Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on archives, publications, and bibliometric data, include: 1) a (...) critical discussion of the notions concerning authorship of such methodological innovations; 2) a presentation of the lesser-known aspects of Laplace’s method, showing its contribution to the abstraction and formalisation of archaeological observations and data recording; and 3) the identification of an international Pyrenean intellectual lineage of innovation regarding stratigraphy and excavation methods, from the late 19th century to the early 21th century. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using RFID tags, was analysed in detail. The results of the study indicated that the sociotechnical imaginary of RFID tagging gravitates around the core value of perfect sociotechnical efficiency. (...) This demands a high degree of readiness to engage in standardization efforts, which performs a specific materialized understanding of ethics by other means. Furthermore, the analysis points to the importance of considering the spatiotemporal dimensions in which RFID tags work when reflecting on how this technology matters to society. Finally, the analysis shows a tacit effort to keep RFID technology and thus any questions of responsible innovation confined to the shop floor. However, given the spreading of the use of RFIDs, much wider-ranging considerations are called for. (shrink)

Despite the prodigious inventiveness of the Middle Ages, the era is often characterized as deeply suspicious of novelty. But if poets and philosophers urged caution about the new, Patricia Clare Ingham contends, their apprehension was less the result of a blind devotion to tradition than a response to radical expansions of possibility in diverse realms of art and science. Discovery and invention provoked moral questions in the Middle Ages, serving as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and opening (...) thorny questions of creativity and desire. The Medieval New concentrates on the preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Examining a range of evidence, from the writings of Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer to the letters of Christopher Columbus, and attending to histories of children's toys, the man-made marvels of romance, the utopian aims of alchemists, and the definitional precision of the scholastics, Ingham analyzes the ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. With its broad reconsideration of what the "newfangled" meant in the Middle Ages, The Medieval New offers an alternative to histories that continue to associate the medieval era with conservation rather than with novelty, its benefits and liabilities. Calling into question present-day assumptions about newness, Ingham's study demonstrates the continued relevance of humanistic inquiry in the so-called traditional disciplines of contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

Part two of an innovative trilogy on anarchist geography, this text examines how we can better understand the ways in which space has been used for resistance.

This book makes a timely and engaging contribution to geography’s resurgent interest in art and artistic practice, as well as to growing geographical concerns with embodied or pre-reflective experience. It introduces Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical and methodological work to stimulate geographical thinking and practice, and explores its disciplinary potential through innovative practice-based research into artistic spatial experience. Gendlin’s philosophy and techniques for articulating the pre-reflective are explained and illustrated using artists’ accounts of their practices, both retrospectively and during their practice. (...) The geographical implementation of research methods informed by those techniques is detailed and critiqued. Diverse and potentially contradictory findings, and potentially problematic methodological choices, are discussed, accounted for, and reframed through Gendlin’s ideas. Significant geographical potential within Gendlin’s work—philosophical, conceptual and methodological—is identified and described, and avenues and challenges for further investigation are highlighted. This first step towards a Gendlin-informed geography invites further engagement with his work. (shrink)

An innovative contribution to the literature of cultural geography, this book explores the evolution of landscape--both material and symbolic--from the standpoint of the populations, cultures, and human decision-making processes that shape and give it meaning. Focusing on evolution, behavior, symbolism, and ecology, Norton offers a critique of the literature of cultural and social geography and articulates a framework of central issues that connect a wide range of theoretical approaches. In the first four chapters, Norton gives detailed consideration to (...) both traditional and contemporary literature and methodologies and to the links between cultural geography and other social science concepts and analytical methods. The remaining chapters are concerned with the causes and consequences of cultural landscape evolution and the variables affecting it, including language, religion, politics, society, economy, and the physical environment. In addressing these areas of cultural geography, Norton promotes an approach that integrates the contributions of geography with those of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. His analysis provides a useful synthesis of the conceptual and empirical content of cultural geography and suggests promising new directions for research in the field. Norton's work will prove a valuable classroom and library resource for students and scholars in cultural and social geography and related areas of sociology and anthropology. (shrink)

This book explores an innovative set of critical narratives, accounts and engagements by different authors about their professional mobility and how that relates to the discipline and their life experiences. Human Geography and Professional Mobility seeks to encourage, influence, and help students understand geographic concepts based on critical reflections, international experiences, and practical insight laid out in stories of real people, real geographers, real college faculty, that students can relate to. This volume is less theoretical and more personal insight-based, (...) wherein first-hand and personal accounts of practical experiences are explored, which renders the text supplementary reading for human geography, population geography, world geography, and migration/mobility classes. With critical navigation of spaces in response to several geographical questions, this book offers a novel perspective on professional mobility of geographers which will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of geography, tourism, sociology and anthropology. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Gabriel Rockhill discusses his most recent book, Counter-History of the Present, in the broader context of his research to date on aesthetics, politics and history, as well as its relationship to important interlocutors like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir. He explains the similarities and important differences between genealogy and counter-history, and he elucidates how his work performs a materialist deconstruction that contests the idealist logocentrism operative in purely (...) textualist modes of interpretation. The interview also develops an account of “radical geography” that calls into question culturalist spatial imaginaries, which plague certain forms of decolonial theory that diminish or efface social stratification and class conflict. The discussion thereby contributes to the development of a new model for critical social theory with an internationalist perspective, which seeks to weave these conceptual innovations into a rigorous and radical materialism. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Gabriel Rockhill discusses his most recent book, Counter-History of the Present, in the broader context of his research to date on aesthetics, politics and history, as well as its relationship to important interlocutors like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir. He explains the similarities and important differences between genealogy and counter-history, and he elucidates how his work performs a materialist deconstruction that contests the idealist logocentrism operative in purely (...) textualist modes of interpretation. The interview also develops an account of “radical geography” that calls into question culturalist spatial imaginaries, which plague certain forms of decolonial theory that diminish or efface social stratification and class conflict. The discussion thereby contributes to the development of a new model for critical social theory with an internationalist perspective, which seeks to weave these conceptual innovations into a rigorous and radical materialism. (shrink)

The live outdoor webcam seems inseparable from the mid-1990s’ popular proliferation of the Internet. Combining a well-known medium, i.e. the photograph, with a new one, i.e. the Internet, the live outdoor webcam seems in the rear-view mirror to have contributed significantly to the popular perception of the Internet as a globally distended and thus “geographical” medium. Moreover, due to its role in the NASA Triana mission, the never-realised flagship of the Clinton–Gore administration’s Digital Earth project, the live webcam seemed to (...) play an important part in the construction of what leading geographers coined a “virtual geography”—the geography of the Internet, and the networked geography—that sought to establish itself as a new field of study during the late 1990s. In order to substantiate for this interpretation, I would like in the first part of this article to identify a number of basic characteristics of the outdoor webcam and, in the second, to analyse and discuss two papers written by leading scholars in the field; papers which have been important in the assessment of the impact of the Internet and geographical information systems (GIS) before the scientific community as well as policy makers within technological innovation and the public sector. (shrink)

