- Email: [email protected]
Society in time and space: a geographical perspective on change
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
587
on the political attitudes of ethnic groups, thus reducing the level of political balkanisation stemming directly from isolated, segregated settlement patterns. Following this, he suggests that changes in national immigration policy favourable towards highly skilled and better-educated immigrants may decrease the level of racial tension in American politics. The boundaries of existing political jurisdictions contribute to racial cleavages in America. He suggests that the guiding criteria for redrawing district boundaries should be to maximise racial, economic and political diversity. This is an excellent book for those who are interested in qualitative and statistical research methods, population movement and its impact on politics in America. However this book has very serious shortcomings, especially with Gimpel’s concluding section on how to establish ethnically and racially diverse societies. His suggestion for changes in national immigration law are shockingly exclusionary and class based for someone who claims to be offering an argument against segregation, discrimination and exclusion, and favourable to diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism. This may in part be as a result of the limitations of his heavy dependency on quantitative and statistical research methods. Solmaz Tavsanoglu, South Bank University, Faculty of the Built Environment, 202 Wansworth Road, London, SW8 2JZ, UK doi:10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00041-0
Society in time and space: a geographical perspective on change Robert A Dodgshon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 230, bibliography, index ISBN 0-521-59640-8 The question that animates Robert Dodgshon’s analysis in Society in Time and Space could be posed as follows: How do we most productively conceptualize the geography of societal change? Dodgshon takes “societal” to mean society as “a compound of its cultural, social, political and economic forms” (p.1). If we understand the geography involved here, then we have a chance to explain how and why change occurs when and where it does. Dodgshon argues that to develop a full understanding of scietal change, we need also to understand why societies do not change, and thus he places a heavy emphasis on tracing the role of inertia in social systems and the constraints thereby placed on the potential for societal change. The book is theoretically situated in the realm of a modified structurationist approach, one that gives more weight to the influence of structure than most interpretations of structuration theory allow. Dodgshon primarily views structure as referring to the built environment, moving away from Gidden’s notion of structure as constituted by social practice. In fact, the review of the structure/agency discussion in chapter 1 is concise and insightful, a useful introduction to the topic. Unfortunately, the next chapter is also a literature review, one in which Dodgshon
588
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
seeks to develop a taxonomy of theories of societal change. This effort will likely be useful to some, but it is painfully dry reading whose main payoff is the conclusion that there seems to be a general disagreement between theories that see society as organized for change and those that view society as organized for stability. Dodgshon takes this observation and applies it to a review of studies of world systems and empires (ch.3). This is perhaps the least successful chapter, as it attempts to briefly discuss the factors involved in large-scale societal change, something that is difficult ot convincingly accomplish in 32 pages; the chapter seems to oversimplify the nature of societies and the reasons they change (or don’t). As he moves to an analysis of change at the scale of states and regions (ch.4) the book becomes more engaging. His discussion of the emergence of the nation-state is particularly interesting. For Dodgshon, what was new about the early state systems was that they lasted longer than the political formations that preceded them. They were able to devise structures (in this case, roles, functions, and spaces) that produced relationships and routines that were clearly defined with constituencies to defend them. The effectiveness of the social capital invested in maintaining these institutional relations was due in large part to the creation of national bodies; the nation became the vehicle for the homogenization of a state’s population. This was made possible by improvements in literacy, and here Dodgshon echoes Anderson (1991). But Dodgshon does not follow through to discuss the importance of what he is hinting at here, which is the inertial influence of identity. It seems reasonable to suggest that a coherent national identity is a strong contributor to the inertia of a national society; at the very least this appears to be a point well understood by politicians from across the political spectrum. His argument would have benefited from a consideration of identity as a source of inertia. The next three chapters deal with different sources of inertia: the cultural construction of landscape (ch.5), organizations (ch.6), and the built environment (ch.7). Relying heavily on Bourdieu’s ideas about the structuring principles of society, Dodgshon discusses the inertial effects of particular symbolizations of landscape. He argues that the symbolic landscapes of early cultures were inertial “because they were brought within stable, enduring belief-systems that were shared by all and not treated as something past or in change, but as stable or constant expressions of the present” (p.119). This has changed in modern societies, where we often place symbolic value upon the landscapes that give us a sense of history; in effect, a landscape is valued to the extent that it is inertial. Dodgshon notes that presently “developed societies everywhere try to freeze the landscape, to make a virtue out of inertia” (p.118). This may be true in part because in a world where decisions seem to be made increasingly at scales other than the local, the landscape is one thing over which communities can exert some control. The discussion of the inertial effects of organizations proceeds largely at the level of the abstract and general. This part of the book could have used closer attention to questions of scale; Dodgshon is especially effective at explaining how the interaction of institutions with similar degrees of investment in the status quo creates a significant obstacle to change, but he does not have much to say about how the scale of the organization impacts the degree to which it will facilitate or inhibit change
