Cultural Geography

Geographical endeavours must not only

challenge the fundamental building blocks of

thought and understanding, but be constantly

vigilant to the fundamental Eurocentric assump-

tions underlying the researching and writing of

geographical knowledge. For example, it is easy

for cultural geography to be captured in the hall

of mirrors by representing complex worlds and

multiple knowledges within its own terms.

Bhabha warns that:

Western connoisseurship is the capacity to understand

and locate cultures in a universal time-frame that

acknowledges their various historical and social con-

texts only to eventually transcend them and render them

transparent. (1990: 208)

Always bound by one’s own epistemological

understandings, it can be difficult to envision, let

alone adequately portray, other ways of know-

ing. As Christie states:

most of us who have been counting ever since we can

remember can have little hope of imagining what a world

could look like in which reality is unquantifiable (1992: 2).

It is therefore necessary to critically consider the

spatial and temporal settings examined in and

formed by geographical knowledge. This can be

a challenging task. Soja describes the ‘linguistic

despair’ felt when:

What one sees when one looks at geographies is

stubbornly simultaneous, but language dictates a

sequential succession, a linear flow of sentential

statements bounded by the most spatial of earthly

constraints, the impossibility of two objects (or words)

occupying the same place (as on a page). (1989: 1–2)

SITUATED ENGAGEMENT:

JUSTICE, COEXISTENCE

AND OTHERNESS

Rising to the challenge of social justice solely by

harnessing the tools of Eurocentric knowledges

risks reinforcing colonizing relationships.

Cultural geography’s postcolonial projects often

draw on notions of moving towards something

better. Yet such formulations subtly reinforce the

almost invisible epistemology of developmental-

ism, orienting thinking towards a linear narra-

tive. The implicit symbolism is about direction,

progression and control – exactly what this

chapter seeks to challenge and unsettle. Le Guin

(1989) undertakes a similar exercise of unset-

tling. She suggests that ‘through long practice I

know how to tell a story, but I’m not sure I know

what a story is’ (1989: 37). Her discussion of

writing science fiction unsettles the assumption

that Eurocentric discourses can simply make the

world as we wish it to be. She asks her readers to

begin to see that every remote place is simulta-

neously somebody else’s homeland. In her image

of ‘dancing at the edge of the world’, she offers

an escape from the tyranny of the linear narra-

tives of developmentalism, and glimpses the

seasonal and cyclical patterns of time’s circle

embedded in people–people and people–

environment relationships and processes, along-

side time’s arrow. In such images, there are

opportunities to rethink the epistemological

foundations that are conventionally used to

shape and reshape geographical imaginations so

that they may be woven in ways that acknow-

ledge and include those knowledges that are so

often rendered invisible.

The idea of ‘situated engagement’ (Suchet,

1999) offers a way out of the confines of

Eurocentric discourses, which so often render

even well-intentioned cultural geographers rela-

tively tongueless and earless in dealing with

ontological pluralism. Simply acknowledging

the existence and possibility of multiple know-

ledges is not enough. The ontologies of other

peoples need to be understood and engaged with

in active partnerships in the construction of

knowledge (and power). New interactions and

relationships open new possibilities:

At the margins, within the domain of the ‘other’, one

knows that the world, life and people express them-

selves with rich and interactive presences that are invis-

ible from the viewpoint of deformed power, except,

perhaps, as disorder or blockage. The dismantling of

this oppressive and damaging pole is a necessary step in

moving toward dialogue. Dismantling will fail if it is

confined to monologue; we must embrace noisy and

unruly processes capable of finding dialogue with the

peoples of the world and with the world itself. (D. Rose,

1999: 177)

In these noisy and unruly spaces it is necessary to

reconsider the implications of ontological plura-

lism. Boundaries around concepts can no longer

be concrete, impenetrable no person’s lands.

Rather, they become blurry, fluid, complex,

interacting and multiple. As with the metaphor of

edges in the constantly shifting and changing

tidal zone, boundaries and relationships are

conceived as constructive places which ‘entwine

and interpenetrate in a complex and fecund

embrace of coexistence’ (Howitt, 2001a).

The discursive spaces of ontological pluralism

are similar to what Bhabha calls third space –

‘that position of liminality, in the productive

space of the construction of culture as difference,

in the spirit of alterity or otherness’ (1990: 209).

Others have embraced this sort of space. Lavie

CONTESTED CULTURAL LANDSCAPES 565

3029-ch31.qxd 03-10-02 11:10 AM Page 565