has more recently been turned into the global
‘north’ (cf.south). Each one of these transi-
tions has been freighted with its own cultural
and political baggage, but their general burden
is clear. ‘Eurocentrism is not merely the
ethnocentrism of people located in the
West’, Dhareshwar (1990, p. 235) notes, but
rather ‘permeates the cultural apparatus in
which we participate’: it is a globalideology.
It follows from these characterizations that it is
possible to study Europe without being
Eurocentric, and that it is equally possible to
study non-European societies in thoroughly
Eurocentric ways.
Geography has a particular and a general
interest in Eurocentrism. Historians of the
modern discipline have argued that it is a con-
stitutively ‘European science’ (Stoddart, 1986).
Critics have objected that this erases the con-
tributions of other geographical traditions
(Arab, Chinese and Indian among them) and
thatgeographyin its modern, transnational
and hegemonic forms (seehegemony) is more
accurately described as a ‘Eurocentric science’
(Gregory, 1994; see also Sidaway, 1997).
Work in the history of geography (seegeog-
raphy, history of) has drawn attention
to these issues through an interrogation of
geography’s complicity in the adventures of
colonialism and imperialism and, in particular,
of the reciprocities between the intellectual
formation of the discipline and the political
trajectory of European expansion, exploitation
and dispossession (Driver, 1992b). During
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the discipline invested heavily in activities that
had considerable instrumental value (some
historians have suggested that it was precisely
these practical contributions that helped
secure the formal incorporation of the modern
discipline within the Western academy). Its
strategic contributions included mapping and
surveying other territories, compilingresource
inventories, and producingimaginative geog-
raphiesof other peoples and places. These
investments contributed to the formation of
the modern discipline as a ‘white mythology’
that: (a) postulated a racially unmarked sub-
ject-position as the condition of objective truth
and scientific discourse; (b) effaced alternative
subject-positions; and (c) appropriated other
forms of knowledge – all three gestures are
diagnostics of Eurocentrism (Barnett, 1998;
see alsowhiteness).
In the course of the twentieth century,
Eurocentrism bled into what Peet (2005)
describes as the ‘even more virulent geo-
cultural form’ of Americentrism. There are
crucial differences as well as affinities between
the two (Slater, 2004, pp. 13–16), but both
cultural formations have underwritten and
been propelled by military force and capitalist
globalization. Their conjunction was regis-
tered within the modern discipline by the
designation of a singular ‘Anglo-American
geography’ in the 1960s and 1970s, but this
was a double exclusion: apart from some
key contributions from German and Swedish
writers, non-Anglophone European geograph-
ers were marginalized (Eurocentrism had con-
tracted to ananglocentrism), and classical
spatial scienceoffered a series of supposedly
generalmodelsthat were in fact predicated on
specifically European and American cases
(Christaller’s Germany, Burgess’s Chicago)
(cf. McGee, 1995). Since then, however, while
the intellectual corpus of ‘Anglo-American
geography’ has become increasingly fractured –
here too there are differences as well as
affinities – Slater (1992) could still argue that
much of it continued to rely on a Euro-
Americanismthat projected its own situations
as ‘lineages of universalism’. Slater claimed
that the dependence of an ostensiblycritical
human geography on European and
American traditions ofcritical theory,his-
torical materialism and postmodernism
(the list could now be extended: feminist
geography and post-structuralism have
been exercised by the same questions) tacitly
licensed assumptions of ‘universal applicabil-
ity’thatconcealed‘a particularity based to a
large extent on the specific experiences of
the USA and the UK’. Geographies written
under the sign ofpost-colonialismhave been
directly interested in these issues – in the need
to ‘provincialize’ the assumptions of Euro-
American geography, to attend to other voices
and to ‘learn from other regions’ – but they also
oftendrawdirectlyonEuropeanhightheory,and
Slater (2004) has demonstrated that they have
much to learn from other politico-intellectual
traditions too (cf.tricontinentalism).
Geography is scarcely alone in these pre-
dicaments, and in the sense ofdiscourse
rather than discipline it has a more general
involvement in Eurocentrism. Gregory (1998)
has drawn attention to four conceptual strat-
egies – ‘geo-graphs’ – that entered directly into
the formation of a colonialmodernity:(1) Absolutizing time and space:the construc-
tion of concepts through which Euro-
pean metrics and meanings of history
and geography were taken to be natural
and inviolable, as marking the centreGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 221 1.4.2009 3:17pmEUROCENTRISM