The geography of contemporary bohemia is integral to Richard Florida’s thesis of the rise of a new creative class in the USA. The strong correlation between the presence of bohemians and innovative high-tech industries in a number of American cities stands in sharp contrast to the historical image of a bohemian subculture of artists and intellectuals, defined by their antagonistic relationship to bourgeois society. Rather than a sign of social marginality, bohemian life-styles have now become a marker of the (...) ‘new economy’, variously labeled the creative, the cultural or the aesthetic economy. In my paper I want to compare and contrast these two opposed images of bohemia – the 19th-century idea of bohemia as the libertarian other of liberal-bourgeois society and the new, highly topical economic geography of bohemia – with the following questions in mind: How and why does the 19th-century artistic critique of capitalism mutate into an expression of the new spirit of capitalism? Does this change from an antagonistic to an affirmative relationship signal the emergence of a new spirit of art that can be related to the new spirit of capitalism? (shrink)

This book is an innovative attempt by a leading film theorist to locate cinema--from the earliest experiments, via the work of Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles and many others, to contemporary European art cinema-- alongside philosophy, painting, geography and travel in terms of a history of modernism. The focal point of Promised Lands is a vast collection of geographical and ethnographic films and photographs made around the world, The Archives of the Planet . Based in Paris, (...) the collection was amassed by a French banker, Albert Kahn, in the 1900s, and for a time it was run by the Professor of Geography at the College de France, Jean Brunhes. The collection is, for Sam Rohdie, an astonishing instance of French modernism comparable to the philosophical work of Henri Bergson. Promised Lands weaves a narrative of speculative and analytical fragments around the rich resources of the collection. Each chapter is named for a real or imaginary place and the sum is a study that, in its interdisciplinary range and its attempt to integrate personal and cultural history, redefines modernism as a shifting geography of artforms, desires, and practices of understanding. (shrink)

ABSTRACTGeography must be conceived in relation to man. It is not merely a description of the Earth, rather it accounts for the history of man’s relationship with it, of man’s movements on its surface, and his transformative impact on the world. From this perspective, Friedrich Ratzel was extraordinarily innovative respect to other nineteenth century scholars. That said, however, his revolutionary approach actually relied on an ancient foundation. To understand the basis of Ratzel’s anthropogeographical project it is vital to return to (...) a Greek concept that, over the centuries, has been variously resemantized: the concept of the oecumene. In his understanding of the oecumene, the entire breadth of humanity is conceived in historical and geographical relation to the world around it. Ratzel’s anthropogeography aspires to an all-encompassing understanding of man. In fact, it allows us to reconstruct the coordinates of time and space through which man has developed as a being capable of culture. The Earth, according to Ratzel, transcends its eminently geophysical connotations and becomes more similar to the ancient oecumene. It is, once more, the abode of man; it is that which he knows and recognizes, that to which he gives a name. (shrink)

At present, educational discourses on innovative methodologies make up an enthusiastic panorama that is not exempt from criticism. The aim of this paper is to understand the real possibilities of success for new methodological proposals in a case study focused on the Geography and History classes of a teacher–researcher. The results obtained allow us to identify a central category of analysis, “methodological ineffectiveness”, and two subcategories, “methodological supply” and “methodological demand”. This confirms the importance of exploring the impact of (...) new methodologies based on the factors and voices specific to each educational context. (shrink)

The work of the French Lithuanian Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, describes a perceptive rethinking of the possibility of concrete acts of goodness in the world, a rethinking never more necessary than now, in the wake of the cruel realities of the twentieth century—ten million dead in the First World War, forty million dead in the Second World War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet gulags, the grand slaughter of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the pointless and gory Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide and (...) many an attempted extermination from the face of the earth of entire nations of indigenous peoples. The list of horrors goes on and on—daily holocausts that do not distinguish between the civilian and the soldier, the guilty and the innocent, those deserving of life and those less deserving. (shrink)

This book is a festschrift for Torsten Hagerstrand. "Through your work on migration, innovation diffusion, and time-geography you have helped demonstrate that geography's most profound insights are to be gained from the study of process rather than form.".

Economic geographers increasingly consider the significance of history in shaping the contemporary socio-economic landscape and believe that experiences and competencies, acquired over time by individuals and entities in particular localities, to a large degree determine present configurations as well as future regional trajectories. Attempts to trace, understand, and investigate the pathways from past to present have given rise to the thriving and exciting sub-field of Evolutionary Economic Geography. EEG highlights the important factors that initiate, inhibit, or consolidate the contextual (...) settings and relationships in which regions and their respective agents, which comprise and shape economic activity and social reproduction, change over time. It has at its core the production and destruction of novelty in space, and the links between innovation and regional economic fortunes. The creation of knowledge, its movement and recombination within different regional ensembles of economic agents and institutions plays a critical role in the evolution of the space-economy. EEG provides a framework to disentangle the complexity of technological change and regional economic development based on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. In only a short time, EEG has established itself as a promising and rapidly evolving research framework with its focus on the driving forces of regional development across various scales and its attempt to translate findings into public policy. This book advances the theoretical foundations of EEG, and demonstrates how EEG utilises and operationalises conceptual frameworks, both established and new. Contributions also point to future research avenues and extensions of EEG, attempting to build stronger ties between theory, empirical evidence, and relevance to policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Regional Studies. _. (shrink)

This paper describes three social studies teachers’ participation in an approximately 50-h, 13-month, Lesson Study-type professional development program called Beyond Words. The program centered around promoting teachers’ understanding of historical domain knowledge through experiences with innovative visual curriculum materials and sustained collaboration. This qualitative investigation answers: To what degree can Beyond Words help in-service geography teachers design and implement powerful instruction centered around historical photographs? Throughout Beyond Words the teachers demonstrated a spirit of open-mindedness and a willingness to experiment (...) with unfamiliar ideas; they planned and implemented a lesson that featured engaging historical photographs, thinking critically about the past, and making claims about a public issue. At the end of the program, however, they demonstrated conventional approaches toward social studies instruction, especially regarding curriculum and assessment. The work shared here suggests that helping teachers craft high-quality questions to anchor student-inquiry and scaffolding teachers’ sensemaking of student-outcome data should be high priorities for professional development providers. (shrink)

