- Email: [email protected]
Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective
108
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 106–119
but a vast expanse of sugar and cotton enterprises worked at industrial capacity. Furthermore, while there is no denying her formidable command of the archaeology literature, Bassie-Sweet’s dependence on someone else’s grasp of colonial-period history can occasionally let her down. ‘Making offerings in the center and four corners of the milpa [cornfield]’, she writes, ‘is one of the most common rituals’ (p. 46) – or at least used to be. Attributing what she next states to Christenson, she informs us: ‘Just after the Spanish conquest, such a planting ritual was recorded by Francisco Xime´nez’ (p. 46). Xime´nez was shown the original Popol Vuh when serving as parish priest in Chichicastenango, from which he made a copy that is now housed in the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Dominican friar, however, was entrusted with the precious original not ‘[j]ust after the Spanish conquest’ but in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, which is also when he observed, presumably, ‘that the farmer placed fire and incense at the center (heart) and four corners of his field’ (p. 46). Not an egregious error of fact, perhaps, but one that could have been avoided by consulting the works of Xime´nez directly. This book is very much a specialty item, one in which diehard Mayanists will revel and from which they will derive much satisfaction, for Bassie-Sweet’s ability to connect myriad musings from the Popol Vuh to disparate geographical features is truly impressive, be the earthly manifestations in question rivers, lakes, mountains, volcanoes, valleys, or inhabited locales. Most historical geographers, however, I suspect will be content to know that a copy of the book, another elegantly produced volume from the University of Oklahoma Press, is available for consultation at a nearby university library. W.G. Lovell Queen’s University, Canada doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.11.003
A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (Eds), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2008, vii þ 396 pages, US$24 paperback. Cast Out is an edited collection of essays, predominantly written by historians with a few exceptions, with the laudable aim: ‘to bridge some of the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary divides that have discouraged a global history of vagrancy and homelessness’ (pp. 2–3). Unifying this collection, as suggested in the volume’s subtitle, is the objective of demonstrating how the discourses and experiences related to vagrancy are particular to geographic and temporal contexts. The book’s stated goal is to create a comparative social history of humans’ responses to ‘managing poverty, labor, and social norms’ (p. 3) through the development of the concept of vagrancy and implementation of vagrancy laws. Frank Tobias Higbie succinctly states the common thread running through the volume when he asserts that ‘vagrancy has always been a discourse of social control that criminalizes certain populations in order to facilitate selective punishment’ (p. 253). Cast Out imparts details about the shared customs and historical trajectory of social control over vagrants that is necessarily abbreviated in case studies of responses to homelessness, which are more commonly found in the literature. The collection of fourteen chapters spans seven centuries and five continents, which is both a strength and weakness. Such breadth necessarily makes comprehensiveness an impossible goal, but the introductory chapter by co-editor Paul Ocobock attempts to
fill in the historical and geographic gaps by discussing time periods and locales not mentioned in individual chapters. Ocobock does a good job of tracing the history of attitudes toward the poor and the increasing state intervention in their lives shaped by these attitudes. Within this broader historical narrative, from classical Greece to the present, he intersperses descriptions of the chapters within a literature review of the work of authors not included in the volume. The chapters are not mentioned in the order of their appearance, which is a minor symptom of a broader weakness of the book, which is the lack of a clear articulation of the reasons for the selection and organization of the individual chapters and the specific ways in which the chapters effectively provide a comparative social history. Most of the chapters trace the use or threat of vagrancy laws through legal documents and the rhetoric of political and law enforcement institutions of the local state in individual cities and national states, including perspectives from colonial and post-colonial states. A few of the chapters focus on tracing the emergence and shaping of discourse through the publications of newspaper reporters, social commentators, and literary figures (Woodbridge’s Chapter Two and Beier’s Chapter Three). Vincent DiGirolamo’s ‘Tramps in the Making’ about newspaper peddlers in nineteenth-century America (Chapter Eight) and Abby Margolis’ ‘Subversive Accommodations’ about homeless communities living in a Tokyo park in the late 1990s (Chapter 13) are notable for integrating the voices of the homeless themselves into their accounts. Despite using different points of entry, the chapters effectively illustrate the wide range of ways that vagrancy laws and institutions were and continue to be used to address the impacts of contrasting labor dynamics. On the one hand, vagrancy was used to keep laborers from leaving settlements experiencing labor shortages (such as