The Dictionary of Human Geography

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All definitions of plantation tend to differen-

tiate it from other agricultural forms of produc-

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

H.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. thehaciendain Central

America) were essentially pre-capitalist, with

surpluses directed atconspicuous consumption,

while the latter were capitalist enterprises driven

by the rigours of capitalist accumulation

(seecapitalism;feudalism;market).

Recent work has seen plantations as ‘totaliz-

ing institutions’ whose historical connections

withracismandslaveryhave fundamentally

shaped entire social and political structures (as

in the Caribbean and the US South), but have

also acted as powerful agents ofunderdevel-

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

pluralism A term with more than a single

distinct meaning inhuman geographyand

the social sciences:

(1) 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

themanagementof diversity –forexample,

the achievement of social cohesion in the

states of the neweurope(Amin, 2004a).

Such pluralism is usually regarded as

malleable, and subject over time to the

conforming forces ofassimilation.

(2) More specifically, plural societies are the

outcome of Europeancolonialismin

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

European elites, and wherepowerwas

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-colonialperiod.

(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.conflictsare 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

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.

A simple way to find patterns in point data is

to plot their locations on amap. 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: seemedical

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

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 543 1.4.2009 3:20pm

POINT PATTERN ANALYSIS