What is space? And why are questions of space important to social theory? Society, Action and Space is the first English translation of a book which has been widely recognized in Europe as a major contribution to the interface between geography and social theory. Benno Werlen focuses on the issues which are at the heart of the most important debates in human and social geography today. One of the most significant recent developments in social analysis has been the (...) increasing interchange among geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and social philosophers concerning "the spatial." This debate involves the work of Giddens, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lefebvre, Harvey, Gregory, Soja, and many others. From these new developments a whole series of new forms and empirical work, as well as theoretical innovations, have come into being. Spatial considerations are no longer confined to the realm of geography, but are now seen as fundamental to all forms of social theorizing, especially under conditions of late modernity and globalization. Society, Action and Space links discussions in the philosophy of social science with theories of action which have direct relevance to concepts of space. Benno Werlen provides a discussion of Popper's critical rationalism, and connects it to ideas drawn from phenomenology. This epistemological debate is linked with the sociological action theories of Pareto, Weber, Parsons, and Schutz. The book closes with an evaluation of how "the spatial" can be systematically integrated into action theory. Ambitious, original, and persuasive in its arguments, it raises exciting new implications for the study of space and social theory. (shrink)

Universities are increasingly part of wider geographical processes including international, national and sub-national actors. Universities now find themselves having to pay attention to many more political centres than before, as seen, for example, with research grants, assessments and teaching accreditation from transnational bodies, individual states and regional authorities. As an institution, the university constitutes a place which needs to be situated within a wider space and the geography of power-relations. This article traces these spatial developments in relation to recent (...) policy changes in the Japanese context. The current university reforms, set against the development of the globalising knowledge-based economy and regionalization of innovation policies, are examined in relation to the changing role of universities in multi-spacial innovation systems. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to put Ricœur’s philosophy in dialogue with human geography. There are at least two good reasons to do so. The first concerns the epistemological foundation of geography: Whereas humanistic or phenomenological geographers inspired by Heidegger or, to a lesser extent, by Merleau-Ponty have sometimes taken on an anti-scientific approach, the Ricœurian articulation of understanding and explanation may contribute to building a bridge between the experiential side of place-meanings and the scientific explanations of (...) spatial elements and their relationships. The second reason has to do with the application of the Ricœurian “model of the text” to landscape: It is a direction that Ricœur never explicitly took, but it is worth exploring, especially considering that “landscape as a text” was quite a popular metaphor among human geographers in the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper I will discuss both issues in order to outline a “Ricœurian path to geography,” which, while never explicitly developed by the philosopher, may represent an innovative and fruitful actualization of his thought. (shrink)

Alexander von Humboldt’s depictions of mountain vegetation are among the most iconic nineteenth century illustrations in the biological sciences. Here we analyse the contemporary context and empirical data for all these depictions, namely the _Tableau physique des Andes_ (1803, 1807), the _Geographiae plantarum lineamenta_ (1815), the _Tableau physique des Îles Canaries_ (1817), and the _Esquisse de la Géographie des plantes dans les Andes de Quito_ (1824/1825). We show that the Tableau physique des Andes does not reflect Humboldt and Bonpland’s field (...) data and presents a flawed depiction of plant occurrences and vertical succession of vegetation belts, arising from Humboldt’s misreading of La Condamine’s description (1751). Humboldt's 1815 depiction, by contrast, shows a distribution of high-vegetation belts that is consistent with La Condamine’s description, while the 1824 depiction drops innovations made in 1815 and returns to simply showing numerous species’ names, thus not applying Humboldt’s own earlier zonation framework. Our analysis of contemporary reactions to Humboldt’s TPA includes Francis Hall’s posthumously published 1834 illustration of Andean plant zonation near Quito and Humboldt’s reaction to Hall’s critique. Throughout his work on plant geography, Humboldt disregarded some of his own observations, or confused them. At stake was his reputation as an innovator in the field of plant geography and a discoverer of the sequence of high-elevation vegetation belts on the world’s mountains. (shrink)

The distinction between taxonomic plant geography and ecological plant geography was never absolute: it would be historically inaccurate to portray them as totally divergent. Taxonomists occasionally borrowed ecological concepts, and ecologists never completely repudiated taxonomy. Indeed, some botanists pursued the two types of geographic study. The American taxonomist Henry Allan Gleason (1882–1975), for one, made noteworthy contributions to both. Most of Gleason's research appeared in short articles, however. He never published a major synthetic work comparable in scope or (...) influence to the ecological texts of Clements, Schimper, and Warming.Despite exceptions such as Gleason, most plant geographers throughout the twentieth century have emphasized the distinction between ecological and taxonomic plant geographies. Why have these distinct traditions developed? In his book Geographical Ecology, Robert MacArthur has suggested a psychological explanation for the dichotomy: “Unraveling the history of a phenemenon has always appealed to some people and describing the machinery of the phenomenon to others... The ecologist and physical scientist tend to be machinery oriented, whereas paleontologists and most biogeographers tend to be history oriented.”46Without necessarily rejecting MacArthur's explanation, my study suggests a more complex relationship between taxonomic and ecological plant geographies. At the turn of the century a group of botanists self-consciously defined a new area of botanical research. These ecologists defined their new discipline in opposition to what they believed was a moribund, nineteenth-century, natural-history tradition. They turned from historically oriented, descriptive, taxonomic plant geography to experimental physiology. The new ecological plant geography was to focus on communities rather than on species, on proximate environmental causes rather than on historical explanations, and on physiological experiments rather than on morphological descriptions.As we look back, much of the “revolt from morphology” was rhetorical. Ecologists never completely replaced species as units of distribution, nor did they set geography on an explicitly physiological basis. Indeed, much of early ecological research was, quite simply, descriptive. Plant communities were defined in terms of dominant species, representative life forms, or general physiognomy. The underlying physiological basis for community characteristics was more often assumed than demonstrated by experiments.Despite the fact that ecological plant geography was not a truly physiological specialty, it was significantly different from more traditional taxonomic plant geography. First, ecologists were less explicitly evolutionary in their approach than were taxonomists. Following Darwin, most taxonomic plant geographers viewed distribution in historical terms. In contrast, early ecologists tended to ignore the traditional geographic problems. Most ecologists were skeptical of historical explanations, emphasizing instead the proximate, environmental causes of distribution. While some nineteenth-century biogeographers had studied the correlation between climate and vegetation, twentieth-century ecologists focused much more sharply on the interactions between plant and environment. Plant ecologists did not place biogeography on a physiological basis, but by emphasizing physiology they laid the foundation for a more detailed understanding of adaption. This emphasis on physiology and environmental causation was a second distinguishing characteristic of ecological plant geography. Finally, the idea of the plant community, articulated by Eugenius Warming in 1895, provided ecologists with a unique perspective on the distribution of plants. For early ecologists, the community was more than an assemblage of species; it was an integrated unit. The distribution of these units became the major focus of ecological plant geography. Communities never completely replaced species as geographic units, and the distinction between flora and vegetation was often blurred. Nonetheless, ecologists were innovative in studying the distribution of structurally and functionally integrated groups of plants.In the twentieth century plant geography has occupied an anomalous position in biology. It has not developed into an autonomous discipline, nor has it been incorporated into the developing discipline of ecology. Ecologists and taxonomists have pursued fairly distinct styles of geographic research, with the result that two relatively independent approaches to the study of plant distribution have persisted. (shrink)