desertion of emancipated slaves and indentured laborers in plantation colonies like Mauritius described in Chapter Five) and on the other, to prevent newcomers from straining resources and degrading the image of modernizing cities (nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro in Chapter Six). Additional uses involved moving people to places of labor shortages (twentiethcentury British East Africa discussed in Chapter 10) or exiling perpetrators of social disorder and crime (Siberia in Tsarist Russia discussed in Chapter Seven). Also important is the attention several authors give to relaying the failures of many of these approaches to achieve their desired goals (policy shifts in China described in Chapter 11 and Papua New Guinea in Chapter 12). While the collection provides an important step toward developing a global history of vagrancy, in contrast to more commonly found detached national narratives, it is less successful at articulating the findings of the comparative analysis. None of the individual chapters is explicitly comparative in approach or writing style so the comparative social history is left for the reader to assemble. Hibgie’s contribution (Chapter Nine) on the discourses of vagrancy in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century North America is one of the few that references the content of other chapters in a manner that explicitly acknowledges the comparative social history objective of the volume. The collection would have benefited from more of this type of integration and reflection on how each chapter contributes to meeting the overall goals of the book. Most of the chapters review practices and policies at the level of individual countries (England, India, Mauritius, Russia, the United States, and Papua New Guinea). Some chapters focus on regions defined at scales above the level of the nation-state (North America, British East Africa) and others on individual cities (London, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Tokyo). The volume’s geographic coverage expands that found in Huth and Wright’s International Critical
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 106–119
Perspectives on Homelessness (Praeger, 1997) and Polakow and Guillean’s International Perspectives on Homelessness (Greenwood Press, 2001), earlier edited volumes on global homelessness. Despite this important improvement, geographers may find the contributions in Cast Out lacking in careful explanations of the ways in which place matters for the development of state and public reactions to vagrancy. Few provide thorough depictions of the spatial patterns created as a consequence of vagrancy laws and other responses to homelessness. Identifying such patterns of socio-spatial exclusion is of significant interest to scholars examining the geographies of homelessness, but this volume does not speak to analyses typical of those perspectives. To be fair, the volume does not include the work of geographers, so the omission of this perspective is not surprising. Nonetheless, the editors are to be commended for putting together a collection which links traditionally disparate analyses of vagrancy and homelessness, even though the value of making those comparisons is not explicitly drawn out by the authors and editors themselves. As a contribution to the literature on homelessness, this collection reminds scholars of the importance of acknowledging historical precedent and patterns of societal reactions that continue to shape contemporary debates and responses to homelessness as a social problem. Christine L. Jocoy California State University, Long Beach, USA doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.11.004
Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007, xv þ 296 pages, US$28.95 paperback. Diana K. Davis’s superb Resurrecting the Granary of Rome analyzes the emergence, elaboration, and consequences of culturally inflected narratives of environmental destruction in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Methodologically rich, extensively researched, and clearly written, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome addresses a fundamental question in colonial environmental history, indicates fruitful directions for future scholarship, and provides a useful methodological template for such investigations. Davis identifies what she labels the ‘declensionist narrative’ in North African environmental history, the notion that, due to the mismanagement of land by Arabs, the fertility of North Africa had evaporated (p. 1). Such depictions, emerging gradually over the nineteenth century, functioned as a kind of environmental Orientalism, ‘a colonial environmental narrative that blamed the indigenous people . for deforesting and degrading what was once the highly fertile ‘granary of Rome’ in North Africa’ (p. 2). Moreover, the declensionist narrative intersected with other colonialist narratives, such as the Kabyle myth, that conceptualized the history of North Africa as a long series of epic and destructive struggles between various practices, reified as ethnic identities. The declensionist narrative, as the work ably demonstrates, ironed out complexity, subsumed difference, and isolated critical voices. One of the strongest aspects of Davis’s text lies in its exposure of different possible narratives, competing understandings that largely for political reasons remained underexplored and unexecuted in colonial North Africa (see, for example, pp. 47–56). Davis reminds us that the apparently monolithic nature of environmental narratives represents not actual unanimity, but a long process of intellectual competition and silencing.
