informal) and cycles of global dominance
(Blaut, 1993; Taylor, 1996; Abernethy, 2000:
cf. world systems theory). Monocausal,
teleological and diffusionist explanations
(including Marxist ones) of the West’s rise to
global dominance – encompassing 85 per cent
of the Earth’s surface at its 1920s peak – have
been discredited in historical terms but remain
culturally and politically resilient, not least
in ‘end of history’ scenarios that see liberal
capitalism as the high point and terminus of
human progress (cf.neo-liberalism).
Second, since the 1980s, imperialism has
been studied as adiscourse– or grammar –
of domination fuelled by images, narratives
and representations, and shaped by categories
ofgender,sexuality,race, nation and reli-
gion, as well as capital and class. Critical
energies are focused on the potency of binary
and essentialist thinking – us/them and self/
other stereotypes, such as the opposition be-
tween civilization and savagery – and the ways
in which Western knowledge effects and se-
cures empire and dispossession by denigrating
indigenous knowledges and representing the
Earth as the imperialist’s rightful inheritance.
Edward Said’s work onorientalism, and how
imperialism works as a multi-faceted ‘struggle
over geography’, has been particularly influen-
tial in spurring interdisciplinary interest in the
culturally and spatially constructed nature of
Western knowledge about the ‘Other’ (Said,
1993, p. 7). While geographers have paid
close attention to how a range of geographical
ideas, practices and texts might be conceived
as imperial discourses, they have warned
against reducing imperialism to discourse,
and insist on the need to materially ground
understanding of imperialism’s operations
(Lester, 2000; cf.post-colonialism).
A third approach – and one currently mak-
ing great headway in history and geography –
is concerned with the locational basis of im-
perialism. It mobilizes web and network con-
cepts to redress the residual Eurocentrism and
metro-centrism (and textualism and abstrac-
tion) of much writing on imperial/colonial
discourses, and guards against portraying im-
perialism as either rigidly hierarchical, or all
seeing and knowing. Stemming from older
historical debates about the ways and extent
to which actions and policies emanating from
the imperial core were shaped by peripheral/
colonial events and pressures, this ‘imperial
networks’ approach treats metropole and
colony as mutually constitutive (rather than
separate and isolated) entities, and breaks
down the strict equation of imperialism with
the centre/core and colonialism with the
periphery/margin. This literature examines
the variegated, shifting and unstable make-up
of different imperial and colonial projects, and
how multiple forms of affinity, difference,
asymmetry and inequality became mapped
across nation and empire. Imperialism can
thus be seen as both unitary and highly differ-
entiated (Lester, 2001). However, questions
can be raised about how adequately this litera-
ture addresses questions of power. dclSuggested reading
Lambert and Lester (2006); Said (1993); Taylor
and Flint (2000); Wolfe (2004).indigenous knowledge This term repre-
sents the understandings thought to be embed-
ded within indigenous communities (see also
aboriginality), and usually posed against
universalized, Western, scientific knowledge.
While indigenous knowledge was regarded
as a traditionalist or backward-looking barrier
to effective development in the period
immediately following the ‘development dec-
ade’, more recently the idea of indigenous
knowledge as an alternative to increasingly
discredited scientific social management and
developmentalism has gained significant
credibility as a way out of the ‘development
impasse’. The valorization of indigenous
knowledge represents a shift away from privil-
eging the knowledge of ‘development experts’
towards the voices and experiences of the in-
habitants of the global South, at whom devel-
opment is usually projected, ‘listening seriously
to what the rural poor have to say, learning
from them and respecting their realities and
priorities’ (Briggs, 2005, p. 100). Interest in
indigenous knowledge is most often traced
back to Chambers’ (1983) challenge to put
the last first, but there are also clear affinities
with the post-colonial focus on power/
knowledge.post-developmentwriters see in-
digenous alternatives as offering the only real
possibilities for progressive change for the
majority world. For instance, Escobar (1995,
p. 98) suggests that the ‘remaking of develop-
ment must start by examining local construc-
tions, to the extent that they are the life and
history of the people, that is, the conditions for
and of change’.
Until recently, the literature on indigenous
knowledge has tended to suggest a binary
between scientific and indigenous knowledge,
seeingscienceas a groundless set of ideas,
and ignoring the hybrid forms combining
various scientific and local knowledges thatGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_I Final Proof page 374 31.3.2009 7:05pmINDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE