The Dictionary of Human Geography (28 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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the colonized shared, as well as those that set them apart. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A range of recent scholarship on struggles over ?who was inside and who was outside the nation or colony, who were subjects and who were citizens', demonstrates the importance of escaping older scholarly containers and ?map ping . . . difference across nation and empire' (Hall, 2002a, p. 20; Lambert and Lester, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Starting from an analytical standpoint of liminality (how colonialism operates in terms of what it excludes and places outside its domain of comprehension and action), and from the premise that significant gaps existed between metropolitan/imperial prescriptions of power and the daily realities and pressures of colonial rule, a feminist inspired literature examines how colonialism involves incessant struggles over the making and protection of cultural boundaries and frontiers struggles that are gendered, sexualized and racialized, and that work to demarcate the foreign from the domestic, the civilized from the wild or savage and home from away (Stoler, 2002; Blunt, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Emphasis is now routinely placed on the spatiality of such struggles and dynamics, and geographers have been particularly con cerned with how colonialism operates through: (NEW PARAGRAPH) particular sites and contact zones, such as ships, forts, plantations, trade posts, ports and cities, native reserves, mission stations, museums and exhibitions; (ii) the networks and institutions such as the London based Royal Geographical Society and Seville based Council of the Indies that coordinated the flows of people, goods, orders and information connecting this array of places and spaces; and (iii) the inscription devices and systems of representation forms of recording, writing, and calculating distance and measuring differ ence, such as maps, journals, ledgers, paintings and despatches; practices of exploration, observation, fieldwork, classification and synthesis; and discourses justifying colonialism that both shaped and were shaped by such sites, domains and networks (Driver, 2001a; cf. centre of calculation; climate; tropical ity). This body of work emphasizes that Europeans' ability to know, physically reach and govern distant and far flung lands was something made, practiced and performed (and thus amenable to criticism and re inven tion) rather than given (and was not some innate and distinguishing European quality and mark of its superiority). (NEW PARAGRAPH) However, such site specific and de centred readings can arguably lose sight of colonial ism's trans historical traits and general effects such as (for some) its propensity to racialize difference the world over, and (for others) the way in which the state is deemed to be the bearer of the most rational and civilized practices of rule and thus undermine an anti colonial politics that is responsive to the commonalities of experience among the col onized. Anti essentialist and non teleological approaches to colonial history that refuse to generalize and conceptualize colonialism in extremis, or as a totality, can trivialize its impact, and can serve divisive ethnic and nationalist agendas in the post colonial world that ?repeat . . . colonialism's own strategy . . . to regionalize, split up, divide and rule? (Young, 2001, p. 18). Conceptual and ethical tensions also arise when critical affiliation with the colonized (and other so called ?injured identities') is derived from a critical stance that underscores colonialism?s inherently frag mentary character, and sees both colonialism?s civilizing mission and ?third worLd' nation aLisms and revolutionary movements as doomed to failure and self interest. One the other hand, geographers operating at the for mer margins of empire complain about the metro centric focus of both older imperial his tories, and newer critical accounts of the col onizing impact that metropolitan based initiatives (such as cartography and travel) had on outlying regions. Viewing the colon ized world from the (former) imperial centre which is where a good deal of critical work on geography and empire emanates from can blunt understanding of the specific and chan ging composition of colonial power in particu lar localities (Harris, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) With regard to discursivity and dislocation, geographers have considered how a wide range of spatial practices and representations of space work as colonizing discourses as text ual and visual ?scriptings? and ?spaces of con structed visibility? that have shaped what Europeans understood to be ?out there? and framed how interaction was to proceed and be recorded (Duncan and Gregory, 1999). In prosecuting such ideas traveL writing being a prime focus geographers have been critical of the reduction of colonialism to issues of discourse and representation, and a concomi tant erasure of historical geographical specifi city, which has characterized much (especially literary) work in this area, and have coined expressions such as ?spaces of knowledge? and ?geographies of truth and trust? to under score the materiality of discourse and the situ ated and embodied nature ofcolonial knowledge and power (Gregory, 2001b). Nevertheless, much of this literature has been preoccupied with the agency and texts of European/ Western/colonizing projects and actors, and either overlooks native agency or subordinates indigenous knowledge to the gaze of the Western/metropolitan/post colonial critic by representing it as the background noise against which the colonizing West stakes its claims to truth and power. While the difficulties involved in bringing native agendas and ?other? voices back into the colonial spotlight should not be underestimated, work that aims laudably to expose and question previously undisclosed connections between discourse and domin ation runs the risk of reinforcing the ideas, images and categories (of, for example, exoti cism, primitivism and race) that it sets out to challenge. It does so, in part, Nicholas Thomas (1993) has pointed out, by obfuscating how colonial encounters operate as two way and intersubjective (albeit still unequal) processes rather than as a one way projection of desire and fear, or as a unitary imposition of power (see also transcuLturation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) All of this helps to dispel the illusion of a seamless or ineluctable process of Western expansion, and makes the current promulga tion of a ?post colonial geography? that seeks to assess what about geography (as a discip line, discourse and practice of power) might need decolonizing more than a belated or ironic gesture, as some have suggested. dcl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Blunt and McEwan (2002); Cooper (2005); Gregory (2004); Said (1993, 2003 [1978]). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