109
Davis’s thoughtfully constructed argument allows her to offer insightful examination of evidence. Indeed, the deft analysis draws upon a wide range of methodological approaches, all with equal success. Rather than merely juxtaposing different disciplinary practices, Davis demonstrates not only the possibility, but the necessity of marshaling varied avenues of inquiry for a conceptual project such as hers. Most obviously, she draws upon her training as a human geographer to establish patterns of rainfall, environmental change, and the physical conditions of life in North Africa (pp. 8–12). The appendix, ‘A Note on Geography and Ecology of the Maghreb’ supplements such treatments with more quantitative work. At the same time, however, Davis’s book intervenes in discursive and intellectual histories of the conceptualization of North African environments, and Davis evinces a similar aptitude with discussing visual imagery. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome reads the visual language of imperial environments in particular compelling ways. Maps, paintings, and photographs offer coded, ideologically inflected shorthand narratives that precisely depict the contours of Davis’s argument. The 1847 image, ‘Algeria, French Colony’ (plate 2), neatly captures the argument in concise visual language: lush depictions of what Davis correctly calls ‘a veritable cornucopia’, as well as ‘Algerians . in subordinate positions, apparently being enlightened by the French,’ surround and indeed dominate the map of the Algerian provinces (plate 2). Never does Davis lose sight of more concrete contexts for the changing representations of North African landscapes; such different constructions arose out of ever-changing scientific understandings of ecological contexts, environmental interactions, and the processes and consequences of human intervention. As a direct result, histories of science, too, embed within their discussions references to the declensionist narratives that form the subject of Davis’s work. In particular, botany played a major role in the reimagining and replanting of Algerian landscapes. Scientific inquiry and experimentation tied scholars and commercial interests in distant Melbourne to attempts at reforestation in Algeria, resulting in large-scale plantings of eucalyptus throughout France’s largest colony (pp. 102–108). Their thirst for water, tendency to inhibit the growth of other plants, and recalcitrant wood diminished the enthusiasm of Algerian foresters for Eucalyptus (p. 107), but the presence of the archetypal tree of Australian landscapes in Algeria attests to the international, imperial context of scientific and environmental narratives in the nineteenth century. Increasingly precise scientific knowledge did not necessarily combat the declensionist narrative, however. The persistence of the declensionist and other similar narratives in contemporary environmental and landscape ‘management’ policies threads through histories of imperial science, not as a counterpoint, but major constituent of their formation. ‘During [the] formative years of the 1920s and 1930s, as the new science of plant ecology was being developed,’ Davis writes, ‘the narrative of environmental decline and deforestation was refined, quantified, and institutionalized’ (p. 144). Post-independence states in North Africa have largely not interrogated the colonial inheritance of declensionist narratives (p. 169) that continue to inform policies on desertification (p. 172), consuming international aid, targeting pastoralists, and dominating statistical studies through the reliance on colonial statistics. Davis herself points out further sites of potential scholarly inquiry. In particular, the environmental legacies that outlasted empire in North Africa and beyond, not only in a geographic or physical sense, but also in the realms of representation and policy, offer much room for future research. No maps of colonial vegetation ‘have been analyzed for the presence of embedded colonial environmental narratives, despite’ their role in the formulation of ‘draconian environmental policy’ (p. 175). Environmental
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 106–119
but a vast expanse of sugar and cotton enterprises worked at industrial capacity. Furthermore, while there is no denying her formidable command of the archaeology literature, Bassie-Sweet’s dependence on someone else’s grasp of colonial-period history can occasionally let her down. ‘Making offerings in the center and four corners of the milpa [cornfield]’, she writes, ‘is one of the most common rituals’ (p. 46) – or at least used to be. Attributing what she next states to Christenson, she informs us: ‘Just after the Spanish conquest, such a planting ritual was recorded by Francisco Xime´nez’ (p. 46). Xime´nez was shown the original Popol Vuh when serving as parish priest in Chichicastenango, from which he made a copy that is now housed in the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Dominican friar, however, was entrusted with the precious original not ‘[j]ust after the Spanish conquest’ but