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
589
at its own scale and at other scales. The author’s discussion of the built environment as a source of inertia explains quite well the way capital markets attempted to overcome the obstacle of the inertial nature of fixed capital investments while simultaneously creating new forces of inertia. But left unexplored is precisely how the built environment acts as an inertial force in society. In other words, how does the built environment produce societal inertia? This would require attention to the impact of the physical infrastructure and the landscape on social practices, and this level of detail is largely absent from Dodgshon’s work. Perhaps the piece that I most wanted to see that was not included in the book was a consideration of the human experience of the built environment, as ultimately the built environment matters not simply because of its materiality, but primarily for the way it influences human behaviour and understanding. He does recognise the importance of this notion, however, in his chapter on conceptualizing inertia (ch.8), where he argues that “we can best begin to conceptualize inertia and the notion of an ongoing past by establishing the essential role which it plays in the normal, everyday functioning of society” (p.165). In the final two chapters (8 and 9) Dodgshon presents his synthesis of the works surveyed in the book to piece together a geographical perspective on societal change. He offers some insights that are potentially fruitful for informing future research, as in his suggestion that “core groups will occupy the spaces that are potentially more inflexible simply because they consume and invest more of a society’s real wealth, focus more of its organizational needs around themselves and consume more of its symbolic capital on reinforcing their position” (p.183). Likewise, marginal spaces would generally be occupied by subaltern groups, and these spaces would be more flexible and allow for the incubation of oppositional ideas and movements. Overall, Dodgshon’s point that theories of societal change need to grapple with the forces of inertia in order to more effectively understand the phenomenon of social change is persuasive, although he is not always clear about exactly how geography is implicated in the processes of inertia and change. There is much in this book that can helpfully guide analyses of the relationship between social change/inertia and political practices and institutions. Something that troubled me throughout the book, though, was the seemingly organicist way Dodgshon uses the term society. He speaks of societies making decisions about how to represent the past and what directions to pursue for the future, and this seems problematic. If, as noted above, society is a compound of political, cultural, economic and social forms, to what extent does it make sense to speak of a society as a monolithic entity that consciously makes decisions? There are many useful ideas in this book, though it makes for dry reading and seems longer than it needs to be. The main thrust is contained in the last two chapters; readers familiar with social theory (especially Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas, and Harvey) can jump right to this part of the book without losing the crux of the argument. And Dodgshon’s argument is certainly worthy of consideration by any researcher concerned with the possibilities of change and the constraints that inhibit it.
590
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
Reference Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso.
David R. Jansson Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA E-mail address: [email protected] doi:10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00042-2
Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana Peter Redfield; University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0-520-21984-8 Part colonial history, part denunciation of globalization, and part meditation on the aethetics of space development, Peter Redfield’s book is a readable if decidedly difficult-to-categorize work. Perhaps it is best characterized as cultural anthropology or literary criticism. The colonial development of French Guiana is the topic of the book, while the observation that the interaction of nature and technology must be understood in spatial as well as temporal terms is its rather trivial ‘thesis’ (pp.23). The bulk of the text details the spasmodic development of French Guiana as a lackluster sugar plantation and gold mining colony, as failed ‘tropical Quebec’ for French peasants, as infamous penal colony, as destination for immigrants and refugees from Brazil, China and Suriname, and, finally, as a successful platform for space launches. The strength of the book is in its discussion of political decisions to designate the territory as a penal colony and as a space launch site. French Guiana was selected over New Caledonia for the former and over Australia, Brazil, Tuamota (French Polynesia), and Trinidad for the latter. Chapter Four is a wide ranging discussion of the penal colony, including sections on the administrative classification and treatment of convicts, the experience of Alfred Dreyfus (although, almost nothing on that of Henri Charriere a.k.a. Papillon), sexuality, racism, and the unmapped and thus threatening nature existing beyond the prison. Chapters Five and Six are more focused discussions of the Guiana Space Center in Kourou. Extensive background material on the largest remaining French overseas possession, including its demography and ethnic composition, is presented in the book. Discussions of literature, including Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York Mariner, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, are used to introduce chapters. While the various sections are interesting in their own right, the reader is left wondering what scholarly purpose this book was written to accomplish. What is its primary message or argument? At different points in the text the author comes close to moral denunciation (racism, classism, environmental degradation, etc.), but then stops short. The post-modern answer might be that this book does not need a scholarly purpose, message, or argument – that interesting observations are enough justi-
