The Dictionary of Human Geography (147 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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place-names
Attaching a name to a pLace is a way of differentiating one place from another, but place names are more than mark ers in a system of differences: they are also ways of staking some sort of claim (often of rule, domination or possession) and, as such, are frequently sites of contestation. The two spatial registers, linguistic and social, are intimately connected (cf. Pred, 1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In historicaL geography, especially in europe, the study of place names or toponyms is a philological discipline based principally on written evidence revealing early spellings of names. Such studies have often been used to make inferences about settlement history and Landscape evolution, and have also attracted considerable controversy. Thus for Britain it was once claimed that pagan names and settle ments with the element ingas (e.g. Hastings) denoted the very earliest Anglo Saxon settle ment, while ingaham (e.g. Birmingham) represented the next stage of settlement, and the numerous instances of x?s tun names (e.g. Edgbaston: Ecgbald's tun) marked a later establishment (Gelling, 1997). Adherents to these views also believed in the so called ?clean sweep' theory, which asserts that the Anglo Saxons were the originators of English land scapes, since a wholesale disappearance of Celtic place names in the eastern counties denoted a land area devoid of settlers and settlements (cf. settLement continuity). Almost all of these claims have been rejected in the past 40 years. The main objection is that ingas and ingaham place names coincide with early Anglo Saxon archaeological remains about as little as possible, given that both occur in substantial numbers in south and east England (Dodgson, 1966). Furthermore, there are great difficulties consistently distin guishing ham meaning ?village' from hamm meaning ?land in a river bend', probably dry ground in a marsh, which opens up the possi bility of mistaking topographical and habita tive meanings (Dodgson, 1973). However, it is recognized that if there is one nominative form more frequently associated with the early Anglo Saxon settlers than any other it is the topographical name. It is now supposed that tun is associated with manorialization, when society was organized in a more sophis ticated manner with the establishment of the powerful institutions of kingship. A stronger continuity of Celtic populations is suggested by work charting the incidence of the word walh, which is supposed to establish the pres ence of substantial Welsh speaking popula tions (Cameron, 1980). Studies of Scandinavian names have, however, produced greater consensus and led to some successful integrations of philological, archaeological and landscape history. These studies consistently suggest that the Danish named villages were located in the least desirable locations from an ecological and agricultural perspective, and imply that the victorious Danes were a militar ily smaller group than once claimed and did not take over or absorb pre existing English settlements (Fellows Jensen, 1975). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The modern world has by no means been insensitive to the histories carried in solution in place names. Beyond Europe, and some times within, coLoniaLism and imperiaLism exercised the power to impose new names on the landscape: naming a place coincided with the taking of place. Although the practice con tinues as in Israel's colonization and settle ment of Gaza and the West Bank under its military occupation (see occupation, miLi tary: Cohen and Kliot, 1992) subject popu lations do not passively adopt the new nomenclatures. Indeed, the post coLoniaL period has usually been marked by the recov ery or invention of place names that register a pre colonial history and an indigenous culture (Herman, 1999; Nash, 1999). Thus, for example, Salisbury, the capital of the British colony of Rhodesia, was named after a British Prime Minister, but in 1981 it became Harare, (NEW PARAGRAPH) the capital of the newly independent state of Zimbabwe. Many states have attempted to fix place names through the institution of national committees, such as the South African Geographical Names Council or the United States Board on Geographic Names (a federal institution supported by a network of committees in individual states). modernity is as much an economic as it is a political project, and it is scarcely surprising that place names have come to function not only as markers of national or cultural identity, but also as sites of commodification. A place name, through its association with a particular regional exper tise, may thus become a bearer of value for a commodity (cf. intellectual property rights). For this reason, the European Union has attempted to regulate the attribu tion of regional place names to food (e.g. Roquefort cheese) and wine (e.g. Beaujolais) through a law on ?protected geographical indications?: despite bilateral agreements, (NEW PARAGRAPH) however, it has proved difficult to enforce these restrictions and protections outside the EU. In this sphere, as in so many others, place names continue to mark sites of struggle in the present as they did in the past. dg/RMS (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gelling (1997); Nash (1999); Pred (1990, pp. 92 142). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
placelessness