in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, which is also when he observed, presumably, ‘that the farmer placed fire and incense at the center (heart) and four corners of his field’ (p. 46). Not an egregious error of fact, perhaps, but one that could have been avoided by consulting the works of Xime´nez directly. This book is very much a specialty item, one in which diehard Mayanists will revel and from which they will derive much satisfaction, for Bassie-Sweet’s ability to connect myriad musings from the Popol Vuh to disparate geographical features is truly impressive, be the earthly manifestations in question rivers, lakes, mountains, volcanoes, valleys, or inhabited locales. Most historical geographers, however, I suspect will be content to know that a copy of the book, another elegantly produced volume from the University of Oklahoma Press, is available for consultation at a nearby university library. W.G. Lovell Queen’s University, Canada doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.11.003
A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (Eds), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2008, vii þ 396 pages, US$24 paperback. Cast Out is an edited collection of essays, predominantly written by historians with a few exceptions, with the laudable aim: ‘to bridge some of the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary divides that have discouraged a global history of vagrancy and homelessness’ (pp. 2–3). Unifying this collection, as suggested in the volume’s subtitle, is the objective of demonstrating how the discourses and experiences related to vagrancy are particular to geographic and temporal contexts. The book’s stated goal is to create a comparative social history of humans’ responses to ‘managing poverty, labor, and social norms’ (p. 3) through the development of the concept of vagrancy and implementation of vagrancy laws. Frank Tobias Higbie succinctly states the common thread running through the volume when he asserts that ‘vagrancy has always been a discourse of social control that criminalizes certain populations in order to facilitate selective punishment’ (p. 253). Cast Out imparts details about the shared customs and historical trajectory of social control over vagrants that is necessarily abbreviated in case studies of responses to homelessness, which are more commonly found in the literature. The collection of fourteen chapters spans seven centuries and five continents, which is both a strength and weakness. Such breadth necessarily makes comprehensiveness an impossible goal, but the introductory chapter by co-editor Paul Ocobock attempts to
fill in the historical and geographic gaps by discussing time periods and locales not mentioned in individual chapters. Ocobock does a good job of tracing the history of attitudes toward the poor and the increasing state intervention in their lives shaped by these attitudes. Within this broader historical narrative, from classical Greece to the present, he intersperses descriptions of the chapters within a literature review of the work of authors not included in the volume. The chapters are not mentioned in the order of their appearance, which is a minor symptom of a broader weakness of the book, which is the lack of a clear articulation of the reasons for the selection and organization of the individual chapters and the specific ways in which the chapters effectively provide a comparative social history. Most of the chapters trace the use or threat of vagrancy laws through legal documents and the rhetoric of political and law enforcement institutions of the local state in individual cities and national states, including perspectives from colonial and post-colonial states. A few of the chapters focus on tracing the emergence and shaping of discourse through the publications of newspaper reporters, social commentators, and literary figures (Woodbridge’s Chapter Two and Beier’s Chapter Three). Vincent DiGirolamo’s ‘Tramps in the Making’ about newspaper peddlers in nineteenth-century America (Chapter Eight) and Abby Margolis’ ‘Subversive Accommodations’ about homeless communities living in a Tokyo park in the late 1990s (Chapter 13) are notable for integrating the voices of the homeless themselves into their accounts. Despite using different points of entry, the chapters effectively illustrate the wide range of ways that vagrancy laws and institutions were and continue to be used to address the impacts of contrasting labor dynamics. On the one hand, vagrancy was used to keep laborers from leaving settlements experiencing labor shortages (such as desertion of emancipated slaves and indentured laborers in plantation colonies like Mauritius described in Chapter Five) and on the other, to prevent newcomers from straining resources and degrading the image of modernizing cities (nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro in Chapter Six). Additional uses involved moving people to places of labor shortages (twentiethcentury British East Africa discussed in Chapter 10) or exiling perpetrators of social disorder and crime (Siberia in Tsarist Russia discussed in Chapter