Cultural Geography

A ROUGH GUIDE 23

other, a world of nature on which machines were thought to do their work, a critical spotlight

is turned on another vector of power (see also Latour, 1993; Strathern, 1999). This has as its

conceit the premise of human ‘emancipation’ from a passive world of objects in nature,

according to which the likes of boomerangs could never match the instruments of nature’s

‘improvement’. In this sense the civilizational discourse handed down by classical humanism

provided the connecting tissue between the regimes of modernity and colonialism. It directs

our critical imagination to the linkedoppressions of the non-human and human worlds. This

civilizational discourse, of ‘culture’ as the supersession of nature, has served to inferiorize

non-human animals, while simultaneously privileging those humans who have affected the

greatest distance (alienation) from the non-human world.

In a recent review of anthropological epistemologies, Thomas (1997) claims that

presences as well as representations, objects as well as texts, substances as well as signifiers,

doings as well as meanings, should be central to contemporary cultural analysis. In the case of this

story of an agricultural show, attending to the materiality as well as the iconic power of the exhibits

helps advance the preoccupation of constructivist strands of critical cultural geography with dis-

course and representation. The Sydney showground was not only one of colonialism’s quintes-

sential representational spaces whose meanings we might read as ‘texts’. By also evoking

the impurity of the artefacts themselves – in ways that activate our imagining beyond stories of

human agency and invention – it is possible to chip away at a much older and persistent story

that western society tells itself. This is the tale of the human, or ‘lord of creation’ in Sauer’s

(1952: 104) words, as the being who transcends the merely natural. Challenging this cherished

self-image forces an exciting revision of concepts at the heart of the subject to which this

volume is devoted.

Struggles over geography

Steve Pile

This vignette is about geographies of protest: about a particular (urban) site of protest,

Trafalgar Square in London; about the geographies that are folded up in moments. For a

decade or so, Labour Day – 1 May – has been marked in London by a gathering of various

leftist groups at Trafalgar Square, at the heart of the capital. Though many groups were

represented, the largest single groups seemed to belong to various Turkish communist par-

ties. At least, they had the biggest, reddest banners. However, things have changed recently,

within the last three years.

In the wake of a series of three bombings, 1 May 1999 was marked by the confluence of

divergent marchers, streaming down from different symbolic sites in London: from

Brixton, from Brick Lane, from Soho. First a little reminder of the events leading up to the

protests. On 17 April 1999, two stall-holders at Brixton’s Electric Avenue market began to

examine a plastic bag that someone had left behind. Some thought it might contain a bomb,

so one of the men even took out a container from the bag. People were laughing, until some

said ‘it’s ticking’. At 5.30 p.m., while police were moving people away, the bomb

exploded. Ten pounds of metal nails were blown into the street, injuring 50 people.

Immediately, there was speculation that the bomb had been aimed at Brixton’s black com-

munity, but as yet no-one had any idea who had set the bomb, or why. A week later, on

24 April 1999, a second bomb exploded in Brick Lane, at the centre of one of London’s

most prominent Asian communities. This time, 13 people were injured. Fears that these

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