If by one definition place represents a ?fusion? of human and natural worlds that become ?significant centers of our immediate experiences? and make it possible to live authentic, original and meaning filled lives, then placelessness represents its antith esis (Relph, 1976, p. 141). It ?describes both an environment without significant places and the underlying attitude which does not acknowledge significance of places? (Relph, 1976, p. 143). Relph devised the concept as an object of critique in a treatise that became a key text in humanistic geography, particu larly in those versions that were inspired by phenomenology. Placelessness is said to result from the tyranny of ?technique?, effi ciency, interchangeability and replicability, in the design and construction of the human landscape. It is evident everywhere from sub urban houses and shopping centres to tourist attractions, restaurant chains and airports. In this sense, placelessness is a distinctly modern phenomenon that is all of a piece with the rise of mass culture, mass communication, multi national corporations and overweening central governments (see also alienation; modern ity; postmodernity). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The concept of placelessness is not without controversy. The kinds of ?places? it names (suburbs, shopping strips, tourist sites and so on) have been viewed more tolerantly, even affectionately, by students of popular and ver nacular culture, especially in the USA, as evinced by the writings of J.B. Jackson and his students (e.g. Jackson, 1970; Wilson and Groth, 2003). They claim an important dis tinction between the crass imposition of bur eaucratic planning, on the one hand, and culturally original solutions to the spatial prob lems of everyday life, on the other. Moreover, they see in these inventive responses (not all of them ?good?, but none so destructive as to undo place as such) a great deal of popular meaning and symbolism. More recently, geographers who study the consumption of mass goods, including clothing, food and shelter, have argued that production does not determine consumption: thus places produced with one set of uses in mind can be claimed and hence consumed by people for quite other, often resistant, purposes (e.g. Gregson and Crewe, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Placelessness has also been argued to be a necessary and important resource for the exercise of marginalized and oppressed sexual identities, a realm of relative freedom, liber ation and anonymity versus the constraints imposed by otherwise ordered places (see Knopp, 2004) (cf. heterotopia). GHe (NEW PARAGRAPH)
plantation
The meaning of the term ?plan tation? has changed over time. Originally a plot of ground with trees, it came to mean a group of settlers or their political units during British overseas expansion (e.g. the Ulster Plantation; see colonialism). Later, ?planta tion? came to mean a large farm or landed estate, especially one associated with tropical or subtropical production of ?classical? planta tion crops such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, tea, cocoa, bananas, spices, cotton, sisal, rubber and palm oil (Thompson, 1975b: see farm ing). Most plantations combined an agricul tural with an industrial process but technologies, labour processes, property rights and infrastructure have varied enormously across space and time, making a generic def inition of plantation impossible (see agribusi ness). Plantations have witnessed historical transformations in labour relations between slave, feudal, migratory, indentured and free wage labour, and many plantations in latin america operated on a mixture of these labour forms (see labour process; slavery). (NEW PARAGRAPH) All definitions of plantation tend to differen tiate it from other agricultural forms ofproduc tion by size, authority structure, crop or labour force characteristics (low skills, work gangs, various forms of servility). The theory of plantations has had a long lineage that can be traced back to David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century through to (NEW PARAGRAPH) J. Nieboer and Edgar Thompson in the twen tieth. An important distinction has been made between old and new style plantations, in which the former (e.g. the hacienda in Central America) were essentially pre capitalist, with surpluses directed at conspicuous consumption, while the latter were capitalist enterprises driven by the rigours of capitalist accumuLation (see capitaLism; feudaLism; market). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recent work has seen plantations as ?totaliz ing institutions' whose historical connections with racism and sLavery have fundamentally shaped entire social and political structures (as in the Caribbean and the US South), but have also acted as powerful agents of underdeveL opment (Tomich, 2004; Edelson, 2006; Pons, 2007). Plantations and plantation economies and societies cannot be understood in the terms of the narrow logic of production of the enterprise alone, however. The enormously diverse forms and circumstances in which the plantation has persisted and transformed itself must be rooted in the historical forms and rhythms of capitalist accumulation under spe cific land, labour and capital markets. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
pluralism
