The Dictionary of Human Geography

include rivers, lakes, marshes, fens and peat-
lands, and intertidal and shallow-marine envir-
onments up (such as salt marshes and
mangroves). Wetlands are economically imp-
ortant as sources of fish, crops, grazing land
and other products, and provide criticalecosys-
temservices (World Resource Institute, 2005).
Key threats include dams,pollution,intro-
duced species, aquaculture, agriculture,urba-
nization and industrialization. The 1971
Ramsar Convention promotes theconserva-
tionand ‘wise use’ of wetlands as a contribu-
tion to achievingsustainable development.
There are over 1500 Wetlands of International
Importance, covering (129 million hectares)
(http://www.ramsar.org/). wma

whiteness Aracializedidentitythatisbound
up withpowerand privilege (see alsorace;
racialization). Although whiteness is a long-
established part of ageographical imagin-
ation, it has only been subject to critical scru-
tiny in recent years, particularly since the
1990s. Both within and beyond geography,
the power and privilege associated with white-
ness has underpinned its normalization and
assumed transparency, against which other
racializedidentitiesare perceived as visible,
different and/or inferior. But since the 1990s,
geographers and others working across the
humanities and social sciences have interro-
gatedwhiteness, white identities, and their
normative and naturalizing power (for an influ-
ential study, see Dyer, 1997). Rather than view
whiteness as a fixed andessentialistcategory,
geographers and others have traced more
complex and differentiated racializations that
are bound up withclass,ethnicity,gender
andsexuality, as shown by research on ‘poor
whites’ in the USA and South Africa; white-
ness, mixed descent and racial ‘passing’; the
gendered and sexualized commodification of
whiteness; and the ways in which the racializa-
tions of the white working class and the Irish,
for example, complicate assumptions about
white privilege. Geographers have explored
the power relations of whiteness and white
identities in relation to racist andanti-racist
politics; their spatial and temporal differenti-
ation; and their articulation within and through
both the disciplinary spaces of geography and
other spaces such as the street,suburb,town,
cityandnation(see, e.g., Bonnett, 2000;
McGuinness, 2002).
Both the normative power of whiteness
and critical studies of whiteness have their
own geographies. The emergence of ‘White
Studies’ in the late 1990s brought together

critical work across a wide range of disciplines,

and has been largely based in the USA (includ-

ing Delgado and Stefancic, 1997). Other

researchers have sought to widen comparative

and transnational research beyond what might

be termed ‘American whiteness studies’ (Ware

and Back, 2002, p. 14) by studying the power

relations and material effects of whiteness in a

wide range of different contexts. In his forceful

critique of multicultural Australia, for example,

Ghassan Hage (1998) analyses the ways in

which ‘fantasies of White supremacy’ have

shaped ideas about the nation. He considers

‘‘‘Whiteness’’ to be itself a fantasy position of

cultural dominance born out of the history of

European expansion’ (p. 20). Alastair Bonnett

(2000) analyses the ‘mythologies ofeuropean

whiteness’ in relation to two, connected pro-

cesses: first, ‘The development of non-

European (and non-racialised) white identities

and their marginalisation or erasure by an

increasingly hegemonic, European-identified,

racialised whiteness’ (p. 7); and, second, the

ways in which ‘the development of whiteness

as a racialised, fetishised and exclusively

European attribute produced a contradictory,

crisis-prone, identity’ (p. 8). Unlike work that

not only overlooks the importance of white

identities beyond the particularity of

European and/or Westernmodernity, but also

fails to interrogate this particularity, Bonnett

(2000) has studied whiteness and the meaning

of modernity inlatin americaand Japan.

Like other research that recognizes the

social constructionof ‘race’ andethnicity,

the critical study of whiteness in both histor-

ical and contemporary contexts has been con-

cerned with the risks of reifying whiteness and

its normative power. As Vron Ware and Les

Back explain, ‘For us it is impossible to separ-

ate the act of writing about whiteness from a

political project that involves not simply the

fight againstracism, but also an attack on the

very notion of race and the obstinate resilience

of racial identities – one of its most disastrous

consequences’ (2002, p. 2). ab

Suggested reading

Delgado and Stefancic (1997);Hage (1998);

McGuinness (2002); Ware and Back (2002).

wilderness A condition, usually applied to a

landscape, of being wild, out of human con-

trol, uncultivated and uninhabited. Wilderness

is a highly contentious term with a long history

of usage. As an uninhabited land, wilderness

has had both negative and positive value. Until

the late eighteenth century, Euro-Americans

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_W Final Proof page 810 31.3.2009 4:10pm

WHITENESS