Seven). Also important is the attention several authors give to relaying the failures of many of these approaches to achieve their desired goals (policy shifts in China described in Chapter 11 and Papua New Guinea in Chapter 12). While the collection provides an important step toward developing a global history of vagrancy, in contrast to more commonly found detached national narratives, it is less successful at articulating the findings of the comparative analysis. None of the individual chapters is explicitly comparative in approach or writing style so the comparative social history is left for the reader to assemble. Hibgie’s contribution (Chapter Nine) on the discourses of vagrancy in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century North America is one of the few that references the content of other chapters in a manner that explicitly acknowledges the comparative social history objective of the volume. The collection would have benefited from more of this type of integration and reflection on how each chapter contributes to meeting the overall goals of the book. Most of the chapters review practices and policies at the level of individual countries (England, India, Mauritius, Russia, the United States, and Papua New Guinea). Some chapters focus on regions defined at scales above the level of the nation-state (North America, British East Africa) and others on individual cities (London, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Tokyo). The volume’s geographic coverage expands that found in Huth and Wright’s International Critical
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 106–119
Perspectives on Homelessness (Praeger, 1997) and Polakow and Guillean’s International Perspectives on Homelessness (Greenwood Press, 2001), earlier edited volumes on global homelessness. Despite this important improvement, geographers may find the contributions in Cast Out lacking in careful explanations of the ways in which place matters for the development of state and public reactions to vagrancy. Few provide thorough depictions of the spatial patterns created as a consequence of vagrancy laws and other responses to homelessness. Identifying such patterns of socio-spatial exclusion is of significant interest to scholars examining the geographies of homelessness, but this volume does not speak to analyses typical of those perspectives. To be fair, the volume does not include the work of geographers, so the omission of this perspective is not surprising. Nonetheless, the editors are to be commended for putting together a collection which links traditionally disparate analyses of vagrancy and homelessness, even though the value of making those comparisons is not explicitly drawn out by the authors and editors themselves. As a contribution to the literature on homelessness, this collection reminds scholars of the importance of acknowledging historical precedent and patterns of societal reactions that continue to shape contemporary debates and responses to homelessness as a social problem. Christine L. Jocoy California State University, Long Beach, USA doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.11.004
Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007, xv þ 296 pages, US$28.95 paperback. Diana K. Davis’s superb Resurrecting the Granary of Rome analyzes the emergence, elaboration, and consequences of culturally inflected narratives of environmental destruction in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Methodologically rich, extensively researched, and clearly written, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome addresses a fundamental question in colonial environmental history, indicates fruitful directions for future scholarship, and provides a useful methodological template for such investigations. Davis identifies what she labels the ‘declensionist narrative’ in North African environmental history, the notion that, due to the mismanagement of land by Arabs, the fertility of North Africa had evaporated (p. 1). Such depictions, emerging gradually over the nineteenth century, functioned as a kind of environmental Orientalism, ‘a colonial environmental narrative that blamed the indigenous people . for deforesting and degrading what was once the highly fertile ‘granary of Rome’ in North Africa’ (p. 2). Moreover, the declensionist narrative intersected with other colonialist narratives, such as the Kabyle myth, that conceptualized the history of North Africa as a long series of epic and destructive struggles between various practices, reified as ethnic identities. The declensionist narrative, as the work ably demonstrates, ironed out complexity, subsumed difference, and isolated critical voices. One of the strongest aspects of Davis’s text lies in its exposure of different possible narratives, competing understandings that largely for political reasons remained underexplored and unexecuted in colonial North Africa (see, for example, pp. 47–56). Davis reminds us that the apparently monolithic nature of environmental narratives represents not actual unanimity, but a long process of intellectual competition and silencing.