command economy
An economy in which the means of production are owned and con trolled by the state and in which central plan ning prevails. The term is used to distinguish economies, such as those in Eastern Europe until the early 1990s, from either capitaLism or a mixed economy. The dismantling of com mand economies in Eastern Europe reflected an inability to produce goods in the quantities that people had come to expect, as a result of difficulties of coordination and the lack of effi ciency incentives. However, the economies that replaced them have their own imperfec tions, including large scale criminalization, reflecting the difficulty of creating market regulated economies in former socialist states (cf. sociaLism). dms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
commercial geography
A forerunner of economic geography concerned with (NEW PARAGRAPH) describing, tabulating and cartographically representing the geographical facts of com merce for practical, business ends. Coined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 1804) in the late eighteenth century as one of his six divisions of geography, commercial geog raphy was systematically taken up by German geographers from the middle of the nineteenth century. In Britain, the Scottish geographer George Chisholm (1850 1930) provided the first English language version of the project in his 1889 tome, A handbook of commercial geography, and identified three sections: how commodities are produced, what commodities are produced and where commodities are produced. Chisholm provided no indication of the complexity of the concept of commod ity, however, and seven years before his book was published the German geographer Gotz (NEW PARAGRAPH) had already recognised a new sub discipline, economic geography, that was to be a science rather than an encyclopaedia of facts for improving the bottom line (Sapper, 1931, p. 627). tjB (NEW PARAGRAPH)
commodity
With its price tag, said the great German critic Walter Benjamin, the commod ity enters the market. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a commodity as something useful that can be turned to commercial advan tage (significantly, its Middle English origins invoke profit, property and income); it is an article of trade or commerce, a thing that is expedient or convenient. A commodity, in other words, is self evident, ubiquitous and everyday; it is something that we take for granted. Marx (1967 [1867]) said that com modities were trivial things but also bewilder ing, ?full of metaphysical subtleties and theological capers'. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Commodities are everywhere, and in part define who and what we are. It is as if our entire cosmos, the way we experience and understand our realities and lived existence in the world, is mediated through the base realities of sale and purchase. Virtually every thing in modern society is a commodity: books, babies (is not adoption now a form of negoti ated purchase?), debt, sperm, ideas (intellec tual property), pollution, a visit to a national park and human organs are all commodities. Even things that do not exist as such appear as commodities. For example, I can buy a ?future? on a basket of major European currencies, which reflects the average price (the exchange rate) of those national monies at some distant point in time. Other commod ities do not exist in another sense; they are illegal or ?black' (heroin, stolen organs). Others are fictional (e.g. money scams and fraud). Visible or invisible, legal or illegal, real or fictive, commodities saturate our universe. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Commodity producing societies in which the dominating principle is commodities pro ducing commodities are a quite recent invention, and many parts of the world, while they may produce for the market, are not com modity societies. Socialist societies (and per haps parts of China and Cuba today) stood in a quite different relationship to the commodity than so called advanced capitalist states (cf. sociaLism). Low income countries, or the third worLd so called, are ?less developed? precisely because they are not mature com modity producing economies (their markets are undeveloped or incomplete, as economists might put it) they are not fully commoditized. (NEW PARAGRAPH) So the full commodity form as a way of organizing social life has little historical depth: it appeared in the West within the past 200 years. And over large parts of the Earth's sur face the process of commodification of ever greater realms of social and economic life being mediated through the market as a commodity is far from complete. Perhaps there are parts of our existence, even in the heart of modernity, that never will take a commodity form. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A peculiarity of a commodity economy is that some items are traded as commodities but are not intentionally produced as com modities. Cars and shoes are produced to be sold on the market. But labour or, more properly, labour power is also sold and yet it (which is to say me as a person) was not conceived with the intention of being sold. This curious aspect of labour as a commodity under capitalism is as much the case for land or Nature. These sorts of curiosities are what Karl Polanyi, in his book The great transform ation (2001 [1944]), called ?fictitious commod ities'. Polanyi was of the opinion that market societies that do not regulate the processes by which these fictitious commodities become commodities will assuredly tear themselves apart. The unregulated, free market, com modity society would eat into the very fabric that sustains it by destroying nature and by tearing asunder the most basic social rela tionships (see capitaLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The commodity raises the tricky matter of price, which after all is the meaning of the commodity in the capitalist marketplace: how it is fixed, and what stems from this price fixing. For example, the running shoes that a poor inner city kid in the USA yearns for are Air Nike, which cost slightly more than the Ethiopian GNP per capita and perhaps more than his mother's weekly income. Or consider the fact that a great work of art, Van Gogh's Wheat field, is purchased for the astonishing sum of $57 million as an investment. The problem of the determination of prices and their relations to value lay at the heart of nine teenth century classical political economy, but it is an enormously complex problem that really has not gone away or in any sense been solved. The ?metaphysical subtleties' that Karl Marx refers to are very much about the mis understandings that arise from the way we think about prices, and what we might call the sociology or social life of commodities. But if there is more to commodities than their physical properties and their prices, which are derived from costs of production or supply and demand curves, then there is a suggestion that commodities are not what they seem. Commodities have strange, perhaps ?meta physical?, effects. For example, the fact that a beautiful Caravaggio painting is a commodity and correlatively, that it is private property and only within the means of the extravagantly rich fundamentally shapes my experience of the work, and of my ability to enjoy its magnificent beauty in some unalloyed way. Its commodity status has tainted and coloured my appreciation of it. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A commodity, then, appears to be a trivial thing but it is in fact bewildering, even theo logical. The commodity, said Walter Benjamin, has a phantom like objectivity, and it leads its own life after it leaves the hands of its maker. What on earth might this mean? (NEW PARAGRAPH) One way to think about the commodity is derived from Karl Marx, who begins his massive treatise on capitalism (Volume 1 of Capital) with a seemingly bizarre and arcane examination of the commodity, with what he calls the ?minutiae' of bourgeois society. The commodity, he says, is the ?economic cell form' of capitalism. It is as if he is saying that in the same way that the DNA sequence holds the secret to life, so the commodity is the economic DNA, and hence the secret of mod ern capitalism. For Marx, the commodity is the general form of the product what he calls the generally necessary form of the product and the general elementary form of wealth only in capitalism. A society in which the com modity is the general form of wealth the cell form is characterized by what Postone (1993, p. 148) calls ?a unique form of social interdependence': people do not consume what they produce and produce and exchange commodities to acquire other commodities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the commodity itself is a queer thing. because while it has physical qualities and uses, and is the product ofphysical processes that are perceptible to the senses, its social qualities what Marx calls the social or value form are obscured and hidden. ?Use value' is self evi dent (this is a chair that I can use as a seat and that has many fine attributes for the comfort of my ageing body) but value form the social construction of the commodity is not. Indeed, this value relation the ways in which commodities are constituted, now and in the past, by social relations between people is not perceptible to the senses. Sometimes, says Marx, the social properties that things acquire under particular circumstances are seen as inherent in their natural forms (i.e. in the obvi ous physical properties of the commodity). The commodity is not what it appears. There is, then, a hidden life to commodities and under standing something of this secret life might reveal profound insights into the entire edifice the society, the culture, the political economy of commodity producing systems. It is pos sible to construct a diagrammatic ?biography? of the broiler from production to consumption, which depicts many of the actors involved in the commodity's complex movements and valuations. This is a commodity circuit or a coM modity chain (in French, it is referred to as a filiere). Commodity circuits can depict different types of commodity chains and contrasting commodity dynamics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marx invoked commodity fetishism to describe the ways in which commodities have a phantom objectivity. The social character of their making is presented in a ?perverted? form. By this, he meant a number of complex things: first, that the social character of a com modity is somehow seen as a natural attribute intrinsic to the thing itself; second, that the commodities appear as an independent and uncontrolled reality, apart from the producers who fashioned them; and, third, in confusing relations between people and between things, events and processes are represented as time less or without history, they are naturalized. Another way to think about this is that com modity production the unfathomable swirl of commodity life produces particular forms of alienation and reification. In his book Society of the spectacle (1977), Guy Debord argues that in a world of total commodification, life pre sents itself an as immense accumulation of spectacles. The spectacle, says Debord, is when the commodity has reached the total occupation of social life and appears as a set of relations mediated by images. The great world exhibitions and arcades of the nine teenth century were forerunners of the spec tacle, celebrating the world as a commodity. But in the contemporary epoch, in which the representation of the commodity is so inextric ably wrapped up with the thing itself, the com modity form appears as spectacle, or as a spectacular event, whether four men trying to play chicken or a chef playing football with a frozen broiler. Whatever else it may be, the terrifying events of 11 September 2001 and the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center represented an enormous spec tacle in the Debordian sense; and a spectacle for which there could be no spectacular response of equal measure. Necessarily, this spectacle of spectacles was a product of com modification and necessarily it has become a commodity itself. Within weeks of the attacks, (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ground Zero in New York City had become a small marketplace for 9/11 T shirts and other mementos, just as shirts bearing the image of Osama Bin Laden and the falling towers were selling like hot cakes in Bangkok, Jakarta and the West Bank as icons of anti imperialism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) We began with the commodity as a trivial thing and have ended with a world of com modities that ?actually conceals, instead of dis closing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers? (Marx, 1976 [1867], pp. 75 6). But this hidden history of the commodity allows us to expose something unimaginably vast; namely, the dynamics and history of cap italism itself. The commodity as its ?cellular form? is surely one of the keys to unlocking the secrets of what Max Weber (2001 [1904 5]) called the ?capitalist cosmos?. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Taussig (1978). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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