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

_ _From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, _The Memory of Place___ __charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world._ Dylan Trigg’s _The Memory of Place_ _ __offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field (...) at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, _The Memory of Place___ __argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls _The Memory of Place _“genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”. (shrink)

This paper adopts a relational, also known as a topological, approach to food accessibility—the idea that food spaces are best understood as relational becomings rather than as voids filled exclusively with mass and address. It is animated by an experimental spirit, in terms of the methods employed, the data collected, and by how those data are brought together, which together better enriches inductive theorizing. The project looks at the daily macro-mobilities—trips from one GPS coordinate to another—of 70 Coloradoans, triangulated with (...) qualitative semi-structured interview data. Data collection occurred over three phases: baseline interviews, which lasted approximately 45 min; 30-day study period, which involved using a GPS tracking app. on their mobile phones; and follow-up interviews that lasted roughly two hours. The paper, through inductive theorizing and methodological experimentation, contributes to the critical food mapping scholarship in three ways: first, by looking at rural and urban food environments and livelihoods ; second, by focusing on mobilities as opposed to fixities ; and, lastly, by its conceptual innovations attributed to phenomena such as life course and geographies of care. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe purpose of this essay is revisionist on two counts: first, that the American colonies and early United States republic kept pace with Great Britain in reaching a relatively advanced stage of industrialization by the early nineteenth century and second, that the Middle Atlantic States shared equally with New England the innovative role in creating America's industrial revolution. In both cases the industrial leaders achieved their preeminence by different routes. By concentrating on the importance of the sources of machine (...) power as the defining characteristic of industrialism, scholars have overlooked alternative paths to industrial change. In Britain steam power and the textile industry were the foundations of an industrial revolution. But in American colonies the use of water power and the growth of industries such as woodworking and building led to an equally revolutionary change in the production of machine-made products. Benign geography in colonial America provided abundant wood and water power and an excellent transportation system based on navigable rivers and a hospitable coastline. But the crucial factors were cultural: the compelling urge to do things with less human work, the open reception to new immigration, a younger and more venturesome population, a favorable legal and fiscal environment for enterpreneurs. In the American context the tendency of scholars to emphasize the leadership of New England was largely a result of the greater local availability of manufacturing records. But recent research has demonstrated that Philadelphia, the largest port of entry in the eighteenth century, was quite naturally a center of innovation in construction materials, woodworking machinery and shipbuilding to meet the needs of the expanding agricultural hinterland and the coastal trade. In sum, the values of an expanding, youthful, skilled population replenished by fresh and venturesome sources from abroad helped shape cultural values that were particularly favorable in the geographic environment of North America for alternative paths of rapid industrial growth. (shrink)

Chemical embryology was born in 1931 with the publication of Chemical Embryology by Joseph Needham. In the following two decades it became an innovative research project aiming at the description of the construction of the embryological structure and differentiation in biochemical terms. This research programme produced a vast amount of experimental evidence and theories on the chemical dynamics of the embryo: particularly chemical characterization of the zygote and the developing embryo, the chemical exchanges between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, the (...) significance of subcellular structures, and the role and distribution of nucleic acids within the cell. From the 1950s on, a large part of these results came to be integrated into the empirical basis of molecular biology. However, the shift from chemical embryology to molecular embryology was not just a semantic shift but a deep theoretical change, produced by the introduction of a new model of scientific explanation, based on the transmission and expression of genetic information and opposed to the biochemical definition of life. (shrink)

This book gives insight into the ongoing work of the forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology (fPET), which brings together philosophers and engineers from all over the world to discuss philosophical issues of engineering across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on presentations and conversations at the fPET 2020 online conference hosted by the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Chile, the chapters establish connections and describe discoveries that have so far been neglected in the discussions held within the young discipline of philosophy (...) of engineering. This volume appeals to students and researchers in the field, through twenty-four proposals brought forward by leading scholars and emerging voices. Pertinent themes covered are: the broader engagement of engineers in problem-solving beyond the scope of their own profession the exploration of new goals for technology development and the implementation of strategies to reach these goals the need for philosophical content and unique pedagogical approaches to engineering education, digital transformations, artificial intelligence and the ethics of online collaboration in social media critical revisions of fundamental terminology and theoretical modelling of key concepts in engineering design, ethics, innovation and the anthropology of technology. (shrink)

Orthodox ethic is inconsistent with liberal values and the spirit of capitalism. This incompatibility sets limits on the rates of economic growth in Orthodox countries and determines their backlog from the most developed Protestant and Catholic countries at the present stage. In this paper is examined the hypothesis of the decisive role of geography and some random events in the adoption of Orthodox Russia and the formation of specific characteristics of Russian mentality, in particular, the messianic spirit. The adoption (...) of Orthodoxy by Rus is viewed in accordance with concept of Akhiezer and his co-authors as a partial borrowing of foreign culture for further development of its own culture. From this point of view such borrowing was not sufficient. Unlike Germanic tribes Rus did not succeed in adoption enough to start a new period of cultural self-development. The Baptizing was a large-scale intentional action for modernization of Rus life-style through intensifying with a help of cultural borrowing. But this potential was not enough for genesis of innovations that required for further intensive development. Thus the Baptizing can be viewed as a step on the way of extensive development. In the future Russia would use same practice of adopting ‘modern, more advanced cultural resources and reproducing on their basis the same extensive paradigm‘ (Akhiezer A., Kliamkin I, Yakovenko I. History of Russia. The End or New Beginning? M., 2005). The Baptizing can be considered not only as some kind of start for Russian history but also as a choice of development pattern. This pattern would persist even in 20th century in the period when Christianity and Orthodox church would be discarded. (shrink)

