The Dictionary of Human Geography

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the industrialization of Alsace-Lorraine to the

wider geopolitical structures of France as a

whole and,en passant, to challenge the legitim-

acy of its post-1871 occupation by Germany.

Recent attempts to situate regional forma-

tions and transformations as constellations or

condensations within more extensive networks

have been far more attentive to such concerns

and in the 1980s and 1990s many of them were

given a considerable fillip byworld-systems

theory and the analysis of the capi-

talist world-economy (see, e.g., Agnew,

1987b; Dixon, 1991; Becker and Egler,

1992). These projects were distinguished by

a much greater sense of historicity – ofplace

and region as historically contingent process

(Pred, 1984; Gilbert 1988) – which in turn

made the ‘bounded spaces’ and ‘building

blocks’ofconventionalregionalgenresseem

much less solid. To talk in this way is not

merely to invoke Marx’s description of capit-

alistmodernityas a world in which ‘all that

is solid melts into air’, important though that

is, because the tensions between ‘fixity’ and

‘motion’ that spasmodically interrupt and

restructure regional formations are not the

exclusive preserve ofcapitalism,andarehence

not contained by its history alone. Our present

understanding ofregions suggeststhatthey have

never been closed, cellular, bounded spaces:

indeed,muchof‘traditional’regionalgeography

may turn out to have been about inventing a

‘traditional’ world of supposedly immobile,

introspective and irredeemably localized cul-

tures. Many anthropologists, geographers, his-

toriansandothersnowacceptthatnon-capitalist

worlds havealsoalwaysbeen actively engaged in

other worlds, and that they have also always

been constituted through their involvement in

trans-local and trans-regional networks.

In order to develop historical geographies of

regional (trans)formation that are open to

these possibilities, it is not enough to locate

regions within progressively larger global

frameworks or to identify the ‘regional’ as

one level within an interlocking system of dif-

ferentscales. One of the persistent difficulties

of such approaches is that regions become

products of processes that are located ‘on the

outside’ – in the absolute spaces of the con-

taining frameworks and coordinate systems –

so that regions become surfaces that merely

register the impacts of globalization,of

successive rounds of capitalaccumulation

or thedivision of labour, or of cycles of

time–space compression that are seen as

enframing them. Against these ways of figur-

ing the world, many scholars now argue that

such processes are also ‘on the inside’ –

indeed, that the demarcations between ‘out-

side’ and ‘inside’ are deeply problematic

and made more so by what Hardt and Negri

(2000, pp. 194–5) call ‘Empire’, where ‘the

modern dialectic of inside and outside has

been replaced by a play of degrees and inten-

sities, of hybridities and artificiality’. Whatever

one makes of this particular thesis, there is a

broad consensus within human geography

that regional formations are more or less

impermanent condensations of institutions

and objects, people and practices that are

intimately involved in the operation and out-

come of local, trans-local and trans-regional

processes. For much the same reason, even

though the ‘regional’ has constantly been

hypostatized as the quintessential scale of

geographical analysis, many writers have

become much more attentive to the ways in

which these scalar distinctions have been

historically produced. It is through these pro-

ductions, at once material and discursive, that

regional structures have become sedimented

in imaginative geographies, in material land-

scapes, and inpublic policy.

The theorization of regional formations as

partial, porous, hybrid condensations of

entangled networks between human and non-

human actants, each of different spans and

with inconstant geometries, raises difficult

questions ofrepresentation. How are these

ideas and concepts to be redeemed in the

fabrication of regional accounts? Part of the

problem concerns the need to find ways of

conveying these theoretical constructs in

empirical solution: as Pudup (1988) observed,

‘Anyone trying to mesh theory with empirical

description [in regional geography] soon learns

that movement among abstract concepts and

empirical description is like performing ballet

on a bed of quicksand’ (see also Sayer, 1989).

To some writers, the metaphor of dance subse-

quently seemed peculiarly appropriate: one

implication ofnon-representational theory

is that all human geographies need to become

much more physically sensuous, much more

expressive in their poetics. In the specific case

of regional geography, there is clearly much to

learn from careful, critical readings of imagina-

tiveliterature,filmand video, and from con-

temporary travel accounts that have tried to find

the terms for the complex interpenetrations of

cultures: what Iyer (1989) epigrammatically

described as ‘Video night in Kathmandu’ (cf.

transculturation). In doing so, authors have

wrestled with some of the same demons that

haunted traditional regional geography, and

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REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY