This paper examines the figuring of water towers in Zionist mythology by focusing on three symbolic functions: the iconographic, the commemorative and the nostalgic. The icono-graphic function pertains to the iconic employment of water towers in pictorial depictions of the Zionist settlement landscapes. The commemorative function refers to the transformation of particular water towers into war memorials of Israel’s War of Independence. The nostalgic function relates to the valorization of defunct water towers as elements of local heritage and material symbols of local identity. Operative in different historical periods, political contexts and cultural settings, these symbolic functions pertained to particular Zionist myths and were productive in the ongoing formation of Zionist cultural geographies of modernity, tradition, memory and nostalgia.
nist geographies; As such it contains information on concepts, terms, and the debates that have taken place within feminism more widely. As the editors recognize in the brief Introduction, entries in a glossary such as this can never be entirely authoritative or comprehensive. Readers will no doubt have their own list of omissions and quibbles over definitions. However, the explanations are informative, expansive and clear, and provide a good indication of the diversity and dynamism of feminist geographies. There is also meticulous crossreferencing and pointers towards further reading, both within geography and social sciences and humanities more broadly. The labour involved in preparing, writing and cross-referencing each entry by authors and editors is laudable. The entries are up-to-date and, in places, quite funny. I was amused to find an entry on ‘Essex girl’ – ‘perhaps the only geographically specific term used to refer to women in 1990s Britain’. Interestingly, ‘girl power’ and the Spice Girls make it into this edition; Camille Paglia does not. Under ‘icon/feminist icon’ is the entry ‘often used in association with Madonna – the singer, not the Virgin Mary’. Whoever said feminists don’t have a sense of humour? This collection is unique among glossaries and dictionaries in its focus on feminist geographies. For any student new to feminist perspectives within the discipline and wishing to discover the richness, breadth and diversity of approaches and subject matter, this book will be a revelation. For those more advanced students wishing to explore more detailed and dynamic debates within feminist geographies, the book will prove an invaluable companion. For teachers and students alike, the glossary is an excellent addition alongside other staple texts such as the Space, gender, knowledge reader and the WGSG book Feminist geographies. The bibliography, in addition to being an excellent resource in itself, attests to the very good health of feminist geographies at the end of the 1990s.
This paper examines the discursive practices employed by property owners and the state to justify the exclusion of mostly black squatters from three 'white' suburbs in Cape Town, South Africa. In these suburbs, Noordhoek, Hout Bay and Milnerton, property owners voiced nearly identical objections to justify the exclusion of the squatters from 'their' neighbourhoods. The main justifications, couched mostly in race-neutral terms, was that the squatters would increase crime, decrease property values, spread disease and despoil the natural environment. It is argued that while these discursive practices often camouflage racial prejudice, this does not explain the occurrence of similar discursive patterns in areas where race has not been a major factor. A satisfactory explanation for these discursive commonalities should thus embrace both class and racial dynamics and must be situated within the context of property relations within a capitalist land market.
ent form by a number of leading Marxists, and addressed by Andrew Barshay’s chapter in this volume. Many of the contributors to this book reflect on the manipulation of traditions in terms of binaries of space and time, binaries that are singled out and defined as essential elements of modernity. As Jennifer Robertson notes, in a chapter entitled ‘It takes a village: internationalization and nostalgia in postwar Japan’, the concentration of activity in Tokyo has led to an exoticization of the countryside. In this state-sanctioned space of nostalgia, arenas for the performance of traditional activities are created, despite the inevitable paradox in this process (a paradox inherent within modernity). Modernity defines itself in terms of tradition, but tradition is always at its root a view of the past defined and informed by the present and heavily imbued therefore with nostalgia. Carol Gluck, whose book Japan’s modern myths: ideology in the late Meiji period (Princeton University Press, 1985) is one of the inspirations for this work, details the highly selective rendition of Edo (the name for premodern Tokyo) that came to be used as a basis for extolling a postmodern, nativist view of the contemporary city. Bluck’s is but one of several chapters that can be read as a critique not only of the more explicitly state-oriented exercises in tradition manipulation of the prewar period but also of the rather more obliquely ideological orientations of postwar historiography. For in the end, the writing of history is an ideologically laden enterprise and one in which traditions are constantly being reinforced, recast, or re-evaluated. Mirror of modernity is the work of a number of leading American scholars, most of them historians, and three Japanese sociologists. Its strong engagement with theory – Foucault is inevitably a central point of reference – marks it out as an important staging post in a more theoretically informed understanding of Japan. It is therefore a book with resonances that reach beyond the exclusive domain of Japanese studies. On its way, it enriches our understanding of the multiplicity of meanings that modernity can have. It challenges our epistemologies of modernity, but equally it challenges the assumptions that lie behind Japanese exceptionalism.