The science of Kalâm, expressed as Uṣûlü'd-dîn in Islamic thought, is a constructional science. This means that the science of Kalâm has a dynamic structure in social life as well as a theoretical beginning. Kalâm has played an important role in the implementation of the idea of tawhid and the justice-based life that will accompany it by taking into account the historical and geographical heritage of Muslim communities on how to understand the hopes of religion. It is known that the (...) political and social events that took place in Muslim society also took place in the history of Islamic thought as a theological sect in the later historical process. Muslims, part of a geography that has historically been the source of ancient cultures and thoughts, tried to protect the basic hopes of the religion they belonged to while also responding to the accusations of members of different faiths against Islam. Like other Islamic sciences, the science of Kalâm was formed later as a discipline. Depending on the method followed in understanding religious thought, theological sects were formed. Two basic approaches are dominant in the historical process and the general practice of the Muslim society. There is a rational trend that tends to use ta'wil to understand the verse based on nass and those qualified as Ahl-i hadith that do not accept ta'wil except for narration. The supporters of this method will later be described as Mu'tazila. There are dozens of theological sects shaped around these two basic ideas. This historical use of kalâm is rife with contradictions. They take a serious attitude towards those who use the kalâm method of the Ahl-i hadith. Although this is the case, the science of Kalâm as a discipline has played a very fundamental role in the Muslim society from the very beginning to the present. Unfortunately, the constructive function of the Science of Kalâm historically has not been continuous. As in other Islamic sciences, the Science of Kalâm became after a certain time a form of repetition or interpretation of what was written in the past, with commentaries and annotations instead of original copyright works. This naturally caused the Muslim community to imitate the past in every aspect of life and thus not be able to build a future. Muslim scholars have tried to address this over time and across geographies. A part of this early effort was the necessity of reinterpreting Islamic sciences. In the modern period (19th-20th century), a search for innovation has been made in all Islamic sciences. The main purpose of these efforts was the re-evaluation of Islamic sciences in accordance with the conditions of the age. One of those who was a part of this important and meaningful struggle is Fazlur Rahman (d.1988). He criticizes the science of Kalâm as well as other Islamic sciences and make suggestions to make Kalâm gain a dynamic structure. While Fazlur Rahman's criticism of Kalâm is included, the early period criticism of Kalâm will also be briefly mentioned in order to provide a better understanding of the subject. A comparison will be made between the thoughts of those who criticized Kalâm in the early period and those of Fazlur Rahman in the modern period. While there is an opposition to Kalâm in the form of the rejection of the science of Kalâm as a discipline, especially in the thought of Ahl al-Hadith, the science of Kalâm was considered as a constructional science in Fazlur Rahman. In addition to arguing that the Science of Kalâm should be reorganized as a discipline in terms of the method and content, Fazlur Rahman emphasizes the necessity of considering the past as an experience that must be understood according to the conditions of the day. For Fazlur Rahman, one of the reasons made Muslim thought inert is because the discipline of Kalâm does not consider present social life. In the 20th century, with modernism, theological debates gained a new dimension, and developments in all areas of social life gave birth to a brand new culture very different from the past. As a result of this, new value judgments have been formed to revisit and criticize the culture and values of the past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie JacksonAvram AlpertThe African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 232 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.The world of postcolonial literary studies harbors a well-earned suspicion of claims to promoting liberal ideals like civility, rationality, and individuality. The liberal worldview, after all, arose in (...) the same era as European colonial expansion. To many critics, this was not a coincidence: liberal ideals were often crafted in opposition to the peoples that Europeans were encountering around the world. Whereas these other peoples were supposedly bound to collective myths, unaware of the primacy of the individual, and condemned to violent passions, liberals claimed that Europeans used rationality to perceive the value of individual life, and, in so doing, had unlocked the key to promoting civilizational harmony. All that everyone else had to do to experience this new way of life was, in one of history's most wretched paradoxes, to succumb to colonial violence and join the empire of liberty. It is thus quite logical that anticolonial criticism would call into question the basic features of the liberal worldview.But in recent years, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars—including Sankar Muthu in political science, Sanjay Subrahmanyam in history, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam in literary studies, and Ato Sekyi-Otu in philosophy—have come to question this consensus.1 Their challenge rests on an ironic problem of the critique of ideologies associated with colonialism: by criticizing topics like civility, rationality, and individuality as such, do we not play into the very Eurocentric idea that these ideas were invented by Europeans in the first place? As these scholars have shown across various disciplines, geographies, and time periods, this critique risks giving modern Europe too much credit. Ideals often associated with liberalism have antecedents around the world. Sometimes they are used to advance general equality and well-being; sometimes they subvert these ideals. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues in her trenchant new book intervening in these debates, The African Novel of Ideas, we thus need a criticism that is as much attuned to the critique of "false universalisms" as it is open to "the promise of one that is true" (p. 189).Throughout her book, Jackson argues that a reconstructed liberalism is not only fundamental to literature from Africa but that the critical neglect of this fact has distorted the general understanding of literature today. Critics—especially but not exclusively in the West—have become so accustomed to sniffing out hints of liberal, individualist ideology that they routinely cast aside the ways in which African philosophers and novelists have themselves sought to explore and transform these ideals. Jackson's argument is not that liberalism, as it stands, is a noble philosophy that has been unfairly jettisoned. Rather, she posits that African writers are developing a fundamental innovation by considering how they—who were so long exploited by European ideals—can nonetheless find [End Page 495] meaning in both alternative and emergent versions of these very same ideals. What their work emphasizes is the "process of getting from an African locality to its universal resonance" (p. 185). In other words, whereas Europeans had simply presumed that their view of the world should apply everywhere, the contemporary novelists and philosophers discussed in this book engage in thorough intellectual and conceptual labor to tease out how ideas generated in one place might speak (without force) to peoples around the world.Jackson advances this argument through an innovative mix of philosophy and literature. Rather than evoking the standard series of French philosophers summoned to explicate literature, Jackson frames her readings through the work of philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Emmanuel Eze. This allows her to shift the focus of her readings of literature from questions of language and close reading to underanalyzed topics in philosophy and literature, especially about how African literature enacts philosophical questions. She discusses topics ranging from the nature of the self and the meaning of rationality to a meta-interrogation on the purpose of philosophizing itself (pp. 16–17). That purpose... (shrink)

