Agamben treats thecampas the exemplary
locus of the production of bare life. He does
not confine the camp to particular locations,
but other writers have seen the production of
bare life in the plight of refugees in Kosovo
(Edkins, 2003), in the contemporary ‘war on
terror’ in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq and
its global war prison (Gregory, 2004b,
2006b), in post-colonial violence in Rwanda
and Zimbabwe (Sylvester, 2006), and in post-
Katrina New Orleans (Braun and McCarthy,
2005). The disposition to abandon people in
this way, visible in early and late capitalism,
has economic and well as political coordinates,
and these imperatives have been vigorously
reasserted under the sign ofneo-liberalism
(cf. Bauman, 2004). dg
Suggested reading
Sylvester (2006).
barrio A Spanish word meaning ‘neighbour-
hood’. The term’s various significations in the
Americas are rooted in Spanishcolonialism.
Colonial cities were laid out in a grid pattern
radiating out from a central plaza, church
and government buildings (Bakewell, 2004).
Residence near the plaza was reserved for the
city’s principalvecinos, or citizens. Poorer resi-
dents, with varyingcitizenshipstatus, lived
inbarrioson the outskirts of the town. Thus,
urban location signified social, political,
economic and racial status. Inlatin america
today, ‘barrio’ may signify a neighbourhood
or a squatter settlement (seesquatting); the
actual cultural signification assigned to the
term varies widely (Clawson, 1997, p. 319).
In the Mexican states annexed by the
USA in 1848 after the Mexican–American
War, the term referred to the neighbourhoods
inhabited by Mexican-Americans. Rau ́l
Homero Villa (2000, pp. 4, 7) proposes the
termsbarrioizationto refer to the external legal
and ideological structures that contribute
to the formation of segregated barrios and
barriologyto describe the internal processes of
place-making that facilitate the creation
of Mexican-American communities. For
Mexican-Americans, ‘barrio’ is associated
with both the poverty resulting from dispos-
session and the ‘feeling of being at home’
(Griswold del Castillo, 1979, p. 150). jsu
Suggested reading
Villa (2000).
base and superstructure The metaphor that
Marx uses to express the idea that the
economic structure of society (its ‘base’)
conditions corresponding legal and political
superstructures and forms of consciousness.
As Marx succinctly puts it in the Preface to
his 1859 workA contribution to the critique of
political economy, ‘The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general’
(seemarxism;mode of production).
The relationship is more complicated than it
appears. Marx and Engels subsequently denied
that this formulation implied a simple eco-
nomic determinism, and insisted that there
were many forms of reciprocal effect between
base and superstructure. This did not prevent
the hardening of the distinction in the often
mechanical interpretations that were system-
atized in textbooks by Marx’s immediate fol-
lowers (such as Plekhanov). The tendency
amongst Marxists in the more recent past has
been to downplay themetaphoras too crude to
capture the complexity of interrelationships
that Marx was trying to encapsulate (inter-
actions between base and superstructure are
more evident in some of his historical analyses,
such as ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon’). It has also proved difficult to main-
tain a simple base/superstructure distinction
when many superstructural elements – such as
legal conceptions and scientific knowledges –
clearly enter into the economic base.
Cohen (1978) has provided a sophisticated,
modern restatement in functionalist terms that
tries to clarify these issues (seefunctionalism).
On his reading, the economic base comprises
relations of production (but not forces of pro-
duction), and the superstructure is much smal-
ler than is often supposed, comprising only
those non-economic institutions, such as legal
systems and thestate, that are functionally ne-
cessary to the reproduction of the economic
base (art, for example, is thus largely excluded).
Althusser (see Althusser and Balibar, 1970)
tried to resolve the problem in a different
way by developing a further distinction that
Marx made between ‘determination’ and
‘domination’ in his claim that politics played
thedominantrole in the ancient world and
religion in the Middle Ages. Althusser inter-
prets this to mean that the economic structure
is only ‘determinant in the last instance’, and
may not itself play the dominant role in many
social formations, although itdetermineswhich
of the other levels assumes that dominant
role. For Althusser, therefore, the social sys-
tem is thus a complex totality ‘structured in
dominance’. Following Althusser, ‘anti-
essentialist’ Marxists such as Resnick andGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_B Final Proof page 42 31.3.2009 11:01amBARRIO