ception brought on by mediation (current for at least 100 years), alongside critical discussion of the claims linking forms of logic to different technologies – linear text to instrumental reason, graphics against writing and so forth – through a continual focus on how such changes may operate in detail, which challenges many overstated and underspecified accounts. Of some interest is an extended analysis of geotemporal cartographic imaging and remote sensing. The general critique of cartographical knowledges will not be surprising to readers of Ecumene, but the aesthetic account here suggests not an omniscient viewer, but one that is always rather misplaced – lost in the corporation, in the future, as at once constructed and factual, a viewer oscillating between power and ignorance, evidence and artifice, data and digital art. The argument is perhaps clearer when we turn our gaze from down on the planet to outward to the stars. The parallels of orientalism, imperial gazes and sci-fi are perhaps more suggestive than proven, but the linkage of temporalities of the image and the position of viewing with particular regimes of knowledge and desire was effective. The unpacking of the relation of the subjective and the material is also fruitful in the discussion of the networked subject as an oscillation of hyperindividualization and dispersal; where digital media offer egocentric imaginative universes privileging the controlling self, yet are predicated on the loss of that very autonomy in an endless stream of data and commodities. This leads to a conception of global hybridity that is critical of simply celebrating syncretism without looking at the relative power relations. Indeed, Cubitt is careful to see the exclusions and baggage in mediated networks, and makes a plea to move away from models of a resistant user – arguing that this very idea of popular choice is articulated through corporate technologies. In the end the critical edge of the account is to look for the possibility not of a romantic model of resistance outside the media but of a careful working of heterotopic possibilities between different configurations through a sense of play. On balance then, a by no means easy book, and one which did not always quite convince this reader, but which certainly repaid the effort of a serious engagement.
nial fiction changed in the light of the social, cultural, economic and political upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s – including increasing imperial anxiety and decline. However, Paxton’s multidisciplinary approach (including historical, political, economic and cultural perspectives as well as British literature and critical theory), together with her concern with issues of gender, sexuality, colonial discourse and the significance of the colonial contact zone, means that Writing Under the Raj is an interesting and wide-ranging book which will be of relevance to a broad field of readers, geographers included, particularly those involved with feminist and postcolonial debates.
ducted – as far as they can be – with great prudence. This peculiarity produces strange and interesting phenomena. In this short paper I want to deal with one of these: the survival of national exhibitions. Switzerland is the only European country where there has been a persistent tradition of national exhibitions in the twentieth century. This tradition continues into the present century with an exhibition in four cities of the region of Neuchâtel (Bienne, Morat, Yverdon and Neuchâtel) planned for 2002. My very modest goal is here to sketch briefly the historical context of this exhibition, and consider some of the questions raised by my experience of working with artists, architects and academics on an exhibition on space and identity. I will argue that the cultural projects underpinning these national exhibitions in the past and the forthcoming exhibition have radically changed. This change is at the root of the unease and controversies that the present project has generated, and signifies a shift in the public and governmental politics of Swiss identity.
Global economic change and the discourses, models and practice of international sustainable development are major forces of ecological construction and restructuring. The paper illustrates how the social and ecological co-construction of forests in the Zambrana-Chacuey region in the Dominican Republic has material consequences for distinct groups of people and for other species in rural landscapes. The introduction of the Acacia mangium - a fast growing tree - as a timber cash crop for smallholder farmers in the region between 1984 and 1994 had major social, economic and ecological consequences. A rural federation collaborated with ENDA-Caribe, an international non-government organization, in a ten-year social forestry experiment to develop and promote economically and environmentally viable timber cash cropping systems for smallholder farmers. The experience of the federation members provides a window on the workings of gender, class and popular organization in the making of forest ecologies, and demonstrates the influence of transnational sustainable development models and organizations in the social and biological transformation of rural life. The encounter between the complex social and ecological context with an apparently simple project yields insights into the social, political and material construction, destruction and transformation of biotic assemblages in forests, fields, pastures and gardens in this forest/farm matrix. The research findings also illuminate the distinct effects of the resulting restructured ecologies on the diverse interest groups and plant communities within the regional agroforest.