109
Davis’s thoughtfully constructed argument allows her to offer insightful examination of evidence. Indeed, the deft analysis draws upon a wide range of methodological approaches, all with equal success. Rather than merely juxtaposing different disciplinary practices, Davis demonstrates not only the possibility, but the necessity of marshaling varied avenues of inquiry for a conceptual project such as hers. Most obviously, she draws upon her training as a human geographer to establish patterns of rainfall, environmental change, and the physical conditions of life in North Africa (pp. 8–12). The appendix, ‘A Note on Geography and Ecology of the Maghreb’ supplements such treatments with more quantitative work. At the same time, however, Davis’s book intervenes in discursive and intellectual histories of the conceptualization of North African environments, and Davis evinces a similar aptitude with discussing visual imagery. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome reads the visual language of imperial environments in particular compelling ways. Maps, paintings, and photographs offer coded, ideologically inflected shorthand narratives that precisely depict the contours of Davis’s argument. The 1847 image, ‘Algeria, French Colony’ (plate 2), neatly captures the argument in concise visual language: lush depictions of what Davis correctly calls ‘a veritable cornucopia’, as well as ‘Algerians . in subordinate positions, apparently being enlightened by the French,’ surround and indeed dominate the map of the Algerian provinces (plate 2). Never does Davis lose sight of more concrete contexts for the changing representations of North African landscapes; such different constructions arose out of ever-changing scientific understandings of ecological contexts, environmental interactions, and the processes and consequences of human intervention. As a direct result, histories of science, too, embed within their discussions references to the declensionist narratives that form the subject of Davis’s work. In particular, botany played a major role in the reimagining and replanting of Algerian landscapes. Scientific inquiry and experimentation tied scholars and commercial interests in distant Melbourne to attempts at reforestation in Algeria, resulting in large-scale plantings of eucalyptus throughout France’s largest colony (pp. 102–108). Their thirst for water, tendency to inhibit the growth of other plants, and recalcitrant wood diminished the enthusiasm of Algerian foresters for Eucalyptus (p. 107), but the presence of the archetypal tree of Australian landscapes in Algeria attests to the international, imperial context of scientific and environmental narratives in the nineteenth century. Increasingly precise scientific knowledge did not necessarily combat the declensionist narrative, however. The persistence of the declensionist and other similar narratives in contemporary environmental and landscape ‘management’ policies threads through histories of imperial science, not as a counterpoint, but major constituent of their formation. ‘During [the] formative years of the 1920s and 1930s, as the new science of plant ecology was being developed,’ Davis writes, ‘the narrative of environmental decline and deforestation was refined, quantified, and institutionalized’ (p. 144). Post-independence states in North Africa have largely not interrogated the colonial inheritance of declensionist narratives (p. 169) that continue to inform policies on desertification (p. 172), consuming international aid, targeting pastoralists, and dominating statistical studies through the reliance on colonial statistics. Davis herself points out further sites of potential scholarly inquiry. In particular, the environmental legacies that outlasted empire in North Africa and beyond, not only in a geographic or physical sense, but also in the realms of representation and policy, offer much room for future research. No maps of colonial vegetation ‘have been analyzed for the presence of embedded colonial environmental narratives, despite’ their role in the formulation of ‘draconian environmental policy’ (p. 175). Environmental