This innovative publication maps out the broad and interdisciplinary field of contemporary European social theory. It covers sociological theory, the wider theoretical traditions in the social sciences including cultural and political theory, anthropological theory, social philosophy and social thought in the broadest sense of the term. The volume surveys the classical heritage, the major national traditions; the fate of social theory in a post-national and post-disciplinary era; identifies what is distinctive about European social theory. It is divided into five parts: (...) disciplinary traditions, national traditions, major schools, key themes, and the reception of European social theory in American and Asia. It is an indispensable book for students, teachers and researchers in sociology, cultural studies, politics, philosophy and human geography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie JacksonAvram AlpertThe African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 232 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.The world of postcolonial literary studies harbors a well-earned suspicion of claims to promoting liberal ideals like civility, rationality, and individuality. The liberal worldview, after all, arose in (...) the same era as European colonial expansion. To many critics, this was not a coincidence: liberal ideals were often crafted in opposition to the peoples that Europeans were encountering around the world. Whereas these other peoples were supposedly bound to collective myths, unaware of the primacy of the individual, and condemned to violent passions, liberals claimed that Europeans used rationality to perceive the value of individual life, and, in so doing, had unlocked the key to promoting civilizational harmony. All that everyone else had to do to experience this new way of life was, in one of history's most wretched paradoxes, to succumb to colonial violence and join the empire of liberty. It is thus quite logical that anticolonial criticism would call into question the basic features of the liberal worldview.But in recent years, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars—including Sankar Muthu in political science, Sanjay Subrahmanyam in history, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam in literary studies, and Ato Sekyi-Otu in philosophy—have come to question this consensus.1 Their challenge rests on an ironic problem of the critique of ideologies associated with colonialism: by criticizing topics like civility, rationality, and individuality as such, do we not play into the very Eurocentric idea that these ideas were invented by Europeans in the first place? As these scholars have shown across various disciplines, geographies, and time periods, this critique risks giving modern Europe too much credit. Ideals often associated with liberalism have antecedents around the world. Sometimes they are used to advance general equality and well-being; sometimes they subvert these ideals. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues in her trenchant new book intervening in these debates, The African Novel of Ideas, we thus need a criticism that is as much attuned to the critique of "false universalisms" as it is open to "the promise of one that is true" (p. 189).Throughout her book, Jackson argues that a reconstructed liberalism is not only fundamental to literature from Africa but that the critical neglect of this fact has distorted the general understanding of literature today. Critics—especially but not exclusively in the West—have become so accustomed to sniffing out hints of liberal, individualist ideology that they routinely cast aside the ways in which African philosophers and novelists have themselves sought to explore and transform these ideals. Jackson's argument is not that liberalism, as it stands, is a noble philosophy that has been unfairly jettisoned. Rather, she posits that African writers are developing a fundamental innovation by considering how they—who were so long exploited by European ideals—can nonetheless find [End Page 495] meaning in both alternative and emergent versions of these very same ideals. What their work emphasizes is the "process of getting from an African locality to its universal resonance" (p. 185). In other words, whereas Europeans had simply presumed that their view of the world should apply everywhere, the contemporary novelists and philosophers discussed in this book engage in thorough intellectual and conceptual labor to tease out how ideas generated in one place might speak (without force) to peoples around the world.Jackson advances this argument through an innovative mix of philosophy and literature. Rather than evoking the standard series of French philosophers summoned to explicate literature, Jackson frames her readings through the work of philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Emmanuel Eze. This allows her to shift the focus of her readings of literature from questions of language and close reading to underanalyzed topics in philosophy and literature, especially about how African literature enacts philosophical questions. She discusses topics ranging from the nature of the self and the meaning of rationality to a meta-interrogation on the purpose of philosophizing itself (pp. 16–17). That purpose... (shrink)

Constructing an all-directional, multilevel, and composite interconnection network, accelerating the free flow of producer services elements across regions, and further improving the efficiency of resource integration demand to conduct a comprehensive and systematic analysis of producer services trade. Thus, using bilateral trade data, this paper builds producer services trade network composed of 61 major countries and innovatively combines the methods of social network and economic geography to explore its spatiotemporal evolution and system properties. The results show that, firstly, the (...) producer services trade network has spatial heterogeneity, which is characterized by high-value agglomerations in Western Europe and East Asia, and low-value agglomerations in Southern Europe and Southeast Asia. Secondly, most countries tend to choose trading partners with close geographical locations or common cultures to establish a cohesive subgroup. Thirdly, the producer services trade network has a significant core-periphery structure, the “spaghetti bowl” effect, which leads to a downward trend in the number of core and semi-peripheral countries. Finally, the trade agreement relations, language relations, and differences in economy, geography, institution, and technology all have a significant impact on the evolution of producer services trade network, but this change has little relationship with the population size divergences of different countries. (shrink)

This article offers a discussion on the opportunity of collaborative, multi-actor (public, private, science, social, and civic actors) partnerships as experimental policymaking and governance solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation plans geographically localized at the urban, metropolitan, and regional level. It sets out considerations as regards the need to design newly conceived permanent or temporary institutional geographies by building on the analysis of examples of policies implementing this kind of partnerships in Italy (e.g., river contracts; river foundations; neighborhood agreements; pacts (...) of collaboration; city science offices; urban sustainable development and innovation partnerships, etc.). Finally, the article draws attention to the challenges entailed by these partnerships including ethics, accountability, and climate justice concerns. (shrink)

Elite U.S.-based global law firms concentrate in the costliest districts of superstar cities, especially two neighborhoods in Manhattan. This pattern has persisted despite both the dispersal of Biglaw clients across less-dense, lower-cost U.S. geographies and the development of telework capacity. It suggests a puzzle: law is among the occupations most conducive to remote work, yet Biglaw prior to the coronavirus pandemic required in-person work in the priciest places—meaning it paid a premium on both of its biggest expenses, wages and real (...) estate. How might this equilibrium be explained, and what might lead it to change? This Article contends that Biglaw clustering reflects a management preference for the exploitation of proven strategies over the exploration of novel and uncertain ones—but that the pandemic telework experience is eroding this dichotomy. This analysis has direct implications for private international law practice, where large-scale transactions and disputes are handled by Biglaw firms and involve significant international travel. This Article contributes to a growing literature on telework’s impacts on cities, labor markets, and industries, and is the first to extend that focus to Biglaw and PIL. A post-pandemic Biglaw embrace of dispersal via telework would destabilize standard accounts of collaboration in agglomeration economies. While the Article expresses skepticism about that outcome, it identifies a mechanism by which it might plausibly come about. Crucially, this mechanism—the replacement of an exploit vs. explore choice with two different exploit options—posits as the key driver not technology but management learning and innovation that quickened during the pandemic. (shrink)

This book moves beyond seeing the commons in the past tense, an entity passed over from the public into the private, to reimagine the commons as a process, a contest of force, a reconstitution, and a site of convening practices. It highlights new spaces of gathering opening up, such as the digital commons, and new practices of being in common, such as community economies and solidarity networks. The commons is seen as a contested domain of the collective and as a (...) changing way of being in common, with the balance poised in the tensile play between political economy and social innovation. The book focuses on the possibility of recovering a future in which more can be held by the many, focusing on three concepts: nation and nature as a commons, publics and rights, and bodies, concerning the management of lives and livelihoods. Across these three passage points, the book finds evidence of a commons under attack but also defended in fragile though promising ways. With contributions from leading scholars, this thought provoking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in geography, environmental studies, politics, anthropology, and cultural studies. (shrink)

This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of ‘audit culture’, the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monetised university might once more be challenged. The risk of importing the metrics and audit culture (...) of Britain, and the neoliberal managerialist administration-led university of North America, wholesale into Asian universities is questioned by acknowledgment that exiting hierarchies are persistent, and competing on Euro-American terms is a recipe for disaster. Due recognition is curtailed, hard work and standards are ignored, prospects for junior staff are constrained to a kind of intellectual and social penury. Resources based on research skills more robust than the current axiomatic research assessment calculus are suggested from within the university. The solution is not to emulate a declining system, but to innovate and invent new horizons and terms of engagement. The proposals offered here are only a suggestion for reflexive inquiry and informed self-examination—criticism-self-criticism from co-research sociology, ethnographic film and urban geography, among others—offered as alternate concurrent paths to accountability. (shrink)