This paper argues that an architectural geography should be about more than just representation. For both as a practice and a product architecture is performative in the sense that it involves ongoing social practices through which space is continually shaped and inhabited. I examine previous geographies of architecture from the Berkeley School to political semiotics, and argue that geographers have had relatively little to say about the practical and affective or 'nonrepresentational' import of architecture. I use the controversy over Vancouver's new Public Library building as a springboard for considering how we might conceive of a more critical and politically progressive geography of architecture. The library's Colosseum design recalls the origins of western civilization, and is seen by some Vancouverites to be an insensitive representation of a multicultural city of the Pacific. I seek to push geographers beyond this contemplative framing of architectural form towards a more active and embodied engagement with the lived building.
The landscapes created by livelihood diversification in rural Africa result from human activity, from biophysical processes, and from their interrelations. The paper explores these interrelationships through analysis of ‘productive bricolage’ -the ways in which rural people in one of Africa’s most disadvantaged countries have constructed a livelihood system that is a response to local constraints and opportunities, and to broader patterns of income-generating possibilities. Zarma farmers in south-west Niger inhabit a region where the political economy has helped fuel economic migration and a partial withdrawal from agriculture, and has significantly altered social relationships and labour patterns in and between households. Zarma responses to these conditions include income diversification, and these activities are expressed in their fields and their farms, as well as in their economic and locational choices. Attempts to build bridges between the concerns of a geographically aware ‘local political ecology’, concerned with these patterns of livelihood dynamics and resource use, and the new cultural geography of landscape must continue to pay attention to material practices enacted through human agency. Social and environmental change is a fluid, non-linear, and dynamic process in drylands that are marginal to the globalized economic system.
This paper introduces a collection of articles on ‘Transnational livelihoods and landscapes’. We outline the analytical value of grounding political ecologies of globalization in notions of livelihood, scale, place and network. This requires an understanding of the linkages between rural people to global processes. We argue that the exploitation of these linkages can, under certain circumstances, result in new options and markets for rural people in marginal regions, even though many rural societies also confront serious political, environmental and economic challenges that likewise derive from globalization.
Contemporary globalization in the Andes challenges the sustainability and quality of rural livelihoods. However, it is also the case that rural people have often addressed these destructive dimensions of economic globalization through a progressively deeper engagement in other types of globalized relationship. They have done this by organizing, through engagements with networks linking them to international actors, and through participation in new product and labor markets. While such global entanglements do not guarantee local development and empowerment, they offer one of the few ways to confront the demise of rural localities. This paper discusses such sets of globalized relationships in four localities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the emergence and activities of local organizations and social movements have been affected by the nature of their relationships with wider transnational development networks, and the constraints and possibilities that come with these relationships. The cases demonstrate how forms of global entanglement vary greatly across sites, and so suggest that the effects of globalization on livelihoods and landscapes are not easy to judge normatively or ex ante. Instead they imply that rather than speaking of globalization generically, it is important to consider the types and sequences of globalized relationships in which people and places have been enmeshed. This suggests the need for historically situated studies of ‘glocalization’ in order to understand both the actual processes of livelihood change under conditions of globalization, and the conditions under which more sustainable and locally governed rural livelihoods and landscapes might be built.
ethnic distinctiveness is ‘naturalized’ into the material fabric of place through architecture, in this case through the development of chalet-style buildings. His account of the dismay of Swiss architects at the size and design of some of the chalets and, later, the dismay of some New Glarus inhabitants at a Swiss architect’s modernist ‘Hall of History’ insightfully highlights differing notions of ‘Swissness’ and of ‘authenticity’. While for many Little Swiss, authenticity lies in the reproduction of signifiers of traditional Swissness, for the Swiss architect at least, authenticity is about ‘trueness to materials and an honesty about age’. Richly detailed though this book is, it is not just about ‘Little Switzerland’. The story of New Glarus is woven into a bigger historical account of changing conceptions of American citizenship and of ethnicity, and Hoelscher frequently alludes to comparative (US) examples. Moreover, this is an important theoretical contribution to debates about traditionalization and retraditionalization, authenticity, heritage, tourism and the production of ethnic place. It deserves to be widely read.