587
on the political attitudes of ethnic groups, thus reducing the level of political balkanisation stemming directly from isolated, segregated settlement patterns. Following this, he suggests that changes in national immigration policy favourable towards highly skilled and better-educated immigrants may decrease the level of racial tension in American politics. The boundaries of existing political jurisdictions contribute to racial cleavages in America. He suggests that the guiding criteria for redrawing district boundaries should be to maximise racial, economic and political diversity. This is an excellent book for those who are interested in qualitative and statistical research methods, population movement and its impact on politics in America. However this book has very serious shortcomings, especially with Gimpel’s concluding section on how to establish ethnically and racially diverse societies. His suggestion for changes in national immigration law are shockingly exclusionary and class based for someone who claims to be offering an argument against segregation, discrimination and exclusion, and favourable to diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism. This may in part be as a result of the limitations of his heavy dependency on quantitative and statistical research methods. Solmaz Tavsanoglu, South Bank University, Faculty of the Built Environment, 202 Wansworth Road, London, SW8 2JZ, UK doi:10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00041-0
Society in time and space: a geographical perspective on change Robert A Dodgshon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 230, bibliography, index ISBN 0-521-59640-8 The question that animates Robert Dodgshon’s analysis in Society in Time and Space could be posed as follows: How do we most productively conceptualize the geography of societal change? Dodgshon takes “societal” to mean society as “a compound of its cultural, social, political and economic forms” (p.1). If we understand the geography involved here, then we have a chance to explain how and why change occurs when and where it does. Dodgshon argues that to develop a full understanding of scietal change, we need also to understand why societies do not change, and thus he places a heavy emphasis on tracing the role of inertia in social systems and the constraints thereby placed on the potential for societal change. The book is theoretically situated in the realm of a modified structurationist approach, one that gives more weight to the influence of structure than most interpretations of structuration theory allow. Dodgshon primarily views structure as referring to the built environment, moving away from Gidden’s notion of structure as constituted by social practice. In fact, the review of the structure/agency discussion in chapter 1 is concise and insightful, a useful introduction to the topic. Unfortunately, the next chapter is also a literature review, one in which Dodgshon
588
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
seeks to develop a taxonomy of theories of societal change. This effort will likely be useful to some, but it is painfully dry reading whose main payoff is the conclusion that there seems to be a general disagreement between theories that see society as organized for change and those that view society as organized for stability. Dodgshon takes this observation and applies it to a review of studies of world systems and empires (ch.3). This is perhaps the least successful chapter, as it attempts to briefly discuss the factors involved in large-scale societal change, something that is difficult ot convincingly accomplish in 32 pages; the chapter seems to oversimplify the nature of societies and the reasons they change (or don’t). As he moves to an analysis of change at the scale of states and regions (ch.4) the book becomes more engaging. His discussion of the emergence of the nation-state is particularly interesting. For Dodgshon, what was new about the early state systems was that they lasted longer than the political formations that preceded them. They were able to devise structures (in this case, roles, functions, and spaces) that produced relationships and routines that were clearly defined with constituencies to defend them. The effectiveness of the social capital invested in maintaining these institutional relations was due in large part to the creation of national bodies; the nation became the vehicle for the homogenization of a state’s population. This was made possible by improvements in literacy, and here Dodgshon echoes Anderson (1991). But Dodgshon does not follow through to discuss the importance of what he is hinting at here, which is the inertial influence of identity. It seems reasonable to suggest that a coherent national identity is a strong contributor to the inertia of a national society; at the very least this appears to be a point well understood by politicians from across the political spectrum. His argument would have benefited from a consideration of identity as a source of inertia. The next three chapters deal with different sources of inertia: the cultural construction of landscape (ch.5), organizations (ch.6), and the built environment (ch.7). Relying heavily on Bourdieu’s ideas about the structuring principles of society, Dodgshon discusses the inertial effects of particular symbolizations of landscape. He argues that the symbolic landscapes of early cultures were inertial “because they were brought within stable, enduring belief-systems that were shared by all and not treated as something past or in change, but as stable or constant expressions of the present” (p.119). This has changed in modern societies, where we often place symbolic value upon the landscapes that give us a sense of history; in effect, a landscape is valued to the extent that it is inertial. Dodgshon notes that presently “developed societies everywhere try to freeze the landscape, to make a virtue out of inertia” (p.118). This may be true in part because in a world where decisions seem to be made increasingly at scales other than the local, the landscape is one thing over which communities can exert some control. The discussion of the inertial effects of organizations proceeds largely at the level of the abstract and general. This part of the book could have used closer attention to questions of scale; Dodgshon is especially effective at explaining how the interaction of institutions with similar degrees of investment in the status quo creates a significant obstacle to change, but he does not have much to say about how the scale of the organization impacts the degree to which it will facilitate or inhibit change