The idea that research should become more interdisciplinary has become commonplace. According to influential commentators, the unprecedented complexity of problems such as climate change or the social implications of biomedicine demand interdisciplinary efforts integrating both the social and natural sciences. In this context, the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue for governments, research policy makers and funding agencies. Interdisciplinarity, in short, has emerged as a key political (...) preoccupation; yet the term tends to obscure as much as illuminate the diverse practices gathered under its rubric. This volume offers a new approach to theorising interdisciplinarity, showing how the boundaries between the social and natural sciences are being reconfigured. It examines the current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity, notably the ascendance of a particular discourse in which it is associated with a transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. Contributors address attempts to promote collaboration between, on the one hand, the natural sciences and engineering and, on the other, the social sciences, arts and humanities. From ethnography in the IT industry to science and technology studies, environmental science to medical humanities, cybernetics to art-science, the collection interrogates how interdisciplinarity has come to be seen as a solution not only to enhancing relations between science and society, but the pursuit of accountability and the need to foster innovation. Interdisciplinarity is essential reading for scholars, students and policy makers across the social sciences, arts and humanities, including anthropology, geography, sociology, science and technology studies and cultural studies, as well as all those engaged in interdisciplinary research. It will have particular relevance for those concerned with the knowledge economy, science policy, environmental politics, applied anthropology, ELSI research, medical humanities, and art-science. (shrink)

This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of ‘audit culture’, the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monetised university might once more be challenged. The risk of importing the metrics and audit culture (...) of Britain, and the neoliberal managerialist administration-led university of North America, wholesale into Asian universities is questioned by acknowledgment that exiting hierarchies are persistent, and competing on Euro-American terms is a recipe for disaster. Due recognition is curtailed, hard work and standards are ignored, prospects for junior staff are constrained to a kind of intellectual and social penury. Resources based on research skills more robust than the current axiomatic research assessment calculus are suggested from within the university. The solution is not to emulate a declining system, but to innovate and invent new horizons and terms of engagement. The proposals offered here are only a suggestion for reflexive inquiry and informed self-examination—criticism-self-criticism from co-research sociology, ethnographic film and urban geography, among others—offered as alternate concurrent paths to accountability. (shrink)

In the early exploration and colonization of the Americas, Europeans encountered unfamiliar climates that challenged received ideas from classical geography. This experience drove innovative efforts to understand and explain patterns of weather and seasons in the New World. A close examination of three climatic puzzles (the habitability of the tropics, debates on the likelihood of a Northwest Passage, and the unexpectedly harsh weather in the first North American colonies) illustrates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century observers made three intellectual breakthroughs: conceiving (...) of climates as a distinct subject of inquiry, crossing the hitherto-separated disciplines of geography and meteorology, and developing new theories regarding the influence of prevailing winds on patterns of weather and seasons. While unquantified and unsystematic, these novel approaches promoted a new understanding of climates critical to the emergence of climate science. This study offers new insights into the foundations of climatology and the role of the New World in early modern science. (shrink)

Space Gender Knowledge is an innovative and comprehensive introduction to the geographies of gender and the gendered nature of spatial relations. It examines the major issues raised by women's movements and academic feminism, and outlines the main shifts in feminist geographical work, from the geography of women to the impact of post-structuralism. In making their selection, the editors have drawn on a wide range of interdisciplinary material, ranging across spatial scales from the body to the globe. The book presents (...) influential arguments for the importance of the intersection between space and gender. Looking both at geography and beyond the discipline, it explores the gendered construction of space and the spatial construction of gender. Divided into a number of conceptual sections, each prefaced by an editorial introduction, this reader includes extracts from both landmark texts and less well-known works, making it an indispensable introduction to this dynamic field of study. (shrink)

The Geography of Morals is a work of extraordinary ambition: an indictment of the parochialism of Western philosophy, a comprehensive dialogue between cultural and psychological anthropology, recent work in empirical moral psychology, behavioral economics, and cross-cultural philosophy.

This paper examines the social and organizational innovation processes undertaken by small-scale producers engaged in short food supply chains in the North Swedish region of Västerbotten. The study uses the notion of proximity to empirically analyse and conceptually explore these phenomena. The paper illustrates the ‘new associationalism’ mobilized by producers in order to promote knowledge exchange and learning and highlights the role of translocal practices in sustaining this transition. The study found that open and trusted interactions with consumers are (...) central to the development of ‘quasi-organic’ practices, and that producers belong to numerous motley associations of food professionals facilitating the creation of collective meanings about near-produced quality food. The paper contributes to the rapprochement between agri-food studies and human geography to understand the formation of local food systems from an evolutionary and relational perspective. (shrink)

In Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace, Jean-François Drolet provides a synoptic interpretation of Nietzsche's reflections on politics and international relations in the context of the late nineteenth century. Revolving around questions concerning conflict and political violence, the study examines the symbiotic relationship between Nietzsche's critique of Western metaphysics and his analyses of the political processes, institutions and dominant ideologies shaping public life in Germany and Europe during the 1870s and 1880s. This includes the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany (...) under Bismarck, the advent of mass democracy and the rise and transformation of European nationalism. In the German-speaking world, these developments were also central to the emergence of what would come to be known as "Geopolitik" (geopolitics)--a distinct set of intellectual and political initiatives driven by growing anxieties over the more permanent aspects of German political geography and the destabilizing consequences of techno-scientific innovations for world order. Drolet exposes and analyses Nietzsche's account of these developments against the backdrop of Nietzsche's engagement with Kantian thought and "European nihilism"--an all-consuming crisis of meaning triggered by the dissolution of the structuring ideals which had connected the exercise of power with purpose and determined questions of human co-existence under Christianity. Through this reconstructive exegesis, he shows that Nietzsche's philosophy channels a powerful and still greatly under-appreciated account of the changing political processes and agencies that culminated in the momentous collapse of the European society of states during the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