A term with more than a single distinct meaning in human geography and the social sciences: (NEW PARAGRAPH) In sociaL and cuLturaL geography, anthropology and cultural studies, the term is invoked to describe a condition of societal diversity, usually (though not necessarily) along ethnic lines. In such uses, cultural pluralism can become synonymous with muLticuLturaLism, and features prominently in discussions of the management of diversity for example, the achievement of social cohesion in the states of the new europe (Amin, 2004a). Such pluralism is usually regarded as malleable, and subject over time to the conforming forces of assimiLation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) More specifically, plural societies are the outcome of European coLoniaLism in the tropics, where, according to the writ ings of J.S. Furnivall (1948), a distinct society emerged of indigenous and mar ginalized labourers, Asian merchants and (NEW PARAGRAPH) European elites, and where power was commonly held in inverse proportion to group size. Furnivall's initial work in South East Asia was extended to the Caribbean islands by M.G. Smith, and influenced a number of studies by social geographers (Clarke, Ley and Peach, 1984). The sense of these studies is that stratification is more rigid, sustaining intergenerational divisions well into the post coLoniaL period. (NEW PARAGRAPH) (3) In political decision making, ?pluralism' refers to a thesis associated with Robert Dahl concerning the mobility of power in modern democracies among defined interest groups. confLicts are temporary rather than structural and may be ad dressed pragmatically, with elections forming the final court of arbitration. This optimistic thesis of self governing checks and balances in the political arena has received sharp criticism, and has been superseded in the urban context in which it was first formulated by studies of growth coalitions (Jonas and Wilson, 1999) that revive the earlier elite theory that Dahl set out to undercut. dL (NEW PARAGRAPH)
point pattern analysis
Point pattern analy sis involves looking for geographical patterns in data sets that have point (x, y) geocoding given National Grid References, for example, of where a geographical phenomenon exists or takes place. A pattern is said to occur if the locations of the geographical feature or event are non randomly distributed across a study region, meaning that they are either clustered into particular places or evenly spaced across the same. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A simple way to find patterns in point data is to plot their locations on a map. Reference is often made to the physician and epidemiolo gist John Snow, whose map of the distribution of deaths from the 1848 cholera epidemic in London provides an appealing allegory about how processes (the transmission of disease) create geographical patterns (a concentration of deaths around a water pump in Broad Street, Soho) which, when revealed (by map ping), suggest new information about how those patterns were caused (the discovery that cholera is a water borne disease: see medicaL geography). Whilst this popular telling is part fable the map was not actually present in Snow's original work the element of myth says something useful about the nature of point pattern analysis, offering an important caveat to the otherwise undoubted value of maps in supporting geographical enquiry and knowledge discovery. Shaw, Dorling and Shaw (2002) demonstrate that had Snow extended his map to include all of London, then a greater concentration of deaths would have been found south of the Thames (Soho is north of the river). Snow's map is a rhet oricaL device centred on a particular pump in London to illustrate his pre existing finding that cholera is harboured by polluted water. The general problem is that maps can be cre ated for very deliberate purposes and the eye can find (or be led to find) apparent patterns that are not necessarily validated by the data. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Point patterns are therefore verified analyt ically against the usual statistical benchmark by asking ?Could we expect this by chance?? quadrat anaLysis overlays a raster grid on the study region to compare the incidence rate in each cell against the average for all. Other methods of cluster detection include calculat ing the distance from events to either their nearest neighbour (the earliest form of pattern analysis within quantitative geography, linked to testing hypotheses derived from centraL pLace theory) or to other events in the study region, and also the geographicaL anaLysis machine. Assessing the significance of the pat terns can use probability theory or, in an era of geocomputation, use random redistributions of the data to simulate the effects of geography (controlling for the fact that it is hardly sur prising to find more of an event in a particular part of a study region if more people live there). (NEW PARAGRAPH) As well as in epidemioLogy, point pattern analyses are used in environmental and crime mapping (Chainey and Ratcliffe, 2005), supported by a range of software that include geographic information systems, GeoDa (Anselin, Syabri and Kho, 2006) and CrimeStat (Levine, 2006). As examples of LocaL statistics, the geographical principles of these analyses can be extended to use pre dictor variables to help explain what is found (see, e.g., geographically weighted regres sion and the geographicaL expLanations machine). rh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) O?Sullivan and Unwin (2002); Wong and Lee (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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