTRIBUTIONS One of the key contributions provided by Barnes’ examination of the histories of economic geography lies in his provision of a more nuanced story of the discipline than narrations of strict succession and progression of knowledge generally would suggest. The notion of a quantitat- ive revolution in geography itself obvious- ly implies a move beyond pre-existing theoretical perspectives – and indeed post-spatial science approaches such as Trevor Barnes 23 Marxism, feminism, locality studies and accounts of flexible production were an explicit ‘attempt to create something dif- ferent from the past’ (Barnes, 1996: 4). However, Barnes goes on to suggest that economic geography through the 1970s and 1980s remained in the grip of a strong Enlightenment ethos that sought certain- ties and foundations. Despite seeking to distance themselves from both the lan- guage and practice of spatial science, most analysts ultimately were unable to escape the legacy of the seventeenth cen- tury.
Excavating the subdisciplinary his- tories of economic geography might at first glance seem a somewhat atavistic project. However, Barnes explicitly argues that:
Barnes characterizes such emergent alter- natives as ‘post’-prefixed economic geo- graphies that reject the search for a singular order. Exemplary work includes poststructuralist feminist economic geo- graphies (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 1996); feminist work on local labour markets (Hanson and Pratt, 1995; see also Pratt 1999); and development geography in- formed by postcolonial sensibilities. Most recently, Barnes (2002b: 95) has exhorted researchers to strive for a more ‘edgy’ engagement with their topic: to ‘[attempt] to undo formerly fixed conceptual catego- ries of economic geography, and put them together again in different ways, and add new ones as well’. In the same way that he has sought to use the work of Sraffa (among others) to demonstrate the possi- bility of ‘embrac[ing] openness, context and reflexivity’, Barnes hopes that other economic geographers similarly will shun ‘closure, universals and dogmatism’ (Barnes, 1996: 251). Such a stance correspondingly informs Barnes’ own thinking about space and place. Moving beyond singular concep- tions of economic space as (for example) a surface or territory, he has sought to argue that ‘there is neither a single origin point for enquiry or a singular logic, spatial or otherwise’ (Barnes, 1996: 250; emphasis added). Elsewhere, contrasting ‘first’ and ‘new-wave’ economic theory, he has argued that the former – which leant heavily on the work of von Thu ¨nen,
Christaller and Weber – demonstrates that ‘one should not explain events or phenomena by reducing them to funda- mental entities taken as natural, or at least lying outside the social’ (Barnes, 2001c: 559). In this sense, Barnes’ (2001b, 2001d, 2002a) considerations of the performan- ces of networks of actors (including, for example, economic geographers as well as textbooks) represent attempts to work with and through anti-essentialist concep- tualizations of space and place. His work thus has contributed substantially to the reconfiguration of economic-geographical approaches in ways that seek new theor- etical understandings of space and place but which at the same time reject a ‘single route from here to there’ (Barnes, 1998: 101).
