The Dictionary of Human Geography

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that forecloses questions about the complex

reactivation of older, often colonial images in

our own present (cf. Tavares and Brosseau,

2006) and the ways in which what Lisle

(2006) calls ‘the global politics of contempor-

ary travel writing’ now participates in and

responds to the anxieties created byglobal-

ization. jsd/dg

Suggested reading

Duncan and Gregory (1989); Hume and Youngs

(2002); Lisle (2006).

travelling theory Intellectual ideas that

move from one location to another and, in

the process, change in response to new cir-

cumstances. The original formulation was by

Edward Said, who identified three critical

moments:

 The first wasorigination, the circumstances

within which a body of ideas emerges.

Ideas are not free-floating constructions,

on this reading, and their analysis requires

what historians of science and of geog-

raphy call a ‘contextual history’. Said

(1984, pp. 241–2) called for a ‘critical con-

sciousness’, a ‘spatial sense, a sort of meas-

uring faculty for locating or situating

theory’ by understanding it ‘in the place

and time out of which it emerges as part

of that time, working in and for it, respond-

ing to it’ (cf.situated knowledge).

 The second wasinstitutionalization. Said

knew very well that ideas move – the cir-

culation of ideas is an enabling condition

of intellectual activity – but he was also

concerned that as radical, unsettling

ideas become fashionable so they are

domesticated: ‘Once an idea gains cur-

rency because it is clearly effective and

powerful, there is every likelihood that dur-

ing its peregrinations it will be reduced,

codified and institutionalized’ (Said,

1984, p. 239).

 The third wasrevivification. Said subse-

quently accepted that a theory could be

reinterpreted and reinvigorated by travel-

ling and responding to a new situation.

These transgressive theorizations – his ex-

amples were Adorno and Fanon – give one

a sense of ‘the geographical dispersion of

which the theoretical motor is capable’ by

pulling ideas from one region to another

and realizing the productive possibility of

‘actively different locales, sites, situations

for theory’ – a sense of active, operative,

concrete differences – that allow no ‘facile

universalism or over-general totalizing’

(Said, 2000 [1994], p. 452).

Said’s own account oforientalismhas been

interpreted as a classic instance of travelling

theory (Brennan, 2000).

Inhuman geographytravelling theory has

its place in a wider landscape that includes

geographies of intellectual production, dis-

semination and circulation, and reception.

Journeying across this landscape raises import-

ant and interrelated questions about the fix-

ation of hightheoryon fashionable thinkers;

about thecommodity chainsthat make up

the international publishing industry; about

the trafficking in metropolitan ‘high theory’

and the use of other regions as resource banks;

about the dominance of English-language

publication and the problems of translation

(seeanglocentrism); and about the place of

the modern corporate university and its rela-

tion to other sites at which geographical know-

ledge is produced (cf.public geographies).

It is not only ideas that travel, and Living-

stone (2003b) sees travelling theory as part of

a larger apparatus of circulation that is indis-

pensable to the scientific enterprise: ‘Ideas and

instruments, texts and theories, individuals

and inventions – to name but a very few – all

diffuse across the surface of the earth (see

science).’ Their circulation raises similar

questions about the hierarchies and thenet-

worksthrough which they move, both in-

wards and outwards, and their reception and

reworking also raises questions about

ideologiesof respect and techniques oftrust:

‘Scientific knowledge has been expanded by

circulation...[but] distance and doubt have

always been close companions’ (p. 178). dg

Suggested reading

Said (1984).

trend surface analysis A technique devel-

oped by Chorley and Haggett (1965) for

generalizing the pattern in a set of geograph-

ical data. It usually employs a form of multiple

regressionin which the independent vari-

ables are the grid coordinates for the obser-

vations and the dependent variable is some

item of interest measured there – such as

land elevation. The aim is to identify the sali-

ent features of a complex three-dimensional

surface. rj

trialectics A term proposed by the

American geographer Edward Soja (1996b)

as ‘a mode of dialectical reasoning that is

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 775 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

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