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
589
at its own scale and at other scales. The author’s discussion of the built environment as a source of inertia explains quite well the way capital markets attempted to overcome the obstacle of the inertial nature of fixed capital investments while simultaneously creating new forces of inertia. But left unexplored is precisely how the built environment acts as an inertial force in society. In other words, how does the built environment produce societal inertia? This would require attention to the impact of the physical infrastructure and the landscape on social practices, and this level of detail is largely absent from Dodgshon’s work. Perhaps the piece that I most wanted to see that was not included in the book was a consideration of the human experience of the built environment, as ultimately the built environment matters not simply because of its materiality, but primarily for the way it influences human behaviour and understanding. He does recognise the importance of this notion, however, in his chapter on conceptualizing inertia (ch.8), where he argues that “we can best begin to conceptualize inertia and the notion of an ongoing past by establishing the essential role which it plays in the normal, everyday functioning of society” (p.165). In the final two chapters (8 and 9) Dodgshon presents his synthesis of the works surveyed in the book to piece together a geographical perspective on societal change. He offers some insights that are potentially fruitful for informing future research, as in his suggestion that “core groups will occupy the spaces that are potentially more inflexible simply because they consume and invest more of a society’s real wealth, focus more of its organizational needs around themselves and consume more of its symbolic capital on reinforcing their position” (p.183). Likewise, marginal spaces would generally be occupied by subaltern groups, and these spaces would be more flexible and allow for the incubation of oppositional ideas and movements. Overall, Dodgshon’s point that theories of societal change need to grapple with the forces of inertia in order to more effectively understand the phenomenon of social change is persuasive, although he is not always clear about exactly how geography is implicated in the processes of inertia and change. There is much in this book that can helpfully guide analyses of the relationship between social change/inertia and political practices and institutions. Something that troubled me throughout the book, though, was the seemingly organicist way Dodgshon uses the term society. He speaks of societies making decisions about how to represent the past and what directions to pursue for the future, and this seems problematic. If, as noted above, society is a compound of political, cultural, economic and social forms, to what extent does it make sense to speak of a society as a monolithic entity that consciously makes decisions? There are many useful ideas in this book, though it makes for dry reading and seems longer than it needs to be. The main thrust is contained in the last two chapters; readers familiar with social theory (especially Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas, and Harvey) can jump right to this part of the book without losing the crux of the argument. And Dodgshon’s argument is certainly worthy of consideration by any researcher concerned with the possibilities of change and the constraints that inhibit it.
590
Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 585–598
Reference Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso.
David R. Jansson Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA E-mail address: [email protected] doi:10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00042-2
Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French Guiana Peter Redfield; University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 0-520-21984-8 Part colonial history, part denunciation of globalization, and part meditation on the aethetics of space development, Peter Redfield’s book is a readable if decidedly difficult-to-categorize work. Perhaps it is best characterized as cultural anthropology or literary criticism. The colonial development of French Guiana is the topic of the book, while the observation that the interaction of nature and technology must be understood in spatial as well as temporal terms is its rather trivial ‘thesis’ (pp.23). The bulk of the text details the spasmodic development of French Guiana as a lackluster sugar plantation and gold mining colony, as failed ‘tropical Quebec’ for French peasants, as infamous penal colony, as destination for immigrants and refugees from Brazil, China and Suriname, and, finally, as a successful platform for space launches. The strength of the book is in its discussion of political decisions to designate the territory as a penal colony and as a space launch site. French Guiana was selected over New Caledonia for the former and over Australia, Brazil, Tuamota (French Polynesia), and Trinidad for the latter. Chapter Four is a wide ranging discussion of the penal colony, including sections on the administrative classification and treatment of convicts, the experience of Alfred Dreyfus (although, almost nothing on that of Henri Charriere a.k.a. Papillon), sexuality, racism, and the unmapped and thus threatening nature existing beyond the prison. Chapters Five and Six are more focused discussions of the Guiana Space Center in Kourou. Extensive background material on the largest remaining French overseas possession, including its demography and ethnic composition, is presented in the book. Discussions of literature, including Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York Mariner, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, are used to introduce chapters. While the various sections are interesting in their own right, the reader is left wondering what scholarly purpose this book was written to accomplish. What is its primary message or argument? At different points in the text the author comes close to moral denunciation (racism, classism, environmental degradation, etc.), but then stops short. The post-modern answer might be that this book does not need a scholarly purpose, message, or argument – that interesting observations are enough justi-