In this article Carolyn Cartier discusses and critiques the so-called macroregion models in understanding China’s geography. Drawing predominantly on the works of other geographers, she critiques William Skinner’s widely quoted and famous essays on the “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China” as well as his volume “The City in Late Imperial China“, in particular his adoption of “Central Place Theory”. As always, criticising a “macro theory” is far easier than actually developing one. Especially when the criticism is based on the complete rejection of macro theories and the call for a focus on micro theories instead. There is some of that in this article, which is, I believe, missing the point. The same is true for Cartier’s questioning as to whether it is at all useful or even possible to produce maps (something that Skinner has become famous for). Well, there are probably many reasons for why maps should be treated with great caution (i.e. they set spatial and temporal boundaries around in reality fluid and changing circumstances). But are these arguments really relevant here? What is, however, interesting is Cartier’s knowledge of the origins and developments of geographical theories and theoreticians, something that I believe many China scholars (and anthropologists) lack. So Cartier is able to uncover a whole range of inconsistencies in Skinner’s usage of geographical theories and when Cartier, at some point, argues that “to develop the macroregion model from marketing systems material, Skinner uses the language but not the practice of science” (by which she means the science of geography), it comes across as quite convincing. But at the same time, this seems to be about the struggle between an academic discipline (in this case geography) and area studies (China Studies). I would suggest to try and ignore the disciplinary “politics” and “boundary making” when reading the article.
Carolyn Cartier “Origins and Evolution of a Geographical Idea: The Macroregion in China”
Filed under Books and Articles
Space in Anthropology: some thoughts on how it begins
How do we get from “nothing” to “something”? This is not a question commonly addressed by anthropologists, as there is of course always “something” already out there. People, society, culture, political or economic structures, all that already exists waiting to be scrutinised by the anthropologist. This is perhaps why space is a tricky “thing”. Space is everywhere (or nowhere…) as Clifford Geertz (1996) accurately remarked. So how can we grasp it? “The spatial bible” (Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space) quite clearly and also convincingly states that space is not merely a container for social and cultural activity but that it is in fact produced by such activity. Further, it is said that space is always in the making, always in a state of becoming. How are we to make sense of this? When we walk through a city centre, we only see that “something”, we do not see, however, how that “something” has come about. The setting is likely to appear static and fixed and to have (or so it seems) already reached the “final stage”. We walk along the roads that have been paved for us, we stop at the traffic lights that have been set up for our security and we rest when a bench indicates that this is a place (not a space!!!) to rest. How are these spaces possibly in a state of becoming? And how are they being produced by social and cultural activity? These questions are a great deal more fundamental than one may initially anticipate and it is this fact that makes space so immensely complex.
It took me a while to understand that the only way to get to the bottom of space (quite literally so), we need to leave the spatial jungle of the city and think of (or imagine) how it all began.
I recently read Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (2000), which, to my surprise, has not really been used or quoted at all in the general literature on the anthropology of space and place – most of the works I have so far consulted are from American anthropologists. Is Ingold, being a Brit, too unconventional for the Americans?
Ingold is predominantly concerned with human beings’ relationship with their environment. His work has hence been very useful, as it helped me to leave the city and address the more fundamental questions. He argues against the still widely celebrated notion that humans have manufactured their cultured environments from an initially empty space (=nature), or what the philosopher Edward S. Casey (1996) identifies as “a tabula rasa onto which particularities of culture and history come to be inscribed, with place as the presumed result (…) to begin with there is some empty and innocent spatial spread, waiting, as it were, for cultural configurations to render it placeful.” Ingold strongly counters this culture vs. nature dichotomy (and so does Casey), which conveys the idea that there exists a clear-cut separation between the built and the non-built environment, with the former belonging to all non-human beings and the latter being constructs of human beings who physically alter the natural environment through cultural practices. Humans, according to this idea, do not really belong to nature, which leads Ingold to realise “that there is something wrong if we can only understand our creative involvement in the world (…) by taking us out of it.” Instead, he argues, we (human beings) are actually part of nature, we are also “in the world”. As the spider weaves its web, the beetle, fox, or owl finds shelter in an oak tree, so do humans naturally and instinctively dwell. Ingold discards the notion that because humans have the capability to design and imagine something before they put it into practice, humans stand somewhere outside nature and thus merely culturally order nature (known as the “building perspective). Instead, he puts forward the so-called “dwelling perspective”, which understands “the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings”. This idea is based on Heidegger (1971) who wrote: “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers (…) To built is in itself already to dwell (…) Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build”. It is here that we start to see the temporal and processual dimension of space. We are engaging with our environment, not as omnipotent outsiders, but as constituent parts of it. “The Spatial Bible” echoes, “each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space” (Lefebvre 1991: 169-70). It is a dialectic between us and our environment that makes space that in turn makes us. This is how Lefebvre can speak of space being in a constant state of becoming; there is no difference between the built and the non-built environment, it is always being built.
So far so good… Ingold mainly looks at hunters and gatherers, foraging groups and other so-called “primitive” societies. In this sense he does something totally different from what I am mainly concerned with (urban space). However, it is only by going back to this basic and fundamental level that our very own involvement with the space we occupy, move in or inhabit becomes apparent. This realisation (no matter how fundamental it may be) gives rise to a variety of questions directly relevant to the anthropological discipline, for instance, one being the qualitative impact the fieldworker by his simple presence in the fieldsite has upon the spatial settings of his exactly this fieldsite. It poses some fundamental question about representation, objectivity, the dilemma of doing fieldwork and perhaps the predicament of anthropology in general. I will come back to this issue some other time.
References:
Casey, Edward S. 1996. “How to get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso, 13-52. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1996. “Afterword.” In Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso, 259-262. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press
Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.
Ingold, Tim 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Filed under Space in Anthropology
A Place for Space 