One of Barnes’ first statements about the importance of knowledge production was in an editorial for the journal Environment and Planning A (Barnes, 1993). Taking his cue from emergent debates surrounding the sociology of scientific knowledge (see
examination of the sociological construc- tion of geographical knowledge, suggesting that geographers should be more reflexive both about the form and nature of the explanations they use, as well as the Key Thinkers on Space and Place 24 Trevor Barnes 25 strategies they adopt in presenting these explanations to their audiences. Barnes’ argument prompted considerable reac- tion. For example, Bassett (1994) ex- pressed concern about the implications of increased reflexivity in research and writ- ing, arguing (contra Barnes) that certain ‘rational’ or ‘foundational’ standpoints might be necessary for the achievement of social justice. Interestingly, Barnes util- ized a multiply positioned narrative struc- ture to make his case, arguing that ‘there are many different ways to make a con- vincing argument, [but] there is no formal commonality among them’ (Barnes, 1994: 1657). Thus Barnes’ writing strategy – ‘replying’ in five different ways – was a deliberate attempt to take seriously a key tenet of the sociology of scientific knowl- edge: that the meanings of any particular ‘reality’ are ‘constructed within a wider social network of meanings’ (Barnes, 1994: 1655). Certain commentators have been scep- tical of Barnes’ approach to the history of economic geographies and of his interest in the economic landscapes created through the use of metaphor (Barnes, 1992). Scott (2000: 495), for example, is uncomfortable with Barnes’ emphasis upon the subdiscipline’s fissures and dis- locations, preferring to foreground ‘evi- dent continuities’ in economic geography. Scott (2000: 495) also is concerned that attention to the textual effects of meta- phors is ‘rather off target’ when com- pared with a need to address ‘the immensely real substantive issues and purposive human practices that have al- ways been and still are fundamentally at stake’. As is visible in his reviews of geographical work in political economy, however (see particularly Barnes, 1998), Barnes certainly does not eschew a focus on worlds of (for example) production, class divides and labour market change. Much of Barnes’ writing has sought to contest the drawing of lines around the coherent entities of ‘economy’, ‘politics’ and
‘culture’ (see especially Barnes, 2002b). He has, for example, considered the performances of ‘classic’ economic geography textbooks (via the networks through which they moved) as a means of developing ‘a cultural geography of econ- omic geography and economic geogra- phers’ (Barnes, 2002a: 15). In narrating multi-layered histories of economic ge- ography, Barnes is critical of attempts to police where different ‘types’ of geogra- phy are allowed to be and where they cannot. He acknowledges: There are critics like Harvey (2000) and Storper (2001) who argue that the focus on culture distracts too much from ‘the ‘hard world’ of production and things’ (Hall, 1988), and economic geographers would be better off if they devoted their energies to them. (Barnes, 2002b: 95) At the same time, he maintains that econ- omic geographers would do better to over- turn and rupture existing categories. For Barnes, recognition that there is no single road to truth is essential in developing critical theories. Further, he argues that we need a range of imaginative ap- proaches particularly because of the po- tential
role they
can play
in ‘reconfigur[ing] the world and our place within it’ (Barnes, 2001a: 12).
Barnes, T. J. (1996) The Logics of Dislocation: Models, Metaphors and Meanings of Economic Space. New York: Guildford. Barnes, T. J. and Duncan D. S. (eds) (1992) Writing Worlds: Texts, Discourses and Metaphors in the Interpretation of Landscape. London: Routledge. Barnes, T. J. and Gertler, M. (1999) The New Industrial Geography: Regions, Institutions and Regulation. London: Routledge.
Barnes, T. J. and Sheppard, E. (eds) (2000) A Companion to Economic Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Sheppard, E. and Barnes, T. J. (1990) The Capitalist Space Economy: Geographical Analysis after Ricardo, Marx and Sraffa. London: Unwin Hyman.
Barnes, T. J. (1989) ‘Place, space and theories of economic value: contextualism and essentialism in economic geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 14: 299–316. Barnes, T. J. (1992) ‘Reading the texts of theoretical economic geography: the role of physical and biological metaphors’, in T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (eds) Writing Worlds: Texts, Discourses and Metaphors in the Interpretation of Landscape. London, Routledge, pp. 118–135. Barnes, T. J. (1993) ‘Whatever happened to the philosophy of science?’, Environment and Planning A 25: 301–304. Barnes, T. J. (1994) ‘Five ways to leave your critic: a sociological scientific experiment in replying’, Environment and Planning A 26: 1653–1658. Barnes, T. J. (1998) ‘Political economy III: confessions of a political economist’, Progress in Human Geography 22: 94–104. Barnes, T. J. (2001a) ‘Critical notes on economic geography from an ageing radical. Or radical notes on economic geography from a critical age’, ACME: an International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (www.acme-journal.org) 1: no pagination. Barnes, T. J. (2001b) ‘Lives lived and lives told: biographies of geography’s quantitative revolution’, Environment and Planning
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