An eminent psychologist boldly takes on the presumptions of evolutionary psychology in an engaging exploration of the divergent ways Eastern and Western societies see and understand the world.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction:Beyond Nature/Culture Dualism: Let's Try Co-Evolution Instead of "Control"Ronnie Hawkins (bio)In the original call for papers for this special issue, nature/culture dualism was characterized as a way of thinking that holds human culture and nonhuman nature to be radically different ontological spheres, hyperseparated and oppositional, or, as Val Plumwood maintains in her essay, an orientation that assumes "separate casts of characters in separate dramas." In the human sphere, individuals (...) are unique and their lives are precious (at least theoretically), with concerns understood "from the inside," in terms of experience, intention and agency. In the sphere of nature, on the other hand, nonhuman beings are seen "from the outside," at best as replaceable members of species or populations needed for ecosystem functioning and, at worst, as unagentive, thinglike objects open for unbridled human exploitation. With our vast information and communication systems now largely in place, however, our human "noösphere" is rapidly enlarging to place us firmly within the biosphere (which, of course, in the imagery of Venn diagrams, must make up the larger circle on the screen), illuminating "both casts in both dramas," or perhaps joining all actors on the stage in a many-act, multidimensional play, the denoument of which, whether or not the extant lifeforms on this [End Page 1] planet will continue to evolve, remains as yet unwritten. The five essays in this collection speak to these points, and together they develop an alternative vision to our present dualistic impasse, seeing multiple natural agencies engaged with humanity in ongoing co-evolution and, as Freya Mathews suggests, raising the hope for a synergistic restructuring of lifeways that may yet save us from anthropogenic catastrophe.In "The Culture of Nature As Seen Through Mississippian Geographies," Jeff Baldwin shows us the broad scope of interacting agents, human and nonhuman, biological and geological, in what he terms "the nature-culture of the Mississippi River," as highlighted by the recent devastation of human habitation along the Gulf Coast of the United States wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. By enacting a role in which we "believe [our]selves to rule over a mechanistic world," we humans have, over the last century or so, stemmed the natural flooding of the Mississippi, rerouting the sediments that maintained and extended the delta, funneling them into the sea and thereby bringing about the subsidence and erosion of hundreds of square miles of coastal land. Concomitantly, we have let agricultural runoff from the huge Mississippi drainage basin eject excess nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico, stimulating algal blooms and die-offs, depleting the water of oxygen so as to create a hypoxic "dead zone" that is now the size of Massachusetts, and (though Baldwin does not discuss this aspect of the problem) we have released enough petrochemical pollution in the area to have earned the lower reaches of the River the name "Cancer Alley" decades ago. A failure to grasp the import of these large anthropogenic effects is, sadly, evident in calls for rebuilding the New Orleans area according to the same mechanistic model that has already proven so inadequate. Baldwin observes that the earth changes wrought through human cultural innovation often occur so rapidly, or have their negative feedbacks technologically so displaced through time and space, that their eventual impacts on the larger system may initially go unappreciated. His vision of "the culture of nature," however, is ultimately an optimistic one, since his functional understanding of culture is that it ultimately works toward mutualism, promoting increasingly appropriate relationships among all interacting components, and he finds evidence of a growing effort to establish an "intentional co-evolution," a conscious alignment of human projects with the ongoing projects of a living nature that encompasses them. [End Page 2]If Baldwin's essay helps us see our human activities "from the outside"—not just "from within" prevailing human culture, where they seem taken-for-granted necessities given a certain form of social construction, but as they alternatively appear inside biospherical space, often as inappropriate, exploitative interferences and intrusions—Stacey Sowards' essay, "Identification Through Orangutans: Destabilizing the Nature/Culture Dualism," explores the potential for our connecting with nonhuman life "from the inside," relating... (shrink)

Geographies of Exclusion identifies forms of social and spatial exclusion and subsequently examines the fate of knowledge of space and society which has been produced by members of excluded groups. Evaluating writing on urban society by women and black writers, David Sibley asks why such work is neglected by the academic establishment, suggesting that both the practices which result in the exclusion of minorities and those which result in the exclusion of knowledge have important implications for theory and method in (...) human geography. Drawing on a range of ideas from social anthropology, feminist theory, sociology, human geography and psychoanalysis, this book presents a fresh approach to geographical theory, highlighting the tendency of powerful groups to "purify" space and to view minorites as defiled and polluting, and exploring the nature of "difference" and the production of knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust AmericaKeith P. Feldman (bio)Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. 662 pp.Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America provides a wide-ranging, rich, and nuanced cultural history of what Eric J. Sundquist terms the "black-Jewish question" (2). In doing so, the book serves as both culmination and corrective to an already-expansive scholarly (...) literature on blacks and Jews generated since the late 1960s. Much of this scholarship has operated within a U.S.-centered paradigm to chart interethnic relations, laboring as it does to unpack, complicate, theorize, and otherwise come to understand the changing texture of black-Jewish relations and, in Sundquist's wods, its "intermixture of empathy, anxiety, and Hostility' (3)." Strangers in the Land stretches this paradigm to its limit, even as the diasporic imaginaries treated therein persistently escape a U.S. national imaginary and signal other possibilities for conceptualizing this tense and tender history.In its five hundred–plus pages of text, one hundred–plus pages of endnotes, and countless detailed footnotes (that are themselves illustrative and evocative), Sundquist has assembled a voluminous archive of textual material to show how works of the imagination by blacks and Jews have been "produced in a dynamic, multilayered historical matrix" that reveals the paradoxes of American liberalism (9). From the well-known and well-trodden (novels by Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Morrison all play key roles) to the newly discovered and underappreciated (John A. Williams's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café; William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer; Jon Michael Spencer's Tribes of Benjamin; Lore Segal's Her First American), Sundquist's careful historicism reveals how works of the imagination can serve as both microscopic and telescopic lenses through which to examine the vicissitudes of what he calls black and Jewish "interdependent self-conceptions" in the United States (5).Along with addressing a thick textual archive with subtlety and patience, Sundquist's major analytical innovation is that, unlike many of his predecessors, which frequently [End Page 63] positioned their analyses within the scarred domestic terrain of post–civil rights polarization, Sundquist's voracious curiosity dwells in the archive's heterogeneous details, allowing him to linger in examples that routinely exceed the simple polarization of blacks and Jews. The complex racial geography of New York boroughs and greater Chicagoland, for instance, is overlaid by Auschwitz and Egypt and Jerusalem, Ghana and Kenya and the Caribbean. In these settings, Sundquist spends time with figures only glimpsed in passing in other works: Arab Jews, Afro-Zionists, and anti-Zionists; Jews and Black Jews; Black Panthers, Israeli Black Panthers, Holocaust survivors, Holocaust deniers, Black Power advocates, and their Jewish Power doppelgangers. In a lengthy meditation on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Sundquist charts the novel's refractions of the problem of American racial equality in the wake of the Holocaust. Similarly, the careful readings of novels by Naylor, Williams, Spencer, and Kelley exemplify the rich results of Sundquist's method.This deeply historicist and intertextual project echoes Sundquist's 1993 epic work To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, which strenuously and quite effectively demonstrated how African American literature is constitutive of American literature, and not merely a minor subset of it. If this earlier work revealed the continued paradox of racial slavery in American conceptions of democracy, Strangers in the Land serves as something of a sequel. The book places another massive racial project, the systematic genocide of Europe's Jews, at the heart of twentieth-century American life. "The Holocaust," writes Sundquist, "became the benchmark against which at least one other case, African American slavery and its aftermath, has been judged" (6). By placing Jewish genocide at the center of his analysis, Sundquist importantly reminds us of the conclusion reached almost simultaneously by both Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, that the Nazi racial project had its ideological origins in nineteenth-century European imperialism, and that this legacy bears indelibly on the present... (shrink)